Architexturez South Asia
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Transformed Infrastructures
No full textThis chapter consists of an empirical illustration of when, why, and how ecological infrastructures on the (eastern) periphery of Kolkata made way for concrete estates with major short-term and long-term socio-ecological implications for the city and its (transformed) surroundings. It traces the development of new townships and urban development projects from the 1950s to the present, analyzing the context behind the formulation and implementation of these projects through nuanced readings of development project reports. The chapter demonstrates how EKW conversion is directly and rapidly causing diminishing returns of (provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural) services affecting both wetland dwellers and urban ecology, setting the context for why collective consolidation towards its protection has to be crafted and concretized. It argues that apart from the loss of environmental services and social livelihoods, the transformative processes are far more complex and non-linear, and have to be understood by recognizing and mapping a wide spectrum of challenges and potentials involving coercion, consent, negotiations, perforations, and bargains among old (existing) and new (emerging) stakeholders within the story.</p
The Natural Evolution of the Urban
No full textThis chapter traces the natural evolution of the urban, drawing attention to the swampy origins and marshy roots of present-day Kolkata. The theoretical section at the beginning of the chapter establishes the significance of complicating not only nature/culture, city/nature binaries in urban social science scholarship, but also the “great land–water divide” within tropical estuarine-deltaic contexts. Along with emphasizing almanac forms of reading space as a meaningful exercise in reviving its multiple histories, the chapter explores the mainstream (colonial) archive to understand rulers’ logic behind selecting Kolkata as the seat of the imperial capital in spite of continuous complaints about the site as “wild,” “unhygienic,” and “unhealthy” during the initial years of settlement. Using gazetteers, correspondence, extracts from diaries, medical reports, reports on period surveys of the Hooghly riverfront, etc., the chapter demonstrates that with the river Hooghly in the west, the rivers Bidyadhari and Adi Ganga in the east, the saline marshes further east, and numerous distributaries of the Ganges in its lower course, the site offered ecological advantages that outweighed its disadvantages. By mapping political variables across conflicts, frictions, negotiations, and bargains between the British and the local rulers, this chapter also asserts that multiple realities located at the complex intersections of environment, politics, and society cannot be missed within the larger discourse of urban environmental history.</p
Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization
No full textThe cities of the Indus civilization were expansive and planned with large-scale architecture and sophisticated Bronze Age technologies. Despite these hallmarks of social complexity, the Indus lacks clear evidence for elaborate tombs, individual-aggrandizing monuments, large temples, and palaces. Its first excavators suggested that the Indus civilization was far more egalitarian than other early complex societies, and after nearly a century of investigation, clear evidence for a ruling class of managerial elites has yet to materialize. The conspicuous lack of political and economic inequality noted by Mohenjo-daro’s initial excavators was basically correct. This is not because the Indus civilization was not a complex society, rather, it is because there are common assumptions about distributions of wealth, hierarchies of power, specialization, and urbanism in the past that are simply incorrect. The Indus civilization reveals that a ruling class is not a prerequisite for social complexity.</p
New perspectives on the political economy of Great Zimbabwe
No full textThis review draws from old and new archaeological data and takes interpretive flavor from indigenous African concepts to demonstrate that, within a context of local and external interfaces, Great Zimbabwe’s political economy was a mosaic rooted more in a mix of seasonally specific, household-based, compositional strategies of production and circulation and less in the redistribution of archaeologically low-frequency exotics from the Indian Ocean. An ideology based on the hierarchical triad of land, ancestors, and belief in God underwrote custodial rights and extractive powers that at times enabled rulers to access a share of productive, allocative, and circulative activities in their territories. Simultaneously, households and communities freely participated in the economy, often inside and outside state control and influence, demonstrating the individual, collective, mixed, embedded, and capillary nature of the political economy.
When dealing with a small sample such as is available for early civilizations, data must be considered within a more contextualized framework if researchers are to understand their significance (Trigger, 2003, p. x)
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Paperwork, patronage, and citizenship: the materiality of everyday interactions with bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu, India
No full textThis article explores the material practices through which lower‐caste and poor villagers engage with bureaucracy in contemporary India. We take documents and paperwork – such as ration cards and community certificates – as a ‘lens’ through which to explore how paper materiality is infused with the politics of power, patronage, and identity. The article brings ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, South India, in conversation with two bodies of literature: one on the materiality of bureaucracy and one on the nature of political mediation in contemporary India. We demonstrate how everyday engagements with paperwork as well as processes of applying, form filling, and securing recommendations are constitutive of social and political relationships and, ultimately, of citizenship itself. Political mediation around paperwork and bureaucracy generates a hierarchy of citizens rather than equal citizenship for all, yet ordinary villagers transpire as anything but passive. Drawing on patronage networks, engaging in affective performances, and navigating a politics of identity, they actively negotiate access to the state in an attempt to claim their rights as citizens.</p
The Colonial Port as Contact Zone: Chinese Merchants and the Development of Godowns along Singapore River, 1827–1905
No full textThis paper examines the development of the settlement of Singapore along Singapore River in the 19th century, from a colonial trading outpost to a global entrepôt, by tracing the evolution of the godown. Found only in Asian ports, the godown is more than a utilitarian structure in which commodities were stored, processed, and traded. While architectural historians have paid scant attention to this building type, the godown contributed to Singapore’s economic success. The godown’s association with Chinese merchants and the commercial activities key to the colony’s ascendancy, such as processing raw produce and canning fruit, were contained within this combination of industrial and commercial space. By analysing drawings of godowns from the late 19th century, this research shows that the area along Singapore River was a mercantile contact zone and thus challenges two prevailing assumptions in architectural historiography. First, the development of the colonial port was not the work of just the colonial administrators but rather a joint enterprise of local merchants, European agency houses, and colonial administrators. And second, the common perception of the godown has long been that it is a form of imported Western architecture, but it is actually a building type specific to the region that integrated the skills, materials, and building traditions associated with migrant communities.</p
UNESCO, world heritage and the gridlock over Yemen
No full textSince March 2015, the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen has had devastating consequences for the country, its people and its rich cultural heritage. This article traces the responses of the world’s foremost multilateral body concerned with heritage promotion and protection, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research and long-term ethnographic research on UNESCO itself and, more specifically, its responses to the war in Yemen, it documents UNESCO’s profound failures in protecting Yemen’s heritage and in confronting the Saudi-led coalition. To do so, the article utilises the framework of ‘gridlock’ to analyse how and why multilateral bodies such as UNESCO become hamstrung in confronting powerful member states in conflict. The article concludes by arguing that UNESCO’s failures in Yemen hold powerful lessons about the role of multilateral institutions in addressing conflict.</p
Cementing Africa: Cement flows and city-making along the West African corridor (Accra, Lomé, Cotonou, Lagos)
No full textThis article analyses the production, circulation and consumption of cement along the West African coastal corridor, a 500-kilometre conurbation that stretches between Accra, Lomé, Cotonou and Lagos – the largest urban metropolis still in progress in Africa. By focusing on the ‘cement chain’, this research contributes to ongoing explorations of how urban phenomena are produced in Africa. As a binding material, cement is at the nexus of a range of issues at stake in contemporary African cities, such as urban policies, economic trends, dweller practices, environmental issues and capitalist accumulation. Based on empirical long-term fieldwork, the article adopts a ‘follow-the-thing’, multi-scale approach, retracing the itinerary of cement bags from the plant to the plot and observing all the actors involved in the cement chain, from major companies to bricklayers. Cement, the article concludes, epitomises the emerging ‘Made in Africa’ metropolitan condition, therefore including issues regarding the environment and sustainability in current debates on the growth of the cement city.</p
Configuring the Colonial Grid in Senegal: <em>Comptoirs, escales, villages de liberté, communes</em> and Capitals
No full textIn this chapter, the role of the grid plan in the urban history of French colonial Senegal is analyzed. The history of French colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and its urban policies and practices in Senegal have been well researched and we will not duplicate it here. Rather, this chapter explores one specific colonial spatial design phenomenon, the grid plan, as a cross-sectional topic. The grid plan played a key role in the planning of the administrative chef lieux of the territory, which enabled its effective colonization. This chapter presents an in-depth, nuanced examination of the various functions and rationales of gridded urban design during the different phases of the deployment of French rule in Senegal and adjoining territories. In particular, it analyzes the various types of colonial settlements which were configured as grids: the comptoirs, villages de liberté, communes, and escales, and does so using evidence obtained in archives, satellite images and photos taken on-site in Senegal and elsewhere. In a colonial situation, the power relations inherent to all city planning are more explicitly and unambiguously expressed than in other political contexts. The ambiguities inherent in the colonial situation are also explored, including the salience of autochthonous institutions and agency, and the multifarious ways culture undergirds urban morphology. The employment of the exogenous, European grid planning tradition is scrutinized from the moment of its introduction to Senegal in the mid-eighteenth century until de-colonization. Comparisons are also made with other colonial spatial practices within and beyond West Africa.</p