Maps can hold our favourite meals, remembered afternoons and the places that become part of our lives. The Onion Project brings this idea into architecture, inviting young designers to document how people use, inhabit and reinterpret the spaces around them.
My Google Maps screen time would probably be a little embarrassing if I ever bothered to check it. I spend a frankly unreasonable amount of time on an app designed to get me from one place to another, including stretches of time when I have no plans to go anywhere. I make lists of places I’ve been to, places I’ve eaten at, places attached to a particularly good day, and places I’d like to return to when life and logistics allow it. Google Maps has become a sort of scrapbook with excellent directions, which is a roundabout way of saying that I have a thing for cartography.
And maps are lovely things to have a thing for: the symbols, the colours, the roads branching off into smaller roads, the way a city can be held in the palm of your hand while you zoom in to inspect one tiny corner. A map can tell you where a place is; the reason you saved it may be an afternoon with a friend, a meal you still think about, or a stretch of life you’d like to keep somewhere.
That gap between a place on a map and the life happening around it is our way into The Onion Project, an initiative by the Wadiyar Centre for Architecture (WCFA), Mysuru, which invites students and young professionals to map their interpretations of urban life. Its third edition is heading to Chennai, continuing a project that examines how people use the city, including activities that fall outside a space’s planned purpose.
The Onion Project’s second edition, 'Cartographies of Becoming: Mapping the Other Lives of Urban Spaces', explored how urban spaces take on uses beyond those assigned to them. The competition invited participants to identify a site, situation or event in their city and document how it operated beyond its intended function. Selected projects were exhibited at Sabha in Bengaluru on 25 April 2026.
The idea is compelling because cities are full of arrangements that would be difficult to squeeze into a conventional map. A pavement can be a route to work, a vendor’s workplace and a place where somebody stops for a chat, all within the same stretch of ground. A tea stall can double as the neighbourhood’s unofficial meeting room, with regulars who have their preferred spots and opinions about who has been absent lately. The street plan can record the road; it cannot quite account for the social calendar unfolding beside it.
I like treating these details as worth documenting. Maps are practical objects for finding an address or working out whether a place is walkable; they can also record how we know the world. My saved lists are a small example: pins that tell me where I have been, what I associate with a place and which corners of the world have made their way into my life. The Onion Project brings that curiosity to urban space through architectural mapping.
Chennai is a fitting city for this kind of enquiry. Its streets accommodate food vendors, shops, public transport, religious activity and neighbourhood gatherings, with spaces serving different purposes across the day. A corner may be a place to buy breakfast in the morning and a meeting point later on; a shopfront can become an informal place to pause, talk and catch up. These uses contribute to how a neighbourhood works, even when formal accounts leave them out.
The project’s earlier work has also included an exploration of an urban node in Triplicane, Chennai, looking at how human activity shapes the use of a small public space. That example connects the project to Chennai beyond its upcoming edition.
The process raises a question: what counts as information when we map a place? Buildings, roads and boundaries are easy enough to mark. The person who sets up a stall at the same hour every morning, the group that gathers on a particular step, or the pavement that takes on several jobs throughout the day asks for a different kind of attention. Documenting these details involves deciding what to record and how to show the relationship between people and the spaces they occupy.
For me, maps make the world legible without making it small. I can zoom out to look at a city as a whole, then zoom in on streets I know by heart. My saved places carry little histories, even if I’m the only person who can decode some of those lists. A map can hold a location, but the story attached to it belongs to the person who remembers being there.
The Onion Project takes this interest in place into an architectural context, inviting participants to document lives unfolding around the built environment. As TOP 3.0 heads to Chennai, it gives us a reason to look again at the ordinary spaces that make up a city: the stall, the pavement, the corner where people gather, the route we take so regularly that we stop noticing it.
A map can get you to a place, while looking closely at how people use it can tell you what that place is for and why it matters to the people who call it home.
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