Many powerful visions of what our public spaces could become never get off the ground—not because they are inadequate as plans, but because they are ineffectively communicated to the public. Though designers and architects are very good at explaining their designs to private clients, we need to learn more about building consensual support when working on major redevelopments in the public realm.

At HCP Design and Project Management, we have been working on the Sabarmati Riverfront Project in Ahmedabad for the last 15 years. It is an ambitious multidimensional environmental improvement, social uplift and urban rejuvenation project. It aims to transform 12 kilometers of the Sabarmati riverfront in the middle of Ahmedabad, a city of five million, by stopping the flow of untreated sewage into the river, relocating and rehabilitating all slums in the project area and reclaiming 200 hectares of land in order to convert a mostly private river edge—where private plots front directly onto the river—into a public realm with promenades, parks, markets and public amenities. The long time taken to implement the project is largely a consequence of the scale and complexity of its ambitions and the novelty of the ideas underpinning it.

There are still many critics of the project. Some are deeply apprehensive of “tampering with nature” —they find building embankments and reclaiming land objectionable for environmental reasons. Others are seriously committed to the cause of the poor—they either want more for the poor or do not believe that what the project promises for the poor will ever be delivered. Some are convinced that the project’s public objectives will eventually be sacrificed to serve crass commercial interests.

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For those of us involved in the project, and used to often facing skepticism or suspicion about our plans, seeing how people’s faces lit up was absolutely delightful. The swell of support was also most heartening. The enthusiasm that people displayed after seeing the images in the exhibition was many times more than we had ever achieved through a PowerPoint presentation.

The exhibition forcefully taught us how much more powerfully images can communicate, when compared to words, diagrams, drawings and reasons. It also taught us a few things about images and representation of physical spaces.

Size matters. The large size of the images made it possible for people to imagine that they were actually standing at the completed riverfront.  And it is important for people to “see” what is being proposed.

Focus on people. They are not interested in what you are going to build—they are interested in what they are going to be able to do there. It is difficult for architects and urban designers to understand this—focused as they are on the design of buildings and infrastructure. Designers want to portray what they have designed but people want to see themselves in the picture.

Not too abstract, not too realistic. Make your images too abstract and images stop communicating. Moreover, on the scale leading up to absolutely realistic images there is a point at which they become eerie. It is better to stop well before that point. In our case, dresses were depicted in considerable detail, but we decided to leave the faces blank.

Be honest. People have to be able to trust the images. Depicting an unrealizable and idealized reality does not elicit trust. Though a few persons wanted to know why the riverfront could not have “beggar-free” zones along the riverfront, the vast majority was pleased that we had made space for everyone—the young, the old, the poor and the well off. People found it most agreeable that our images did not pretend that our project was going to get rid of poverty. They also liked the fact that the city we showed them was still a bit messy. Almost everyone liked the fact that we had shown the streets the way they are likely to continue to be—with cows, gobar and dogs.

The exhibition brought home to me something that my friend, Ahmedabad historian Howard Spodek, has been telling me for years. People in Ahmedabad want the city to improve and modernize itself, but they want it to remain Ahmedabad!