[Working Title] : Soft Infrastructure

The project is a tactile data physicalization of urban green space access across Delhi, rendered as a chunky yarn (weight 7) map blanket/rug. Each stitched zone represents green space available per 100 people, with additional annotations for context, revealing spatial inequalities through texture and density.

Visitors experience the map as both landscape and object: something to walk around, touch, feel the warmth of and read with their eyes. Variations in colour and softness create an embodied sense of abundance versus scarcity, turning statistical disparity into a felt spatial gradient.

The work builds on top of my Master's thesis calculating cost of recreation in urban green spaces, and translates per-capita green space metrics into material form, grounding the piece in measurable urban realities. Data anchors the narrative, ensuring the tactile experience reflects lived infrastructural inequality rather than metaphor alone.

The core question: Who gets proximity to breathing room, and how does urban form quietly encode privilege? The piece invites viewers to reconsider access not as an abstract planning metric, but as a daily sensory condition shaped by geography and policy.

Context: Access to trees and open land mediates the temperature, stormwater absorption, air quality, and biodiversity, meaning ecological processes are unevenly distributed alongside social and economic ones. By mapping this, the piece reveals how environmental comfort, climate resilience and exposure to risk are patterned through the city's spatial organization.

It aligns with exhibit themes by making climate adaptation, urban change, and everyday environmental experience, legible through material data, inviting discussion about how cities might be designed for shared resilience rather than uneven comfort.