Students’ Park: A Poetic Dispatch as Placemaking Methodology

Abstract This piece is a creative intervention in the trope of research article writing. This ‘Poetic Dispatch’ is a response to be sent to the readers of this scholarly journal. It transgresses and extends the limit of its readership and genre by employing the ode form of poetic expression. It stresses Doreen Massey’s proposition that space is an incomplete event, always in becoming. The author takes the liberty of transitioning between voices; changing places as observer and observed, cataloguing and producing the space simultaneously. The photographs assert authentic presences. Situated in a students’ park in an Indian university campus, this text uses what Jacques Derrida calls the absence of the center to refer to the reader’s equal power to produce and ascribe meaning to the space. This students’ park acts like a Derridaean heterotopia where there is the coexistence of various orders of local and global without the prevalence of any.