iv. Incomplete Open Spaces
Maidans
A park is an idea of an open space that the local government or the municipality provides in nearly all neighborhoods of the city. They are structured in a way that it intends the users to use it in a particular way. The parks are a green open space and an open ground (maidan) for play, both of these are designed with an intention to keep the body active by engaging in activities like providing space for yoga, laughter clubs, outdoor sports facilities, benches or pavilions to sit, infrastructure or equipment to exercise and walking tracks for morning and evening walkers. To implicate a sense of discipline in its users, they are functional from early morning to evenings before it is dark with always a group of security guards and gardeners around this space. The categories of open spaces hints at different conditions that take place in a park or an open space and intends to look at the how smaller nooks and corners get used within these parks that are located in different contexts.
There are four kinds of open spaces that one comes across in the city of Mumbai, which are as follows:
01. One that is an open maidan where games like cricket and football are played. Such an open space also creates a life around its boundaries for bird watching.
02. Second is a park around a working environment with strategically planted vegetation that is functional throughout the day until evenings; where the workers, tourists and couples occupy the space inside.
03. Third is also a park with an asset in and around it such as a fort inside it and the sea around it with a bridge, which is also a monument for the city around it. Especially couples and other groups of men and women visiting this space use nooks, corners and pockets of such park.
04. Fourth is a park, which locates itself in a living environment within a neighborhood experiences a life where locals use it at different times of a day.
01. Biswa since his childhood had always aspired of becoming a cricketer. Not interested in studies, he only looked forward to complete his school hour’s everyday and then play in the open ground, which was left in between the chawls on its three sides. He never missed a live cricket match on his neighbor’s television or commentary on a radio and kept on thinking about each and every instance of the match and each player’s technique that was implemented. Days have passed very quickly and his passion has only remained as an interest in this particular sport. He works as a courier boy, his work is to deliver letters and parcels in a neighborhood. The addresses that he has been delivering parcels have always remained restricted to this one neighborhood. During afternoons when the pace of work slows down, he finds a place on a large piece of rock under a huge banyan tree where he rests and keeps a track of the cricket match that every new day is unique for him with a different set of players to watch.
Right adjacent to the open ground is a road that lets vehicles to pass by on one side and buildings surrounding the other. The other two sides have wild vegetation that has grown over the years. Trees surround this space that create pockets under it for auto-rickshaw drivers, sales men and courier boys, watchmen from the neighboring buildings and other passers by from the neighborhood around, especially during afternoons to eat their lunch and take shelter away from the heat. Opposite to the road is a pre-primary school to which this ground belongs and right after it is a Gaothan. Especially boys and older men from the Gaothan occupy one edge of the maidan where there are trees with pieces of discarded boulders from construction sites lying around it. A house besides the school serves drinking water in plastic bags for Re.1. This facility becomes useful for the boys who play cricket and also the passers by who pause for a respite. This maidan becomes accessible for everyone because it has no boundary walls. Yet some benches are planned around the periphery, which are in dilapidated condition now. People were supposed to sit on it yet no one occupies it because of the fear of getting hit by a ball and also there are no such elements that could shade this space.
