What happens when you bring together people who are curious about cities and give them a day to talk, make, map, watch, and explore? That was the idea behind the Urban Mixer, a one-day gathering for urbanists, students, researchers, artists, campaigners, professionals, and anyone who simply enjoys thinking about how a city works. On 14 August, we spent the day doing just that.
We began by meeting one another through an exercise that helped us discover the people around us: what they work on, what they care about, and how they think about Pune. Then came the maps.
Mapping the city we carry with us
In the Analog Mapping session, Tanzeel Allapur invited participants to think about their neighbourhoods differently. Instead of looking at a neighbourhood as a collection of roads and buildings, we explored how memories, people, places, and everyday experiences shape the stories we tell about where we live.
And the maps that emerged were anything but conventional.
People mapped dust. They mapped flora and fauna. They mapped little details, memories, encounters, and things that might never appear on an official city map. Each map became a deeply personal portrait of a neighbourhood and together, they showed just how differently we each experience the same city.
Turning movement into stories
After maps came zines.
Shweta Vernekar led a Zine Workshop that invited participants to turn their experiences of moving through the city into something creative. We began by looking at different zine formats and patterns, along with the artistic expressions of her daughter, Ira.
Soon, conversations about mobility became drawings, words, folds, and pages.
Participants transformed their everyday experiences of getting around the city into small, personal publications. Each zine told a different story of movement of navigating streets, waiting, walking, travelling, observing, and experiencing the city along the way.
Seeing Pune on screen
By the afternoon, we turned to films.
Our first film took us to Vetal Tekdi, exploring the importance of Pune's hills and the landscapes that are so deeply woven into the city's identity. We followed the screening with a conversation over chai, reflecting on what these spaces mean to us and why they matter.
And then, to close the day, we travelled back in time.
We watched a 1973 film made by FTII on PMPML. Watching Pune's public transport system from more than five decades ago sparked a surprising number of questions and reflections. What has changed? What hasn't? And what can an old film tell us about the city we are living in today?
By the end of the day, we had mapped neighbourhoods, made zines, watched films, shared stories, and met people who look at the city in entirely different ways.