Architexturez South Asia
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Globalizing Control Research: The Politics of Urban Security in and beyond the Alaouite Kingdom of Morocco
No full textHow do urban security assemblages evolve? Scholars inspired by Deleuze's Control Thesis detect profound shifts in the ways security operates. Different to Foucault's disciplinary logics, they argue, security assemblages now rely intimately on expanding casts of policing agents, digital surveillance, and statistical knowledge(s). They reach beyond enclosures and national borders, and they challenge democratic politics ever more forcefully. Whether this general trajectory of security management holds true across the global cityscape is yet far from evident. Not only do most studies of contemporary control draw conclusions from European and North American cases exclusively. Many also reproduce and project abroad distinctively Eurocentric assumptions about state–society relations, governance, and insecurity. This article foregrounds and problematizes these penchants. It then looks at the Moroccan city of Marrakech to detail how urban security assemblages may evolve in different ways, at other speeds, and following different steering logics than what is generally set out by research on control. The article concludes with a discussion of how insights offered by places such as Marrakech contribute to more robust, analytically refined, and globally inclusive research on the contemporary politics of urban security.</p
Destination branding in tourism: insights from social identification, attachment and experience theories
No full textUsing social identification, attachment and experience theories, this study aims to develop and test a theoretical model of destination branding, which integrates the concepts of destination brand experience, identification, value congruence, attachment and tourist’s behavioural intentions. To investigate these issues, the present study draws on tourist data collected from key tourism destinations in India, including in Jammu and Kashmir. Structural equation modelling is used to analyse the data. Findings suggest that brand experience, value congruence, and destination credibility exert differing effects on destination brand identification, which subsequently affects tourists’ destination attachment, advocacy, and brand loyalty towards tourism destinations. As such, this study bids newer insight into the role of destination branding, from which we develop relevant implications.</p
An Open Letter to Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad
No full textThis is the text of an open letter to the Director of Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, with copies to the Governing Council, written on hearing that the institution plans to demolish fourteen out of eighteen dormitories designed by Louis Kahn. If you wish to use this as the template for your own letter, a Word file of the text, along with all the relevant email addresses, can be downloaded here. A copy of the letter written by the Director to all alumni, referenced here, is also available at the same link.
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Demolishing 14 Kahn Dormitories at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad: A summary of key concerns
No full textThis note is intended as an executive summary of concerns that have been expressed from across the world over IIMA’s proposal to demolish fourteen out of eighteen dormitories designed by Louis Kahn. It has been shared with the leadership of Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.</p
Nature Based Solutions for urban water management in Asian cities: integrating vulnerability into sustainable design
No full textNature Based Solutions (NBS) for urban water management seek to harness natural processes and (re)connect diverse flows in the urban water cycle for increased ecological sustainability. Developed in Australia, the US and Europe, the application of these approaches for urban water management tends to focus primarily on improving the environmental sustainability of grey water infrastructure. In many Asian cities, where the coverage of existing grey infrastructure is partial, and in some cases declining, the applicability of such approaches seems limited. That said, an engagement between NBS and the urban water challenges of Asian cities offers good reasons to expand NBS to address conditions of water vulnerability. In this Viewpoint, we take a particular interest in how NBS principles related to natural processes and alternative water supplies might be directed toward mitigating environmental harm in circumstances where urban residents are already reliant on non-networked and ‘natural’ services for water supply. We argue that improving infrastructure for sustainability in such cases requires thinking about how to limit the impacts of infrastructure inequalities on vulnerable residents and providing low-cost innovations that can work to protect and stabilise the non-networked ecological services on which millions of urban residents already depend.</p
Consuming Citizenship: Prepaid Meters and the Politics of Technology in Mumbai
No full textIn November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai—a new program to upgrade the city’s water infrastructure. Amongst several initiatives was a proposal to connect new settlements to water lines regulated by prepaid meters. In this paper I focus on the surprising and unexpected appearance of the prepaid water meter in Mumbai to make two arguments. First, I argue that based on the particular technopolitical history of Mumbai’s water infrastructure, the neoliberal technology that was the prepaid meter represented not a withdrawal, but an extension of state services in the city. Second, I argue for an attention to the accreted and relational politics produced by infrastructural assemblages. The politics of technical devices or infrastructure are not discrete and singular, nor are these contained by the meter. Instead, the political effects of the meter are plural, and emerge from the relationsbetween the meter and the accreted materials, histories, and rationalities already embedded and at work in infrastructural systems.</p
Moving on by settling down? Ambiguities of urban housing and home in post-genocide Rwanda
No full textWhat can Rwandans’ post-genocide experiences of house and home tell us about how people live with histories of violence? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the university town of Butare, I argue that educated town residents’ relationships to ‘home’ are a nexus of the genocide’s legacy, of the contingencies of lives not lived, and of post-genocide politics. Drawing from participant observation and interviews, I delineate four relationships between home, temporality, and genocide to elicit the broader tension between settlement and what remains unsettled in the wake of violence. Central to this tension is how seemingly private talk of home offers a powerful critique of the former colonizer, of the actors who planned the genocide, and of post-genocide social and political conditions. Butare residents’ relationships to house and home thus uncover the inherent contradictions in the idea that people ‘move on’ from violence by ‘settling down.’</p
Introduction: Architecture as a Form of Knowledge
No full textDrawing from histories of art and architecture, urbanism and planning, landscape, infrastructure, and media, this themed section is premised upon framing architecture beyond the terms of aesthetics or technology toward its agency as a form of knowledge. In this introduction and the articles that follow, architecture acts as an analytic with which to formulate understanding and meaning. Through modern histories and perspectives from the South Asian subcontinent, conceptualizing “South Asia” and “architecture” broadly and inclusively, the articles turn alternately to design and structure, aesthetics and affect, and the human and nonhuman in order to redefine the primary source. From the writings of a Sri Lankan architect, a capitol for a future Bangladesh, the princely state landscapes of a German-Indian planner, films of roads in Bhutan and Kashmir, gardens in Lahore, and towers in Karachi, this collection unsettles borders, writing across South Asian nations and contested territories together to name architectures operating in archival registers. Through habitations and speculations, it reimagines pasts and futures, recasting the architectural beyond instrument, as concept.</p
‘Unintended Cities’ and Inoperative Violence. Housing Resistance in Yangon
No full textUrban development and city expansion in Yangon, Myanmar happened through the forced resettlement of people from the city toward the periphery. Forced resettlement has become the main mode of urban production since the British colonisation, and is sustained by laws, orders and policies. Building on Benjamin’s and Agamben’s essays on violence, we claim that it is possible to interrupt the endless cycle of law and violence by locating violence outside the debate around ‘means and ends’. Stemming from the authors’ experience and repeated encounters with practices of social mobilisation of women in Yangon over the last five years, we have traced the potential for deactivating the ‘signature’ of violence in the everyday practices of resistance of urban dwellers in the township of HlaingTharYar in Yangon. Through the incremental occupation, trespassing and building up of peripheral ‘vacant’ land, organised women’s groups are challenging the spatial order established by post/colonial regimes.</p