Architexturez South Asia
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Urbanizing India’s frontier: Sriganganagar and canal-town planning on the Indus plains
No full textIrrigation projects implemented by British colonial engineers transformed environment, economy, and society in the Indus basin during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to constructing canals, headworks, and distributaries, colonial officers designed new cities to facilitate administration and global commerce in South Asia’s frontier areas. By the 1920s, canal development had formally reached India’s princely states and decades of town and regional planning experimentation yielded reproducible planning codes and development strategies that balanced competing impulses. Sriganganagar (Ganganagar), a city of some 250,000 on Rajasthan’s northwestern border with Pakistan, illustrates these development schemes, the nexus of town and regional planning in colonial India, and its enduring influence on South Asia’s linked urban and regional systems. Like the goddess river with which it shares its name, Ganganagar took many differing forms through its planning and development: as a place of celebration, of production, of modern technological achievement, of ecological and social transformation, of expanding state power, and of ethnic division, imperialism, and repression.</p
Vertical living: transnational urbanisation and diasporic returns to Wellawatte/Colombo, Sri Lanka
No full textThe end of the violent conflict in 2009 and subsequent political changes in Sri Lanka post-2015 has opened a window for the return of the Tamil diaspora. The journey that began with the exodus of the Tamils from the North to Colombo, particularly Wellawatte, continued for those who fled the Island while others opted to stay back. The returning Tamil diaspora find Wellawatte as a place of arrival, transition and resettlement. This article looks at how the returning Tamil diaspora become embedded in Wellawatte by investing in condominium units and thereby becoming involved in transforming neighbourhoods. Empirical data from 32 qualitative interviews provide insight into social challenges and transitions that are part of the return migration process, and how a neighbourhood becomes a place of contested co-living as a result of different expectations, visions and aspirations.</p
Emergence of sub-optimal land utilization patterns in Indian cities
No full textThis paper examines the urban morphology of Ahmedabad, a large and rapidly growing Indian city, to determine land utilization efficiency. It provides a nuanced understanding of land consumption patterns in public and private domains, and how sub-optimal land development patterns emerge. Urban form parameters analysed include public streets, building footprints, and public and private open spaces. The results show that land utilization is sub-optimal, with less land available under public domain and more land consumed as private open spaces (especially as margins and setbacks) leading to excessive fragmentation. Indian cities should rationalize their development regulations to improve land utilization outcomes.</p
Cities and migration: generative urban policies through contextual vulnerability
No full textThis paper deals with the relationships between urban policies for the integration of migrants and the construction of new spaces of coexistence in the contemporary city. It discusses the limits of the current conceptual framework of integration and shows how it works in a way that seperates space and people from each other. This creates marginalisation and segregation in already unjust and uneven cities. By contrast, the paper proposes a different perspective toward the construction of coexistence between local populations and migrants. It places a particular emphasis on contextual vulnerability and on its role in generative planning experiments that are aimed at creating inclusive cities. It also reflects on some of these experiences by considering their potential to reconnect local people, migrants and places, and shows how a focus on a relational and embodied understanding of vulnerability can give rise to supportive, less disciplining forms of coexistence in the contemporary city.</p
Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai
No full textThis paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women’s participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the ‘good life’, it makes two arguments. First: the paper unpacks the ways in which urban publics have been stigmatised as ‘unsafe’ for respectable women. It demonstrates that in practices of publicly-located sex, young women subvert this. They instead see private and commercial spaces – which have been celebrated as the locus of their liberation – as places of surveillance and discipline. Second: the paper interrogates how spatial governmentalities produce regimes of legitimacy that accrue to particular sexual acts. It argues that what ‘counts’ as sex is also determined geographically: by where the sex act occurs and what geographies of discipline and imaginaries of risk and respectability it evokes in its location. Both arguments draw attention to the ways in which contemporary discourses about the ‘risk’ of urban publics evoke the logics of development within which the construct of respectable femininity is located.</p
Postindustrialism and the Long Arts And Crafts Movement: between Britain, India, and the United States Of America
No full textThis article is part of the Objects in Motion series in British Art Studies, which is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Projects in the series examine cross-cultural dialogues between Britain and the United States, and may focus on any aspect of visual and material culture produced before 1980. The aim of Objects in Motion is to explore the physical and material circumstances by which art is transmitted, displaced, and recontextualised, as well as the transatlantic processes that create new markets, audiences, and meanings.
Taking two journeys as its fulcrum, this essay traces how Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) and his wife Ethel Mairet’s (1872–1952) photographs and studies of craft in India and Ceylon in the 1900s relate to Charles and Ray Eames’ India Report (1958), a photographic research journey through craft communities of India that sought to find form, function, and “Indianness” in a bid to exemplify the future of design in India in the 1950s. Unpacking the different contexts of the two moments, the essay analyses how international interventions on the “Indianness” of Indian design were forged in early and mid-twentieth-century India, particularly within what it posits as the “Long Arts and Crafts Movement” between Great Britain, India, and the United States of America. If the British Arts and Crafts Movement was a combination of progressive and conservative tendencies, this essay investigates how the vexed design historical continuum between the British Empire and the Cold War, Victorian socialism, Indian nationalism, and American development-oriented aid programmes played out in the space of the Indian village. Following the intellectual and design historical trajectories of “post-industrialism” (a term that Coomaraswamy introduced in 1914 when thinking about future anti-industrial societies) to think through the complex and moving parts of the Long Arts and Crafts Movement, the essay pursues the paradoxical nature of the term as it is mobilised in the Eameses’ mid-century America and routed back into the Indian village through American technocrats.</p
Power politics: Armed non-state actors and the capture of public electricity in post-invasion Baghdad
No full textScholars observe that armed non-state actors (NSAs) often provide social services to reinforce their popular support and legitimacy as guarantors of local order. On the other hand, NSAs usually face funding constraints that make the independent provision of distributive goods difficult. This article argues that armed NSAs employ an alternative, more cost-effective tactic to deliver services. It argues that militant groups can leverage their armed capacity to capture control of and monopolize access to state-sponsored services. As an example, it documents the capture of public electricity infrastructure that took place in post-invasion Baghdad under the Sadrist Movement, an armed group formed shortly after the ouster of the Ba’athist state. Using local-level information about the location of Sadrist offices and remote sensing data, it estimates that Sadrist-affiliated neighborhoods in Baghdad saw an average increase in access to electricity between 2003 and 2006 that was significantly greater than in other areas of the city. The article concludes by addressing threats to inference, showing that these differences are not alternatively explained by demographic differences or changes therein due to ongoing conflict. It also discusses how this NSA strategy might contribute to an equilibrium of low state legitimacy and weak capacity in fragile contexts like that of post-2003 Iraq.</p
Investigation of informal housing challenges and issues: experiences from slum and squatter of Lahore
No full textThe twin problems of uncontrolled urbanization and shortfall of affordable housing for low income groups are the bane of almost all developing countries. This is true in case of Pakistan undergoing rapid urban transformation with 207 million population at present. According to UN resources, half of the country’s urban population i.e. more than 27 million people continue to live in informal settlements. Lahore being the second largest city, is home to 11 million people, covering more than 300 informal housing settlements in the form of slums and squatters. Adoption of informal housing is a depiction of poor governance system, showing little concerns for welfare of urban poor. This paper investigates the issues of informal housing based on field research and in-depth interviews of the residents of Karol Ghatti slum and Qalandarpura squatter. The objective of the study is to understand the complex phenomena of informal housing development by digging out respective reasons and their impacts on dwellers as a part of their daily survival challenge. Results confirm that inhabitants of slum and squatters exhibit socio-economic deprivations and lack basic infrastructure. This paper delivers a complete synthesis informal housing issues by providing social, environmental, operational and physical constructs, which can lead to thorough understanding and thus, are viable approaches to tackle the challenge of slums and squatters at a national level.</p
Subaltern Urbanization: Indian Insights for Urban Theory
No full textThe concept of subaltern urbanization is about vibrant smaller settlements—outside the metropolitan shadow—sustainably supporting a dispersed pattern of urbanization. We propose a theoretical framework which draws on an empirical research collective using both large statistical and land‐use data sets and detailed case studies in non‐metropolitan Indian geographies. Anchored in postcolonial urban studies, it looks beyond the logic of agglomeration and questions our understanding of settlement hierarchies and the location of social and economic innovation processes, opening up an alternative reading of urbanization that could be valuable for other regions. Local agency is core to this concept, transporting the arguments of the ordinary and the subaltern beyond large cities. Our findings, apart from emphasizing the agency of smaller settlements, highlight their multiple local and translocal flows, shaping an autonomous external engagement that could exist independently of relationships with large cities. Further, even though the rural and the urban seep into each other, they do so organically, unlike the process in planetary urbanization. Additionally, the rural‐urban dichotomy remains performative, in that governance regimes influence the urbanization process. Appreciation of these dynamics can provide insights towards a better understanding of the system of human settlements, which is our goal in advancing this framework.</p
The world-class city comes by tramway: Reframing Casablanca’s urban peripheries through public transport
No full textAlthough framed as projects targeting the improvement of public transport, the reduction of traffic congestion and the integration of urban peripheries, tramways are often inscribed to political ambitions of modernisation and urban renewal. As such, Morocco’s tramway projects constitute a distinct feature of national urban worlding ambitions promoting ‘world-class’ cities. Likewise, Casablanca’s tramway is closely entangled with political discourses on the urban integration of politically marginalised working-class neighbourhoods. However, this article sees the tramway as a symbol and driving force of a new distinction of the urban peripheries of Casablanca – separating it into ‘old’ and ‘new’, desired and undesired population groups. On the one hand, the tramway has fostered the incorporation of the traditional working-class neighbourhoods – the old peripheries – into Casablanca’s urban ‘world-class’ project. On the other hand, the tramway is the flagship of urban renaissance policies that have pushed stigmatised street vendors and shantytown dwellers from the working-class neighbourhoods to isolated new towns – the emerging ‘new’ peripheries. Here they are kept – spatially and discursively – outside the ‘world-class’ city, largely dependent on inadequate, costly and insecure urban public transport. These dynamics not only conflict with the tramway’s objectives to decrease traffic congestion and to promote socio-spatial integration, they also show the power of urban worlding projects to reframe urban marginality and to define who does (and who does not) have access to the ‘world-class’ city.</p