Public spaces and Community bonding

Here in Savannah, Georgia, I like sense of community, that the people are active and pedestrian friendly streets.🚶👨‍👩‍👧👪🐈🐕 And in India I live in Indore, there too, there's a really good sense of community and the city is very clean and people are very friendly.

The area where I live is Salt Lake City, Kolkata also known as Bidhannagar. Firstly, it's a planned city. The area is divided in different sectors and then again in different blocks. Now each block has it's own market from where you get all the daily amenities, own park. It has excellent road connectivity and a lot of trees (greenery), which I like the most. And many other amenities. But along with all the pros, there are few cons as well.😅 Ya like parts of many residential buildings are turned into commercial ones like shops, restaurants, and similar things. So people are doing on street parking, as the provision of proper parking is not kept in mind thus reducing the effective width of the street. Then again no separate provision for cycling tracks, whereas this provision is incorporated in the new developing areas. 😅 Having all different kinds of places in the same block always increases the chances of interactions with friends and ones we know from our society. So I can sayalways that community bonding can happen at random places like under the shade of trees to phuchka (pani puri) informal vending spaces.

I am from Charai, Thane and I find many things which creates a diversity and also the robustness, children playing reminding me of my childhood, easy access....in general the communal living that is brought about by the placement of buildings. Though slowly all of these things are slowly slowly vanishing from the cities and we need to protect them and build more such built and unbuilt spaces strategically.

In my neighbourhood here in Moosarambagh, Hyderabad you can say the bonding can happen over food. There are food stalls in the packed residential area where either mostly meet each other in their societies/ apartments or they enjoy the food from the street vendors while they are out to meet others. Because not all flats/ apartments have the facility of more space where people can talk. But it is good to have more such places in the area. Street vendors as well, because of them we get an escape to meet friends and all. So they are very important as a part of our area.

There are a lot of places in and around us that we may not know/focus on. In my neighbourhood in Pune there are still very less construction or development activities', because of which there are a lot of green spaces. Those green spaces act as common area where people go all throughout the day based on their needs. Some go to exercise while some just hang around with friends. Development may not always be healthy, especially when we take away all the green places and trees from cities. The government campus that I stay in has all these protected but private development is mostly the opposite, there the community will have to save the natural places, that existed earlier. Newer spaces I think do not have the same feeling of bonding.

In most cases when we think about religious places, they are very welcoming in nature and do not have a commercial-oriented motive behind the same. That is why they are easily accessible and preferred by people. There are many places like spaces around temples, etc., or spaces within the compound or even spaces outside them, open places like in the photograph of the post, work really well. There is no foundation or restrictions kind of feeling, which people might have when visiting malls or other such places.