Balaji P
Siddaganga Institute of Technology | Karnataka

“Be proud of who you are, and not ashamed of how someone else sees you”.

  Is the slogan by which every Eunuch leads their everyday life.

Surveys have revealed that there are 6 million eunuchs in India shunned from society. They face extreme discrimination in health, housing, education, employment and law. For survival most of them work as sex workers.

This thesis, thus aims to provide a Non-Heterosexist community center for them, to provide them an

opportunity to utilize a diversity of spaces and spatial networks to create safety and opportunity for connection with the general public through common activities and spaces provided catering for the same and letting them feel proud for who they are and for heterosexist community to repect them.

Objective:

1. Understand how physial space embodies or rejects norms around sexuality and gender identity.
2. To use certain measures to create apt spaces for queer people to interact with their own community and with general public.
3. To eradicate the image of them being regarded as low-income, minority and outcasts, basically to uplift their present status and living condition.

Approach:

1. Usage of “sexuality and space” to derive how comfortable a space is to queer people and to hetero-sexual people.
2. To try to use both kinds ofspaces to define private or public congregation spaces either in their own community or with public.

Methodology:

1. A spectrum of sexed space with “queer space” on one end and “anti-queer space” on the other with intermediate space being “queer-friendly”, “queer welcoming”, “queer accepting”, “open”’ and “queer but straight friendly” as not all  hetero-normative spaces are anti queer and the distribution of space along the line reflects the     reality of most spaces.
2. I have developed an organizing framework for analyzing the values around sexual and gender identity embodied in the built environment. This organizational framework will employ “fit”, “control”, “ sense” and “access” to measure the performance of a variety of spaces.
3. i) Fit : To evaluate the relationship between the physical characteristics of spaces and the things people do (or want to do) in those spaces. Two indicators strongly associated with “fit” are comfort and satisfaction.
4. ii) Control :  Rights to space include: to be present, to behave freely, to appropriate, to modify, and to dispose. In the public domain distinguishing between the right to be present and the right to behave freely is particularly useful in thinking about the level of control queer people have in the city.

  iii)   Access : By access, I mean how do spaces signal welcome and to whom?

1. iv) Sense : By the sense, I mean the clarity with which it can be perceived and identified, and the ease with which its elements can be linked with other events and places in a coherent mental representation of time and space and that representation can be connected with nonspatial concepts and values.
2. The urban spatial system is an expression of behavioral system and the purpose of all spatial divisions, clustering and the like is to improve communication, understanding, predictability and the legibility of cues.

The urban spatial system is divided into :

1. Urban public.
2. Urban semi-public.
3. Group public.
4. Group private.
5. Individual public.
6. Individual private.

Their lifestyle has to be studied to get ques as to how their perception of a physical space would be like and what are their requirements of a space or a community.