Architexturez South Asia
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“We live and we do this work”: Women waste pickers’ experiences of wellbeing in Ahmedabad, India
No full textThis study explores women waste pickers’ perceptions and embodied experiences of wellbeing in Ahmedabad, India. Waste pickers are self-employed urban workers who collect and sell recyclable materials on an informal basis and experience an array of hazards, risks, stigmas, and exclusions in their everyday lives and livelihoods. The paper uses a fluid and multidimensional approach in understanding marginalized women workers’ wellbeing as relational, intersectional, and situated. The paper grounds its conceptualization of wellbeing in respondents’ occupational narratives and highlights the need for the hazardous conditions of this precarious livelihood to be understood in terms of women’s own relational priorities and intersectional identities. This study is based on a survey (n = 401), semi-structured interviews (n = 45), follow-up visits (n = 36), and a series of group workshops (n = 12) with women waste pickers in Ahmedabad between 2016 and 2018. I engage a grounded and feminist approach, privileging women’s lived experiences as central in conceptualizing and addressing wellbeing in research and practice. Research findings engage with the overlapping and multiple dimensions comprising respondents’ everyday livelihood experiences, priorities of a ‘good life,’ and experiences of physical, mental, social, and spiritual wellbeing. The paper argues that by focusing on women waste pickers’ relational perceptions and priorities of wellbeing, we can understand waste picking work as an important asset for women in navigating everyday life and precarity in the urban margins. The study thus foregrounds women waste pickers’ understandings of the benefits and importance of this livelihood and discusses implications of these findings in the context of broader structural oppressions, constraints, and changes to urban governance that inform respondents’ everyday exclusions in various urban spaces and contexts.</p
Pulo Mas: Jakarta’s failed housing experiment for the masses
No full textThis paper analyzes the first government project intended to create a housing community accessible to low-income residents of Jakarta in response to the capital city’s population explosion during the 1950s and 1960s. The project was conceived in the midst of the volatile political and economic circumstances of the Sukarno administration in the early 1960s, but implemented under the governorship of Ali Sadikin in early years of the Suharto New Order government. As the first proposed mass affordable housing settlement, the Pulo Mas plan concept was prepared by three Indonesian architects sent to Denmark to study European social housing and urban planning practices to inform a proposed satellite city scheme for Jakarta. Although conceived under the Sukarno government that regarded European cooperative housing schemes favourably, it was built under the Suharto New Order government with a revised process and plan by Jakarta’s private sector for a more upscale housing market. The changed plan precluded Pulo Mas from fulfilling its promise to bring quality housing to a broad spectrum of Jakarta’s population.</p
‘Is Mugabe Also Among the National Deities and Kings?’: Place Renaming and the Appropriation of African Chieftainship Ideals and Spirituality in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe
No full textThis article examines the elite construction of cultural landscapes in Harare. Since assuming the reins of power in the Zimbabwe African Nation Union (ZANU) in 1977, Robert Mugabe invented a political culture that conflated him with spirit mediums whom the nationalist movement had elevated to national deities and dead kings. Mugabe continued to cultivate this political culture in the post-colonial era using different discourses of self-presentation. The place-renaming exercise that the Mugabe regime implemented immediately after independence was part of Mugabe’s self-legitimating efforts. This article establishes that the place-renaming system in Harare projected Mugabe as a divine king.</p
Management science and nation building: The sociotechnical imaginary behind the making of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad
No full textThe start of management education in India in the early 1960s has been dominantly described from the perspective of ‘Americanisation’, characterised by isomorphism and mimicry. Existing scholarship has avoided the question of how management education and knowledge were reconciled and naturalised with India’s specific socio-economic contexts. This article addresses the issue and provides a situated account of this complex history by delving into the establishment of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, one of India’s first and most prominent management schools. Using the concept of sociotechnical imaginary developed by Jasanoff and Kim, the analysis describes how the development of management education and research was aligned with the objective of nation building. The article shows that the project to start management education did not take off before the capitalist connotations, associated with business education, were subtly removed and a narrative was created that put management education in the context of India’s wider development trajectory. Under influence of a changing political atmosphere in the late 1960s, a particular imaginary on the role of management knowledge and education unfolded in the development of the institute, giving the field in India a distinct character in the early 1970s.</p
International rivers as border infrastructures: En/forcing borders in South Asia
No full textRivers have long been convenient yet troublesome borders. Inherently itinerant, rivers routinely defy cartographic depictions of borders as static, territorially bounded formations. Such dynamism poses material and conceptual challenges to state regulatory activities, resulting in increasingly heterodox attempts to fix waterbodies through various securitizing mechanisms. I examine the dialectical relationship between rivers and borders through the concept of the river-border complex. I ask how the Ganges River shapes the form and function of the Indo-Bangladeshi border and how, in turn, bordering practices in India regulate flows along the river, which comprises 129 km of India's border with Bangladesh. Drawing on archival records, in-person interviews, and river data, I find that the border and efforts to secure it mediate many flows along the river. The study corroborates previous work within critical border studies that securitizing cross-border flows has the perverse effect of generating greater insecurity in adjoining countries. Crucially, historical analysis of sediment, information, and human flows reveals how international rivers also determine patterns and processes of circulation and thereby warrant reconceptualization as border infrastructures, rather than as merely being subject to them.
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Heritage Challenges in Africa: Contestations and Expectations
No full textSince independence, the elusive goal of ‘development’ has been central to the agenda of African nations. This chapter is critical of persistent ‘crisis’ narratives; nonetheless, it recognizes that many parts of Africa face complex challenges. It argues that three aspects are crucial for understanding the ways in which the role and potentials for heritage may be particularly relevant for Africa: the socioeconomic and political pressures, the legacy of colonialism, and the roles of traditional connections with heritage. From these emerge a need to better understand and plan for the role of heritage in sustainable development and to find ways to ensure it may remain a meaningful presence in the lives of various communities. The chapter suggests that African nations will have to address the question of how to domesticate both the concepts of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘heritage’ to make them appropriate for the needs of the continent and its constituent parts.</p
Centralized Clientelism, Real Estate Development and Economic Crisis:The case of postwar Luanda
No full textThe article explores the role of Luanda's property and real estate development within the postwar Angolan system of centralized clientelism, drawing on the political settlements theory applied to urban analysis. It argues that profit-driven urban policies were fundamental to ensure Angola's political stability but detrimental to its development, leaving behind financial distress and a splintered urban landscape, which is a significant impediment to pursuing a much-needed economic structural change. The tensions in the urban realm between factions of the recent power reconfiguration constitute a fertile terrain to explore the relationship between political regimes and urban transformation.</p
