Drawings cities through texts – literary and journalistic, has been a very important mode through which cities are not just represented or narrated but literally imagined. These texts through their structure, narrative styles, descriptions and plots map the urban in ways beyond its physical presence and help in reworking ideas like ‘home’ and the ‘neighbourhood’. Katherine Boo is a journalist and Author of the book, “Beyond the Beautiful Forevers’. Her book examines the relationship between slum dwellers and the urban fabric around them as seen through the prism of reality and contemporary socio-politico identity.

Our idea of a home is a protective and protected space to be saved from the problems of the outside world. In drawings and illustrations, the Interior of the home wherein this role is played out, is also a space for negating representation, in the description of that wall paper or greasy floor, the stained furniture or pattern or embroidered tablecloth. Each space is active and intricate in its own enchanting way.

Unfortunately for many of the cities slum dwellers this protected space is at the mercy of city planners, slumlords, politicians and all the other unruly corrupt elements that play out their power over tin roofs and brick walls. The illustrations that accompany the text are meant to depict complex physical networks and also the underlying psychological landscape of constant terror, fear and anxiety.

As much as we tend to imagine the home in private sphere against the public or urban sphere of any city, the home and its attributes essentially are not just part of the urban, but they literally compose much of the urban sphere. The ‘home’ engages with the urban and public in its ways of privacy, denying exposure, and in the way it leaks out through windows, balconies, stairways, etc.