prOpencity: Treating the Dense City as Open-Source Code That Its Citizens Can Edit

Most visions of the densifying city are drawn from above, by someone who will never sit under its trees. This one starts with a hand holding a camera, a hand holding a pencil, and a skyline crowded with people standing on rooftops. The argument is visible before a single plan appears: the city is already full of authors, and the architect's job is to stop talking over them.

prOpencity: Where the Common Man Presides is the work of Shaurya Chauhan, and it earned Best in Region at UnIATA '21. The project borrows the logic of open-sourcing from software and applies it to urban design. It proposes a collaborative method meant to be applied rapidly because it works as a prototype, and to stay inclusive by mediating between the 'user' and the 'urban'. The result is less a building than a user-centric design approach that can be run again and again as the city thickens.

A Skyline Built From Rooftops and Bystanders

The opening collage reads like a protest poster disguised as a cityscape. Grey apartment blocks pile into a horizon line, a minaret-like tower rises at the centre, and on every ledge stand photographed figures: a child crouched on a parapet, elders seated on an edge, a cluster of kids at street level. None of them are scale figures. They are the subject, placed at the same visual weight as the towers, while an ink hand at the corner sketches over the scene as if still deciding what comes next.

The isometric that follows turns that mood into a district. Under the provocation 'eternally open design?', blocks and courtyards spread across the sheet, threaded with blue movement corridors and tagged with outlined interventions: prototyping kiosks, an ephemeral node around an obelisk, open construction clusters, collaborative consumption along a terrace. Interventions are highlighted rather than drawn as finished buildings, which tells you how the author wants them read. They are insertions into an existing fabric, open to being swapped out. The camera held up in the foreground closes the loop: someone is documenting this, and the documentation feeds the design.

The Plaza Belongs to the Man Who Has Sat Under the Tree for Ten Years

The first vision render is a paved plaza, but its real anchor is a large tree with a brick seating ring wrapped around its trunk. Market tents line the far edge, the obelisk sits on the axis, and the figures carry speech bubbles. One vendor says he has kept his shop under this tree for years and asks what can be changed. Labels like 'Right to the City', 'Indeterminacy & Informal Sectors', 'Liquid Urbanism' and 'Inclusive Planning' hover over specific people rather than over buildings.

That choice is the project's thesis in miniature. The informal trader is not cleared away to make room for the plaza; the plaza is designed around his seat. The brick ring is a modest piece of architecture, a place to perch, and the render treats it as more important than the towers behind it.

A Pavilion That Changes Its Job Between Morning and Night

The second vision shifts to a street crossing, with cyclists cutting through the foreground and a low pavilion sitting beneath a canopy of large trees. Green outlines mark its edges, tagged 'Program Mutations', 'Activated Site Ecology' and 'Rapid-Response Tectonics'. A speech bubble lists cafeteria, tuition centre and karaoke bar as one person's favourite spot, and another figure notes that a performance under the tree brings something new every evening.

The board's own text frames architecture as a transient formation of matter and energy flow, and the drawing backs it up. The pavilion is barely there: open sides, terraced seating stepping down toward the street, a roof that reads more as shade than enclosure. It is built to absorb whatever occupation the day brings rather than to dictate one.

Listening in the Lane Before Drawing the Pod

The most persuasive sheet abandons renders for photographs. A barber works on a client in a narrow lane, and the caption explains that the shop sets up on a weekly, rotating basis, cheap and efficient. Beside him, a young man in a camouflage shirt says conditions are bad because resources are scarce, and wishes for help making the best of what little they have. The text panel names the place as Pilanji Village, a settlement tucked behind glass towers. A hand with a notebook hovers at the edge, taking notes.

Below the photographs, two rows of small diagrams translate those conversations into design moves. Under 'The Homeless', a sequence runs from migration to a pod, a shelter and a system; under 'The Commerce', it runs from opportunity and monetisation to mutation and inclusion. The sequence matters: observation first, then diagrams, then form. It is the open-source method made legible on a single board.

A Flowchart Where the Masterplan Used to Be

The 'Rapid Propagation' storyboard runs a single street and plaza forward through time, from 2020 to question-marked dates at 2035 and 2050. Grey towers multiply, trees persist, and figures keep commenting in speech bubbles along the way. The board describes a perpetual loop of user input, theoretical grounding and design evolution, tested as a pilot. Leaving the future dates as questions is honest: the project does not pretend to know the endpoint, only how decisions should be made along the way.

The prototype diagram makes that process the deliverable. Hexagonal nodes move from Identified Region to The Context, The Proposal, The Prototype, The Manifestation, The Appraisal and finally a Refined Process, each linked by arrows to small axonometrics, renderings and a comparison table. A designer could hand this sheet to another neighbourhood and begin again. That portability is what the description means by a prototypical nature allowing rapid application.

Why This Project Matters

prOpencity takes a familiar complaint, that dense cities get planned for people rather than with them, and answers it with a method instead of a monument. Its spaces are deliberately modest: a seating ring around a tree, a pavilion that changes programme by the hour, pods drawn out of conversations in a lane. The ambition lies in the loop that produces them and in the insistence that the loop can be repeated.

The presentation is part of the argument. Collage, speech bubbles and hands holding cameras and notebooks place the architect inside the street as a recorder and mediator, not a distant author. For anyone working on fast-growing cities, the takeaway is pointed: the most durable thing a designer can leave behind may not be a building at all, but a transparent, editable process that the people who live there can keep running.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Shaurya Chauhan

Competition and award

Best in Region, UnIATA '21

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