Charles Correa used film as a medium to raise awareness around urban issues

Ever since the expansion of transport networks, cities have become one of the most versatile machines for human advancement. And as time has moved on, so has the mass and numbers of these highly efficient cities around the globe. Along with this massive growth, fallacies in this machine have become apparent. The study of urban architecture sought to understand and regulate the exponential spread of cities and made an effort into bettering the lives of the people, who serve as cogs in the city infrastructure.

Charles Correa’s high intellect and excellent observation skills are well known through his works, but another remarkable skill of Correa was the language in which he was able to communicate his learnings to others. An architect is disconnected from the commoners, the use of complex drawings and language structure feels alienating except for the members of the architecture fraternity. Correa observed that at the face of any urban issue, the stakeholders that get hit the hardest are these commoners who live and work in the city. He also remarked how it was extremely important for them to understand the causality of these issues and their roles in getting them fixed. Correa appealed to the masses using simple cartoons to help explain complex workings of urbanism. Caricatures or cartoons were already popular in various media like newspapers, as they could be deciphered regardless of age and level of literacy. He also made sure that the information is relayed in a manner that is effortlessly grasped by the audience, with the use of a hypothetical storyline or through the medium of a conversation between two people. 

The success in Correa’s medium and the way he chose to present it is evident through the positive changes observed from his films. From the formation of neighbourhood associations in the suburbs in America to the scale of urbanisation that spread from Mumbai to its surrounding areas, creating a larger city network. His attempts at conveying the rhyme and reason behind a movement or a shift of urbanisation cut through the meat of the subject, by zooming into people’s lives, their needs and aspirations. Through his work, architects and activists have come up with other solutions that have shaped the way cities function now and eventually how they will in the future.

It is undeniably true that Charles Correa successfully used film as a medium to not just create awareness but also come up with solutions that could be implemented by people or their respective governing bodies. They were crucial as they not just showed the need to scale up but to also make sure the quality of life is improved, communities are preserved and cities are self sustainable. His films have been methods of documentation that make them timeless and as urbanisation continues to spear ahead, these issues still pop up to this day. Thus making Correa’s work still stand as relevant as they were 65 years ago.

Image credits: A frame of the film, 'A City of Water' by Charles Correa made in 1975 with the help of Films Division, India. Image taken from the Films Division YouTube channel.