Someone stole India’s walls while no one was watching.

Walk through any Indian city today and you’ll notice something unpleasant about its public walls. They are loud and scream, declaring political victories, advertising soaps, and announcing property developments. They yearn for attention yet offer nothing in return. Citizens hurry past these surfaces, ignoring these ‘public spaces’ that could alternatively foster cultural connection.

In 2014, when St+art Foundation surveyed Indian cities, they identified an urban crisis beyond traffic congestion and housing shortages. They discovered a crisis of cultural imagination. Public property belonged to politicians and advertising giants. Spaces where citizens could encounter culture on their own terms, collectively, and what they could have called ‘cultural commons’ had been privatized, commercialized, or made out of reach. 

They posed a rather deceptively simple question: could walls play a bigger role for their public? They weren’t just thinking about art but were questioning the entire social contract of public spaces in a rapidly urbanizing India. A decade later, their answer reads like a manifesto: culture isn’t temporary decoration during occasions, it’s infrastructure.

“St+art was born from a simple intuition: that art should not be confined to museums or galleries but should live where people live, on the streets, on the walls, and infrastructures of the city,” the foundation explains.

The timing couldn’t have been more urgent since the gap was both spatial as well as economic. Art engagement in India was primarily institutional and reserved for those who could navigate art gallery thresholds and afford to participate in formal art economies.

Meanwhile, urban design treated culture as a peripheral factor. As cities began to swell with new residents and concrete, public walls battled between commercial messaging and political slogans.

The commons, spaces where citizens could encounter their own culture, were facing a crisis of belonging. The breakthrough question emerged: what if walls could become cultural commons? What if facades served purposes beyond hosting posters?  What if public spaces could help societies own their neighbourhoods with genuine pride?

The Crisis of Cultural Imagination

Declaring public spaces as ‘cultural commons’ seems conceptually straightforward, although programming culture that genuinely belongs to its context is far more complex. St+art has developed a systemic approach to converting local identities into artistic interventions that communities can call their own.

Central to this is research and listening. Artists spend significant time in neighbourhoods before conceiving designs, engaging with local rhythms, and everyday life. This cultural archaeology transforms the artist’s role into a translator.

At Chennai’s Kannagi Nagar, artist Karishma Sarode’s ‘Harbouring Hope’ emerged directly from listening to women who had survived the 2004 tsunami. The waves and irises in her mural weren’t studio conceived symbols but responses to lived testimonies of displacement and resilience.

Their methodology extends to selecting materials too, which they also treat as social and cultural decisions. Weather-resistant paints ensure that maintenance costs don’t become a burden in the future, making durability a layer of social sustainability.

While ensuring longevity, they also make materiality a part of their artistic vocabulary. At Project Sparsh in Jaipur, they used textured paints, allowing visually impaired children to read and interact with the murals through touch, transforming surface treatment into an accessibility infrastructure.

The true test of any commons isn’t its creation but if communities develop a genuine authorship of it over time. St+art has pioneered what they describe as a circular process of community engagement that transforms residents from passive recipients to active stewards.

Making it Real

Proof lives in five landmark projects that demonstrate different models of cultural commons in action.

Lodhi Art District (Delhi, 2015 – present)

In transforming a quiet government housing colony into India’s first art district, St+art faced the challenge of cultural intervention without gentrification. Collaborating with over 65 artists, they created an open-air life size art gallery that maintains the everyday neighbourhood life while also attracting cultural tourism.

The breakthrough came when residents began recognising their reflections in works like Yip Yew Chong’s ‘Impressions of Lodhi, which depicted local flower sellers and their children. Today, residents act as informal travel guides, protecting murals, spreading their significance, and incorporating the district into their local pride.

Kannagi Art District (Chennai, 2020 – present)

This project addresses a stigma reversal challenge in one of the largest resettlement colonies in India. Housing over 1,00,000 tsunami-displaced residents, Kannagi carried associations with crime and poverty despite its vibrant community life. St+art’s murals directly engage with the community’s history of displacement, fisherfolk heritage, and women’s resilience, and celebrate marginalized identities.

The transformation is rather measurable. Residents describe their area as an art district rather than a resettlement colony, attracting visitors and positioning the neighbourhood as a site of cultural significance.

Mumbai Urban Art Festival (Mumbai, 2022 – 23)

This project pushed the model even further by testing whether temporary cultural interventions could catalyze relevant permanent change. Spanning multiple venues with Sassoon Dock at its centre, MUAF had to negotiate with fisherfolk, dock labourers, and the concerned authorities, while making the sensory intensity of ports, fish smells, sounds, and loading rhythms all integral to the experience. The festival succeeded in drawing workers, families, and art enthusiasts into a shared cultural space, proving that thoughtful programming and execution can bridge divides that traditional public spaces often create.

Senapati Bapat Marg (Mumbai, 2022)

Perhaps most innovatively, St+art’s transformation of Mumbai’s Senapati Bapat Marg demonstrates how integrated cultural and technical interventions can transform dead spaces from urban liabilities to community assets. Working with MVRDV and Studio POD, they converted a 200-metre stretch under a flyover from a hostile void into ‘One Green Mile’, instilling the space with shaded sitting, fitness areas, eating zones, and performance spaces. Rainwater harvesting and permeable paving became part of the intervention, proving that sustainability and culture can reinforce rather than compete with each other.

Project Sparsh (Jaipur, 2024)

Tackling the accessibility mandate, Project Sparsh asked how art can involve those who cannot see it? Working with the Rajasthan Netraheen Kalyan Sangh School for visually impaired children, St+art created India’s first tactile murals using Asian Paint’s textured surfaces. Children’s workshop inputs shaped the final designs, making them co-authors rather than beneficiaries. The project challenges conventional notions of ‘Do Not Touch’ in the art world, instead making touch the primary medium of engagement here.

Project Sparsh expands the definition of ‘Art for All’ to include sensory inclusions. The murals draw from Rajasthani cultural heritage; Bandhej Patterns, Kathputli Puppets, Blue Pottery Designs, and Phad painting traditions reflect the preservation of local identity while embracing radical inclusion.

Scaling the Revolution

St+art’s ultimate ambition extends beyond individual projects. They envision a network of cultural nodes where every intervention is rooted in its context, but they collectively redefine how the country conceptualizes public spaces.

They want cultural presence to be treated as essential urban infrastructure. With an influence on architecture and the planning discourse, their next phase involves formalizing impact through publications, university collaborations, and policy advocacy.

In their decade-long journey of patient experimentation, St+art has shown that in order to create lasting cities, spaces must function as well as hold meaning in their context. Culture shouldn’t be a luxury for communities that can afford it, but rather the infrastructure that makes urban life. The walls are still there. The question is: who gets to speak through them?