In this blog, SHLC’s research team in Bangladesh showcase their experience from a creative art workshop led by Mr Sahid Kabir, one of Bangladesh’s most renowned artists, and examine how a creative approach can support urban research and planning.
Contemporary ideologies and practices of city planning and urban development are primarily grounded in a scientific construct that embraces rationality, order, structure, and organisation.
Amid regular promotion of scientific rationality, planners often get carried away with logic, structure, and mathematical precision. This kind of approach may inhibit creative thinking and restrict urban planning research from appreciating what lies beyond rationality, be it an organically grown settlement or a hustling and bustling local market.
In the eyes of rational and scientific thinkers, the inner beauty of so-called ‘ugly’ remains less appreciated as part of the definition of ‘beauty’ and well-planned settlements, and often these kinds of places are dismissed as informal, unplanned, flimsy and congested settlements.
Appreciating beauty of everyday objects to support critical thinking
Beauty surrounds us everywhere in the everyday natural and human-made environment and should be better observed and interpreted through critical thinking as part of our urban research. Art appreciates many unnoticed objects ordinarily considered to be waste, filthy, or rotten. Kathleen Ryan creates sculptures of mouldy fruits and Vincent Van Gogh drew a painting of a pair of old and used boots. These examples show us that creative and critical thinking can help us appreciate the beauty of ignored and rejected objects. Science and art can often break the taboo of conventional rationality and go beyond the ordinary scientific lens. Thus, planners’ engagement in art, painting and sculpture can help them to think beyond their conventional philosophical lens.
Encouraging creativity in urban planning
We organised a recent creative art engagement event at Khulna University, Bangladesh to engage academics, artists, and young planners. The event was designed to introduce the idea of ‘ugly beauty’ and influence the creative thinking of planners for future urban research. The team hopes similar events will be included as a part of the urban planning undergraduate curriculum at Khulna University as well as impact activities with school children.
The team invited one of the most renowned artists in Bangladesh, Mr Sahid Kabir, who is renowned for his work on urban issues. Kabir’s long career in Bangladesh and Spain involved many experiments with ‘ugly beauty’. His most famous work sought inspiration from dying rivers and brickfields in peri-urban areas, slums, poverty, poor health opportunities, and objects we often ignore. His use of bright and vivid colours, foreign materials in paintings and perspective of looking at subjects are unorthodox yet highly creative.
At the beginning of the event, Professor Tanjil Sowgat briefly introduced basic concepts of graphics, compositions, and colour schemes and their link to the day-to-day work and thoughts of planners. Kabir then introduced some world-class artworks and discussed the subject matter, application of art elements and principles in his own famous work. He highlighted how thinking beyond rationality and thinking about visual composition contributed to his art.
In the second part of the event, he worked with the team to create small pieces of artworks that appreciated objects that are ordinarily ignored like rotten fruits, old plates, old pots, and diseased flowers. With lessons on different drawing techniques, Mr Kabir and Mr Mahamudul Hasan, also a painter, helped the SHLC team members think creatively and create artwork.
At the end of the event, all the SHLC members revealed new directions for their critical thinking. Mr Rehan highlighted that:
‘‘ I work on maps almost every day but never understood how colour composition matter. For example, I knew little about the role of the split complementary colour scheme in good composition’’.
Maria, a research assistant at SHLC-BD team, was happy to learn new techniques and methods of artwork, and at the same time, she felt:
‘‘We often ignore and undermine organic and natural built environment. Nevertheless, if we think critically and think beyond common rationality, there are many aspects that we can appreciate about spontaneous and organic growth. Today’s event will surely influence my thinking and make me think and observe planning issues from an unconventional yet critical perspective’’.
Irfan Shakil said:
“As the project manager, I am responsible for designing popular dissemination material. This event showed me a new path regarding how I can make our documents more attractive by making them aesthetically beautiful’’.
Three students – Oishy, Mugdha and Tanmoy – from the Urban and Rural Planning Discipline also attended the workshop. They were all keen learners and felt that such lectures should be included within the current undergraduate curriculum to better orient planners in creative thinking.
Dr Shilpi Roy – one of SHLC’s Co-Investigator – was excited about the potential of the event and hopes that similar engagement events with art and artists would benefit urban planners and help shift their philosophical approach.
The event initially aimed to enhance the capacity of SHLC’s Bangladeshi research team. However, in the end, the event also provided new directions regarding the future curriculum for planning education, the unseen connections between planning and arts and the potential of art engagement as an impact activity in influencing future urban thinking.