Kamal Maharjan and Urban Sketchers Kathmandu: Considering the placemaking agency of urban sketches
Understanding the urban sketch as an artefact through its making, and the ways through which it can construct belonging, common spaces and ideas of a shared city.
by Diego Jaimes-Niño, subproject B02
I propose to unsettle the notion of artifacts of home, homemaking, or belonging, considering urban sketches as place (and home) -making artifacts. Through the etymology of 'artifact', two encounters held during fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley in the beginning of 2025 are narrated, that illustrate how sketching can construct belonging, common spaces and ideas of a shared city.
Ars (art, skill)1: Having a ‘good’ technique or being skilled when sketching is secondary in the walks of the Urban Sketchers Kathmandu (USK) collective. It is more important to make such skills common, and share them with fellow sketchers, as well as relating with inhabitants of the places drawn.
We meet on a Saturday morning. After a brief introduction, we take a walk through a route in Thimi, Bhaktapur. The motive that leads USK to organize a drawing session here today is the ‘Echoes in the Valley’ music festival, a yearly event that connects people of the city, especially younger generations, with traditional and contemporary folk music, each of its versions set in a different traditional settlement of the Valley.
We meet in the Siddhikali Temple, in the lower part of the district and start walking, crossing resthouses or phālcās, temples and pottery workshops. We meet other young collectives who also make part of the festival: a heritage walk and one more interested in promoting traditional Newah calligraphy. The atmosphere is festive, although different than the traditional Jatras or processions that mobilize, at times, the whole valley. After concluding this walk, we are instructed to pick a spot, and to start sketching.
I decide to turn back to the temple at the beginning of our route and sketch there. After having picked a view that interests me, I find a way to sit in which I can comfortably hold my sketchbook, take some minutes to frame what I want to draw. One sparks curiosity when drawing: both an old man from the temple’s Guthi (association of stewards who take care of the temple) and a small group of girls come to find out what I was doing. They react warmly when they realize I am drawing, and although we can’t thoroughly communicate, we connect: I can share the way I see the place they live in without words, and they can point out details which they like, and others which I am missing.
Urban anthropologist Karina Kuschnir2 identifies multiple layers of meaning inside an urban sketch: what is drawn says as much of the place as of whom is drawing, because on-site sketching is an invitation to communicate and establish social interactions. Sketching is about experience more than about representation.
I work in my sketch for about 45 minutes. It is challenging to follow people’s movement, dancing and celebrating, with the speed of my hand. I try taking pictures and using them to continue my drawing but soon let go and, instead, try to represent movement. My drawing shifts from representing architecture, landscape and people, and engages with time. Although most of the crowd is gone by the time I finish the sketch, I can see in it the coming and going of people and how they used the space. The individual sketching time is over, and I go and meet the group of sketchers. We share our results and discover new aspects of the place through each other’s work. We also comment on each other’s technique, share tips, and take pictures while grabbing some Newah food from stalls of the festival. At the end we say goodbye and set a new appointment within two weeks.
Facere (to make)3: Kamal Maharjan, Nepali architect and coordinator for USK, normally shares a short video through his Instagram feed of the making of every big sketch he does. It is a window to share how his body emplaces in his subject through socialization and imagination, in line with the ‘articulation of flows, relationships and exchange’ that mobility ethnographers Drotbohm and Winters4 use to define placemaking.
Kamal was travelling during the Thimi appointment, so we meet some days later. A stone’s throw away from the Patan Durbar Square World Heritage Site, his first-floor office overlooks a quiet courtyard. Like Kamal, I too was trained as an architect—albeit thousands of kilometers away, in Colombia—so some features of his office are familiar to me: a drawing table with a parallel ruler, a large laptop, drawing instruments and a bookcase filled with books, magazines and sketchbooks. The latter come in an array of several formats, sizes, covers and materials, a selection of which he takes out to show me. This gives me a chance to detail many of the drawings I became acquainted with through social media, with their beautiful lines and watercolor work. Kamal thrives making very detailed drawings, be it drawing a ritual procession or a neighborhood shop.
In social media, Kamal shares both location and occasion when sharing his sketches, as well as the interactions that took place while doing it. As mentioned, he likes to draw shops: Traditional commerce is part of the core of Kathmandu’s identity, open to the street, almost as an extension of it. This landscape is slowly but surely transforming, as façade enclosures become a trend and family-owned businesses are being replaced with corporate chains. Kamal is concerned with documenting local practices, and his drawings reveal intimate places among the public space.
I give special attention to the sketches Kamal developed during the USK walks and ask him about the collective’s objectives. His answer reveals why he feels identified and is part of the Urban Sketchers International organization: The meetings aim to document time and place, to observe whatever is happening, to freeze time and set the observer in the moment. He gives it a more personal note by mentioning his interest in seeing details and engaging with history enthusiasts, reflecting the boosting array of activities happening in the valley today around the concepts of heritage and locality.
USK often engages with collectives who do heritage walks, and in a recent event framed within a traditional Newah festival, the Sindoor Jatra, participants were encouraged to use the red-orange pigment that characterizes the festivity in their drawings. As a result, the place that was being drawn became, literally, part of each participant’s sketches.
Urban sketches—both produced in collective exercises as done individually—can be placemaking artifacts thanks to the emplacement required by slow observation. Mediating sketches regulates the entropic speed of images and sounds that seems to be natural to social media, revealing thick layers of information about places. An understanding of place as something that evolves and is constantly constructed allows to consider urban sketches not only as documents, but also as makers of contemporary urban realities.
Author’s note: Upon conclusion of this note, Nepal is undergoing dramatic and violent processes of political change. USK and Kamal’s social media outputs reflect the importance of free media diffusion in the country and make the short-sightedness of the ‘social media ban’ proposed by the former Nepali government obvious. To close this post, a small sample of how Kamal has embraced this in his feed:
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1 Christina Tsouparopoulou and Thomas Meier, “Artefakt,” in Materiale Textkulturen. Konzepte - Materialien - Praktiken (Berlin, 2015), 47.
2 Karina Kuschnir, “Drawing the City: A Proposal for an Ethnographic Study in Rio de Janeiro,” Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 8, no. 2 (2011): 613–14
3 Tsouparopoulou and Meier, “Artefakt,” 47.
4 Nanneke Winters et al., eds., (UN)SETTLING PLACE Diverse and Divergent Place-Making of People on the Move (Berghahn Books, 2025), 1–7.
Commentary by John Aspinwall, subproject A04
This blog post reflects on urban sketching practices in the Kathmandu Valley as a way of rethinking what constitutes and artefact of home. Rather than treating sketches as solely representations of place, Diego Jaimes-Niño proposes that they are placemaking artefacts in themselves—processual, relational, and grounded in embodied encounters. Drawing on two encounters from early 2025, it shows how urban sketching constructs belonging, shared spaces, and ideas of a common city through collective, practice and „slow“ observation.
The post argues that urban sketches are not just documents of a changing city but active participants in making urban realities, in making a Heimat. For example, through the perspective of an encounter with a group of urban sketchers in Thimi, the author describes sketching as a social and spatial practice. Sketching becomes a medium of communication that bridges linguistic and generational gaps; where the act of drawing itself invites one to consider social relations. The intricacy of such social dynamics is particularly striking when considering questions of time and movement: the struggle to capture dancing bodies and shifting crowds leads the author to reflect on sketching not as freezing a static scene, but as engaging with temporality. In this sense, the sketch mediates between presence and absence, capturing traces of collective use even after the crowd has dispersed. The collective sharing of sketches at the end of the walk further reinforces the idea that place emerges relationally—it comes to exist through multiple viewpoints which are layered onto one another.
In considering the place of drawing in modernity, the post necessarily touches upon tensions between ephemerality and durability: sketches are slow, yet they circulate with remarkable speed online where they are used, appropriated, and ultimately discarded. The author thus raises a set of vexed questions about how these conditions shape a drawing's capacity to function as an artefact of Heimat; an approach which leaves the meaning of Heimat itself productively unresolved.