Cities

Jacqueline Lacoste, Roger Anger’s long term companion and collaborator, came to Auroville in 1970. In a sunlit moment at the Centre d’Art exhibition Roger Anger, l’artiste, she shares insights into Roger's identity, where the lines separating artist and architect dissolve, and reflects on the transformative influence of his spiritual encounter with The Mother.

As a child, growing up in a Hindu household in Odisha, I was always intrigued by the images of Lord Jagannath and his siblings. Like most Hindu households, an entire room was reserved for the gods, and the main icons from Hinduism’s rich pantheon of reportedly 330 million gods were prominently displayed and revered.

This interview with Anupama Kundoo is the third article in the series ‘city perspectives’. Anupama Kundoo graduated from Sir J.J. College of Architecture, Mumbai in 1989 and received her doctoral degree from TU Berlin in 2008.

The following is the first in what may become a series of articles featuring Aurovilians who hold the city deeply in their hearts, even though they may disagree about the details of its manifestation

I am Mitali Joshi, 24, born and bred in Bombay, India, I have been volunteering with Thamarai Educational Projects as content writer, editor and facilitator in the after-school program.

“I want to insist on the fact that this will be an experiment, it is for making experiments – experiments, researches, studies.” The Mother on Auroville

Auroville can be seen as the latest in a chain of ideal city experiments stretching back thousands of years.

As part of a two-day meeting held in Auroville on the topic of affordable housing by the Gubbi Alliance for Sustainable Habitat, an association of habitat professionals and researchers which seeks to mainstream sustainability as a core concern in design, policy and habitat management, Professor Ashok Lall, former Dean of the TVB School of Habitat Studies, New Delhi, presented “A critique of the current belief and accelerating trend toward high-rise high-density as the panacea” on August 22nd at the Multimedia Centre.

Throughout those difficult years, each person kept, well hidden deep in the heart, the dream of a luminous, spiritual and harmonious city; a flaming torch.