Scripting Spaces challenges the dominant urban design ideals of sterility, control, and efficiency that shape many public spaces in developed cities. It recognizes how urban environments in developed countries like the U.S. are often designed to instruct rather than invite, reducing streetscapes to clean corridors of movement, stripped of spontaneity, diversity, and public agency. In contrast, the thesis turns to the public spaces of cities in developing countries like India, where streets are layered, negotiated, and socially embedded. What is often dismissed as “messiness” is reframed here as a vital urban affordance - a condition that supports informal economies, social rituals, adaptive use, and shared ownership.

The thesis proposes a more human-centered model for public space design. Through cross-cultural comparison the project repositions informality not as a flaw, but as a opportunity. By studying these contexts and designing a series of public space experiments in Austin, the thesis presents a design methodology for observing, prototyping, and enabling “urban looseness.”

Cross-cultural Urban Study · Behavioral Mapping · Sensory Ethnography · 
Iterative Prototyping · Documentation · Research Led Design