By Shveta Sarda

*Some questions*

- What are the different time scales of development, sites of erasures, sites of heritage, sites of contested memory, sites of nostalgia, sites of future projections, expansion?
- Sites of major projects (infrastructure, commerce, corporate offices, stadiums, housing, cultural centres, museums, common spaces)? (And the time scale of a process from design to aquisition to usage, eg of a mall)?
- Where do people live? (Marking the signs of occupation).
- Where are the waste dumps? (Structures of sewage management)
- What are the forms of water supply and power supply?
- Which are the areas of congestion and unwanted occupation?
- What is the distribution of labour (forms from professional/managerial, white collar/service, formal blue collar/factory, informal labour and unskilled labour)?
- What new forms of everyday routines emerge with new spaces? What relationship do they have with older forms (disruption, speed, erasure, submergence, conflict, parallel...)?
- What are the sites of emergence of retail and what is its relationship with older forms of commerce?
- Where do the workers live after they leave the dorms at the construction site?
- What are the sites of gatherings, memory of gathering, routines of gathering?
- What are the routes of movement - of commodity, of people, generalised movements towards work, leisure...?
- What are the sites of production of music? What are the nodes of circulation?

These are some more questions about the creative practices in the city... In my own practice, and those of my peers, our question is around creative practices, its relation to social spaces, and its transaction ability, its commercial networks and its conflicted space with established economies. I'm talking here of media cultures through dispersed economic activity and entrepreneurship (perhaps someone on this list has clues to this, as I have not been able to trace these through my conversations in Beijing). What are the practices in these spaces? What are the conditions of formation of these spaces? I think of the following few questions as leading to possible clues that may provide some links between urban planning and conditions of being creative.

::Questions about production, publicity and situatedness::
The urban enmeshed with media wires and flows...

- What are the production spaces?
- What are the sites of cultural and festive spaces of production? (Which may also have a relation to time - may be seasonal, to do with a festival, etc)
- How do these producers/practitioners negotiate questions of habitual cultures and experimental cultural practices?
- How does technology change the rules of the game?
- How do these creative practitioners "publish" and "publicise" their works?
- What kinds of conflicts of taste do they get into? (A news report or a case).
- What kinds of conflict does IP create?
- What kinds of technological base is given for practice?