'Building Sight' is a sketch of how a way of thinking about a city has to be constructed, brick by brick. Cities are being built all the time. Construction never ends; no one can say precisely when it began, work is in progress.

The task of constructing an image of a city involves more than collating material about buildings, roads and walls. It also requires you to render all the arguments and feelings that gather around a place. There is no guarantee that all this will resolve into a neat diagram of urban utopia. Every indication, in fact, is to the contrary.

The pleasure of our immersion in cities lies as much in our awareness of their discord as in their design . To think about cities is to consider relationships : between a planned city and its messy footprint, between tower block, hollow ground and dust bowl, between a wall that you can lean on and a house that is demolished, between cul-de-sacs and streets for walking. Between the admonitions inscribed on surfaces and the never-ending games and dreams that are played out and whispered at street corners and crossroads.

The city can strike you as a maelstrom. Evictions bring new people from all over the hinterland - as dams flood valleys, as plans spiral out from blueprints, emptying forests, fields and pastures. Old towns haemorrhage into the metropolis. The city swells, becomes strange, crowded, dense. Old evictions breed new ones. A city becomes something you have to hang on to as you lurch into daily uncertainties.

And yet, time is sought for pauses, for breath, for play, for dreaming, for the carving out of spaces and handholds and corridors which make the city a place to live in, regardless. And there are encounters that bring things face to face when eyes have to meet eyes, gazes have to cross and settle on the beholder and the beheld. And there are conversations - some strident, others tentative; some even have episodes of accord.

A building site is a place where people bring things with which they will construct something. Building sight is an island of design inlaid into the surface of this construction. 'Building Sight' brings together a number of different visions in order to provoke new conversations about the making and unmaking of cities.

'Building Sight' is a provisional index of a handful of conversations that we have been having for some time. With friends, colleagues and correspondents who have helped us to think about what it means to live in cities.

One is an architect, two are documentary filmmakers, one is a cinematographer, one a curator, critic, writer. Then there are collectives and communities - a writer and a community worker, three editors of a broadsheet in dialogue with a designer, a constellation of media practitioners in a working class neighbourhood. Each of these, many from Delhi, some from Mumbai, one from Bangalore - is a stranger to galleries. Their work anticipates, rather than represents, what the response of contemporary art practice can be to the South Asian city.

The dialogue that we have had with these practitioners has led to an eclectic mélange of possibilities, and the tentative laying of foundations, as a series of fragments creates unsettling, pleasurable provocations. In all of this we can see arguments gather ; we see images of disparate dreams and realities unsettling maps, plans and blueprints.

Sometime in the 19th century, a poet who lived in Delhi, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, gave voice to a query about his city.

'What is Delhi?' I ask myself.

I reply, 'The world is a body, and Delhi, the soul'

In the end, building sight - brick by retinal brick, pixel by pixel, frame by frame - is a consideration of what it means to continue a conversation with the body of the world, and its soul.