Architexturez South Asia
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Young adults and homeownership in Jakarta, Indonesia
No full textPurpose: Homeownership, especially for young adults, is a significant challenge in nearly every country and Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, is not exempted. Its capital city, Jakarta, has the lowest homeownership rate when compared with other cities and if this challenge remains unresolved, it could lead to more social and economic issues in the country. Hence, this study aims to investigate the homeownership of young adults in Jakarta, focussing on young adults’ opinions, perceptions and experiences regarding homeownership opportunities.
Design/methodology/approach: A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from young adults in the study area. The collected data were analysed using the statistical package for the social sciences 24.0 software. Descriptive analysis, Cronbach’s alpha test, Pearson’s correlation test and mean score ranking were adopted to analyse the collected data.
Findings: The result shows that homeownership is driven by factors that are more functional and realistic (in terms of a place to live, marriage and parenthood) rather than those related to pride or social status representation (as a personal or career accomplishment). Unaffordability and insufficient income were ranked as crucial barriers to homeownership. Increasing the supply of affordable housing, controlling housing prices through government’s intervention and reducing mortgage interests are potential solutions to address this issue.
Practical implications: The result of this research would be useful to young adults who are the participants of this study, property developers, lending institutions and the government concerning homeownership policy formulation, loan provision, affordable housing supply, etc.
Originality/value: Specific studies that focussed on the young adults’ homeownership in Jakarta, Indonesia is limited, therefore, this research provides an insight into the issue of young adults’ homeownership in the country. Also, the findings could be applicable in other developing countries that have similar characteristics to Indonesia.</p
“By what authority?” The contested politics of urban toponymic inscription in Zimbabwe
No full textThis article explores the contest over the naming of urban landscapes in Zimbabwe. The analysis unfolds from the realization that urban landscapes are significant in naturalizing political systems and ideologies. Political actors strive to control and configure urban landscapes in a way that popularizes their political ideologies. This study advances the argument that urban local government actors may contest the hegemonic place-naming system that ruling elites prescribe. State actors also block any efforts by subordinate groups to disrupt the harmony between official toponymy and the political ideology that the ruling regimes popularize. However, subordinate groups can be heterogeneous leading to a multi-layered nature of resistance. There can be relations of dominance and subordination among the constituent elements of subordinate groups. Preliminary findings indicate that there is legislative ambivalence within and between the Urban Councils Act (Chapter 29:15) of 1996 and the Constitution of Zimbabwe, Amendment No. 20 of 2013, that allows for conflicting interpretations of arenas and boundaries of authority over urban toponymic inscription between urban local government actors and the central state. This causes perennial conflicts between central government and urban local government actors.</p
Gender-biased Street Naming in Urban Sub-Saharan Africa: Influential Factors, Features and Future Recommendations
No full textThis article explores the present-day problematic of gender-biased street names as prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa’s cityscapes. That is, the abundance of masculine street names as opposed to feminine ones in the urban environments of this region. The article first provides a comparative view on the scope of this toponymic phenomenon in other geographic regions with relation to sub-Saharan Africa. It also identifies few decisive factors in the creation of the gender-biased urban landscapes in sub-Saharan Africa. These factors consist of: recent tendencies in critical toponymy studies; colonial and post-colonial cultures of governmentality; and inadequate urban planning legislation and vision as pertained by post-colonial states. This toponymic problematic is then exemplified in a site-specific analysis of the city of Bindura in north-eastern Zimbabwe. The article concludes with recommendations for designing a more socially inclusive urban management policy in the region, pointing to future research directions of this under-studied phenomenon in critical place-name studies.</p
Painting architectural heritage in modern Baghdad: The art of Lorna Selim
No full textThis article explores the work of the artist Lorna Selim in the context of a period of modernization and urbanization in Baghdad, the city she moved to in 1950 with her husband, fellow artist Jewad Selim. Following the neglect and destruction of thousands of traditional houses in Baghdad, the landscape of the city was changing rapidly over time. Modernist architects and planners fuelled these changes, with little consideration for issues of conservation. I aim to show the impact of a variety of policies, historical events and new architectural trends on the Iraqi environment, and show how Lorna captured a snapshot of Iraqi cultural and architectural history which has since been lost.</p
‘Before others’: construction pioneers in the uplands of northwestern Laos
No full textGiven that houses have become a key signifier of an orientation towards the future, several villagers in Pliya can be regarded or regard themselves as pioneers of the construction of a new type of house. I will suggest here that the construction of new concrete houses is not to be understood merely as an adoption of lowland styles but as a self-conscious and selective use of a style of building. Those who are pioneering these houses also discuss their efforts in terms of pioneering acts, emphasising the self-taught nature of their appropriation of new aspects of craftsmanship. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among the Khmu of Pliya, and especially on more recent fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, I wish to argue that the way in which new houses have entered the local cosmos and are materialised by pioneering builders highlights a pioneering ethos that infuses local attempts at future-making, from wet rice cultivation to concrete villas.</p
Emotions, Planning and Co-production: Distrust, Anger and Fear at Participatory Boundaries in Bengaluru
No full textEmotions relationally and performatively constitute the very boundaries that distinguish the subject from the other(s). The urban human in India is affectively constituted by many intense emotional experiences of everyday life. Adopting a participation view of planning and drawing from Sarah Ahmed (2014, The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press), we examine ‘what emotions do’ in the planning and participatory atmospheres (Buser, 2014, Planning Theory, vol. 13, pp. 227–243) in Bangalore. Tracing emotional content embedded in participations and non-participations, we demonstrate how distrust, anger and fear co-produced the process and outcomes of the 2031 Master Plan of Bangalore. We join the few emerging scholars that call attention to the emotional geographies of planning, particularly to be able to transform the continuing colonial urban management practice in the postcolonial world to that of planning. Planning, we argue, has to involve participation, in which emotions, we demonstrate, are the connective tissue (Newman, 2012, Critical Policy Studies, vol. 6, pp. 465–479).</p
Digging pits and making places at Uğurlu during the Sixth Millennium BC
No full textThe site of Uğurlu on the island of Gökçeada (Imbros) is the earliest known Neolithic settlement within the Aegean Islands (c.6800–4500 cal. BC). In total, 37 pits, associated with a rich variety of artefacts as well as human and animal bones were excavated in the Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic levels of the site (c.5900–4500 BC). The pits belonging to the early sixth millennium BC levels of Uğurlu were small and located within the houses that seem to have gone through multiple episodes of house destruction and renovation rituals. During the late sixth millennium BC, this area became the focus of extensive pit-digging activity, when large pits involving rich variety of artefacts were set within the courtyard of a special building (Building 4). Among the pits, a collective human burial pit (P188) incorporating the remains of 11 individuals and another pit (P52) involving a partial human skeleton were also found. From a comparative point of view, the construction techniques of these pits, their spatio-temporal relations as well as their associated archaeological artefacts resemble the Anatolian and Near Eastern Neolithic practices of house destruction and renovation cycles, which are activities related to the ancestor cults of the region. We argue that all of these practices reflect public events during which social relations were negotiated through the agency of place. The differences observed during the sixth millennium BC at Uğurlu reflect the changing concepts of place and society in the immediate aftermath of the Neolithic Process, when interactions with the Balkans as well as the Aegean intensified in this region.</p
New insights into the spatial organization, stratigraphy and human occupations of the Aceramic Neolithic at Ganj Dareh, Iran
No full textThe Aceramic Neolithic site of Ganj Dareh (Kermanshah, Iran) is arguably one of the most significant sites for enhancing our understanding of goat domestication and the onset of sedentism. Despite its central importance, it has proven difficult to obtain contextually reliable data from it and integrate the site in regional syntheses because it was never published in full after excavations ceased in 1974. This paper presents the Ganj Dareh archive at Université de Montréal and shows how the documentation and artifacts it comprises still offer a great deal of useful information about the site. In particular, we 1) present the first stratigraphic profile for the site, which reveals a more complex depositional history than Smith’s five-level sequence; 2) reveal the presence of two possible pre-agricultural levels (H-01 and P-01); 3) explore the spatial organization of different levels; 4) explain possible discrepancies in the radiocarbon dates from the site; 5) show some differences in lithic technological organization in levels H-01 and P-01 suggestive of higher degrees of residential mobility than subsequent phases of occupation at the site; and 6) reanalyze the burial data to broaden our understanding of Aceramic Neolithic mortuary practices in the Zagros. These data help refine our understanding of Ganj Dareh’s depositional and occupational history and recenter it as a key site to improve our understanding the Neolithization process in the Middle East.</p
The Induced Fall of Public Architecture in India
No full textOn Friday 18 June 2021, I took part in a panel discussion on how the Indian state commissions public architecture and its impact on the quality of public design. The event was organised by Zion Exhibitions. This essay is derived from what I said at the discussion.</p