(de)Generating the City
A collaborative work by Lokesh Saini + Shehzil Malik through the DesignKind programme. This work looks at the future of Delhi and Lahore in the face of devastating climate change.
Lokesh Saini and Shehzil Malik looked at their home cities of Delhi and Lahore, which both rank among the most polluted cities in the world. This project imagines the major shifts the cities have experienced over time by using AI-generated imagery.
Lokesh Saini
Lokesh Saini is a multidisciplinary artist and designer from India, currently based in London. Their work is inspired by their lived experiences as a neurodivergent queer immigrant.
They have a passion for storytelling and exploring the intersectionality of technology and aspects of identity.
Shehzil Malik
Shehzil Malik is a designer and illustrator with a focus on human rights and feminism. She works on social impact projects through digital art, publications, textile and public art.
She is excited about how technology, art, imagination and community can be used to create more inclusive spaces for women- both online and offline.
(de)Generating the City
The cityscapes of Delhi and Lahore are rendered by a text-to-image algorithm using keywords from our collective memories of the cities- from a mythical past, present, to a speculative future.
The climate catastrophe, created by the capitalist and unsustainable way of life of the Global North, will most strongly impact those living in the Global South, with India and Pakistan being two of the most vulnerable nations in the world.
Words such as heatwave, drought, flood and smoke were used to explore the issue of climate change in the AI generated imagery.
The images represent places that don’t exist- they are amalgamations of assumptions created by a technology unaware of local contexts, generated via code written with a Western cultural bias.
The images are meant to question the reliance on technological solutions that don’t consider indigenous knowledge and histories, and a top-down approach that doesn’t take the personal and social impact of climate change on different communities into account.
It also interrogates the concept of “development” using a Western model of industrialisation for the Global South- for it’s these very ideas that have created a global climate crisis in the first place.
Speculating the past, present, future of the cities
Lahore - past
These images were generated when exploring a speculative view of Lahore in the past, before experiencing the devastation of colonialism and climate change.
Each of the three sets of images exploring Lahore in the past were generated using different sets of words into Google Colab. From left to right the sets of words were:
Lahore Past (1): “City of Lahore, City of Gardens, fantasy, Mughal architecture, Abdur Rahman Chughtai, in style of painting, Hieronymus Bosch, people strolling, flowers, trees, Heaven”
Lahore Past (2): “City of Lahore, City of Gardens, Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, fantasy, in style of painting, animals, sun, sky, stars, flowers, trees, Heaven”
Lahore Past (3): “City of Lahore, City of Gardens, Mughal architecture, Indian miniature painting, in style of painting, people, women, sun, sky, stars, flowers, trees, Heaven”
Lahore - present
The same exploration was done to generate a set of images exploring Lahore in the present. From left to right the sets of words were:
Lahore Present (1): "City of Lahore, smoke, smog, men on motorbikes, fog, new construction, roads, gray, cloudy sky, broken down, Abdur Rahman Chughtai, in style of painting, Hieronymus Bosch
Lahore Present (2): "City of Lahore, City of Smog, fantasy, Mughal architecture, Jamil Naqsh, in style of painting, Sadequain, cars, pollution, motorbikes, children, gas masks, modern architecture”
Lahore Present (3): "City of Lahore, Indian miniature painting, in style of painting, men, smoke, smog, pollution, motorbikes, children, gas masks, modern architecture, highrise buildings, roads, cars, bridges, deforestation”
Future
The marginalised within these countries- the working class, and women and children- are the ones most at risk to the rising temperatures and heat waves, droughts, floods and dire air pollution. Political borders are no match for the shared experiences of people living through the scorching heat, flooding, power shortages, economic scarcity and an emerging food crisis.
