INFRASTRUCTUR (ING) PUBLIC SPACE.

The Street is an Organ, Not a Corridor;

Site Map, Sector 14 Planned and Unplanned neighbourhoods, Sonipat Haryana

In the growing peri-urban geographies of India, what counts as "infrastructure" has long been equated with the presence of concrete: roads, flyovers, pipes, gates. But our research in Sector 14, Sonipat, Haryana, complicates this narrative. Here, we ask:

"What if we think of public space not as absence, but as a form of living infrastructure—dynamic, relational, and deeply political?"

We explored how children, across classed neighbourhoods, navigate and perform everyday life in spaces often labeled public, private, or in-between. Our fieldwork—conducted across the upper-class bungalows of Sector 14 and the dense lanes of Janta Colony—reveals that public space is not neutral. It is produced, surveilled, claimed, and resisted.

"Sector 14’s streets are wide and walled, meant for cars. Children cycle in brief, linear bursts, mostly under the adult gaze—moving from tuition to home, daycare to gurukul. Play is supervised, scheduled, and spatially zoned."

"By contrast, in Janta Colony, the street is the playground. Cricket matches spill into alleys. Hopscotch mingles with shared chores. Surveillance here is communal, not institutional. A mother watches the game from her doorstep—not with anxiety, but familiarity."

Desiring Silence and the Gated Imagination

This sharp contrast reveals the latent ideology of urban planning: its allegiance to private mobility, commercial zoning, and the nuclear family. In such a framework, children's play is infrastructured not through spontaneity, but through securitised design.

While children from upper-income neighbourhoods may not explicitly say why they don’t play with children from Janta Colony. The silence is telling. We observe that this silence is a performance of internalised surveillance—a way of maintaining peace with parental expectations, even at the cost of one’s own curiosity. 'Public space' then is not freely navigated but filtered through layers of class-coded caution. As a result, children self-regulate their desires before anyone has to say "no". Resulting in a representational space that never gets to be lived fully. What might be a playground becomes a corridor. What might be an encounter becomes avoidance.

In our research, one site stood out: a former playground, a contact zone that has now become a garbage dump. Once a shared maidaan between Janta Colony and Sector 14, it was a space of unstructured play, festivals, and neighbourly gathering. Today, it symbolises decay—physical, social, and political. Wherein, garbage becomes metaphor: a social boundary masquerading as waste to be managed. Its very placement—closer to the poorest households—spatially encodes stigma. The message is clear: some bodies are less deserving of clean, open space.

Rethinking Infrastructure: The Public As Contact Zone

Inspired by examples like Superkilen in Copenhagen, we propose a radical reimagining: treat the street not as a conduit, but as a 'CONTACT ZONE'; A place where intergenerational, inter-class, and inter-gender encounters are not only possible but infrastructurally encouraged. This does not mean building more gated parks. It means removing the gates. Infrastructure is not only pipes and pavement—it is the affordance of encounter. Benches that invite lingering. Streets closed to traffic on weekends. Vendor kiosks that foster interdependence. Sidewalks that are wider than a car lane. Urban design, then, becomes less about control, and more about invitation.

Drawn from field research in 2022 by Rhea Jaiswal and Sohana J. Sarkar, exploring the textures of public space in Sonipat, Haryana.