Architexturez South Asia
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How do institutions and infrastructure affect mobilization around public toilets vs. piped water? Examining intra-slum patterns of collective action in Delhi, India
No full textWhy does a slum community mobilize differently around different public services? I use qualitative data derived from ethnographic fieldwork in four urban slum communities in Delhi, India, to examine the strategies they employ for countering everyday problems of access to water and toilets. While literature explains communities’ use of informal arrangements and political engagement to access water, what is less clear is why similar strategies do not emerge in the case of toilets. While collective action literature focuses on community-level factors such as social capital, trust, ethnic heterogeneity, and intermediary organizations, it often ignores how services interact with the slum ecology and the institutional frameworks they are embedded within. Caste, gender, religion, class, and influential slum leaders no doubt mediate everyday social relations in Indian slums, but communities that surmount these obstacles may still not be able to mobilize in a way that improves everyday service delivery. I argue that communities are able to coordinate when they think their efforts will yield success – both locally in terms of inducing reciprocity and reducing free riding as well as when they get appropriate institutional support for their initiatives. Infrastructural characteristics unique to a service determine whether reciprocity and cooperation can be sustained within the built environment of the slum. Bureaucratic complexity determines whether communities will be able to negotiate successfully. In the case of water, easy adaptability within the neighborhood and ease of bureaucratic access allow for sustained coordination within communities. The infrastructural nature of toilets makes it harder to find arrangements that will work within the slum ecology and induce cooperation. The complicated institutional dynamics create obstacles on top of that deter sustained mobilization. What communities experience instead is a sporadic pattern of collective action around poorly functioning public toilets.
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Gray local governance and Israeli Indigenous Bedouin: Credibility, functionality and the politics of refusal
No full textOur research explores the Bedouin town of Kseife in Israel’s southern district as a case study of a local authority willing to sacrifice the credibility earnable from local population in order to maintain Indigenous symbolic presence against state attempts to eliminate it through assimilation into ‘modern’ and ‘formal’ order. Elimination of Indigenous spatiality, typical to settler-colonialism, resulted in dividing the traditional space and society into ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ spaces. Kseife and its surroundings are socially and geographically sub-divided into three social groups with contrasting interests: (a) landlords (by customary law) who live in squatter (‘informal’) localities (‘informalities’) within and (b) outside the town’s jurisdiction, and (c) landless Bedouin who live in the formally planned neighborhoods in town. However, our study on the spatiality and temporally defined function of the local authority explores that as part of the ‘politics of refusal’ to the elimination of Indigenous spatiality, the local authority functions in-between the two sets of law – state law and tradition, and in-between the dynamic interaction between these three groups. Our findings show that the municipality maneuvers between these contradictions and socio-spatial order, thus failing to achieve credibility, yet maintaining Indigenous symbolic presence. We call this functionality gray governance.</p
An Archive of Development: The Road Film's Tyranny of Proximity
No full textThis article argues that a fantasy of Indian road infrastructure was archived in official documentary films. It analyzes two 1960s road construction projects through three corresponding Films Division of India documentaries, which represented India's northern borders. These show how the playfulness of film, the unruliness of infrastructure, and the precariousness of the border and its imaginary have meant that even propaganda films with set narratives erupted with an aesthetics of pleasure and violence. Replete with such dramatic signifiers, the films offer a psychic archive of the developmental state. The projective capacity of architectural knowledge enables this article to speculate on this archive of fantasy and thus interrogate infrastructure, modernization, and development, not as normative categories, but as aesthetic techniques. These produced for the Indian state a spatial narrative of fraught borders contiguous with metropoles, a condition that created a new tyranny of proximity.</p
Building, Dwelling, Dying: Architecture and History in Pakistan
No full textThere is a long history of scholars finding in architecture tools for thinking, whether this is the relationship between nature and culture in Simmel's ruins, industrial capitalism in Benjamin's Parisian arcades, or the rhythms of the primordial in Heidegger's Black Forest farmhouse. But what does it mean to take seriously the concepts and dispositions articulated by architects themselves? How might processes of designing and making constitute particular forms of thinking? This article considers the words and buildings of Lahore-based architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz (b. 1939) as an entry point into such questions. It outlines how professional architecture in Pakistan has grappled with the unsettled status of the past in a country forged out of two partitions (1947 and 1971). Mumtaz's work and thought—engaging questions of tradition, authority, craft and the sacred—demonstrates how these predicaments have been productive for conceptualizing time, labor and the nature of dwelling in a postcolonial world.</p
Typology as situatedness: the architectural dialectics of modern vernaculars in British Mandate Palestine
No full textThis article examines the ways in which several key figures in Jewish architectural circles sought to create an appropriate style that would reflect their emerging national identity in British Mandate Palestine. I analyse the 1930s texts by two architects and educators at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technion Polytechnic, Yohanan Ratner and Julius Posener, whose efforts were motivated by a notion of belonging. Belonging or affirming a connection to a specific place, and creating architecture that reflected this connection, was a pressing question for architects in the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine, which was mainly populated by new immigrants. The article argues that Ratner (who immigrated to Palestine in 1923), and even more so Posener (who did so in 1935), addressed the notion of belonging by articulating a ‘local bearing’ for modern Israeli architecture. Stemming from a critical historiography of interwar modernism, ‘local bearing’ refers to the process of situating modern architecture, and claiming its historic and vernacular sources. I show that typological reflections, or the examination of architecture’s cultural and disciplinary history, became the means through which these architects sought to localise modern architecture.</p
Analysis of the Khmer Walled Defensive System of Vimayapura (Phimai City, Thailand): Symbolism or Military Effectiveness?
No full textThis article analyses the walled defensive system of the Khmer city centre of Vimayapura (modern Phimai, Thailand) to evaluate the theoretical level of military effectivity of both the walls and the moats against potential attackers, considering their technical characteristics and the enemy’s weapons. We also study the layout of the urban enceinte, the constructive material, the gateways as well as weakness and strengths of the stronghold and the symbolic, monumental and ornamental functions in the overall role of the walls. Based on comparisons with similar cases, as well as in situ observations of the archaeological remains and a bibliographical research, our study reveals that the stonewalls were not designed primarily to resist military attacks. Instead, the army, the moat, and possibly the embankments and/or palisades would have been the first lines of defence of the city.</p
Identifying archaeological evidence of past earthquakes in a contemporary disaster scenario: Case studies of damage, resilience and risk reduction from the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake & past seismic events within the Kathmandu Valley UNESCO WH Property (Nepal)
No full textThe 2015 Gorkha Earthquake was a humanitarian disaster but also a cultural catastrophe that damaged and destroyed historic monuments across Nepal, including those within the Kathmandu Valley UNESCO World Heritage Property. In the rush to rebuild, traditionally constructed foundations are being removed and replaced with modern materials without assessments of whether these contributed to the collapse of a monument. Generally undertaken without scientific recording, these interventions have led to the irreversible destruction of earlier subsurface phases of cultural activity and the potential loss of evidence for successful traditional seismic adaptations and risk reduction strategies, with no research into whether modern materials, such as concrete and steel, would offer enhanced resilience. In response to this context, multidisciplinary post-disaster investigations were undertaken between 2015 and 2018, including archaeological excavation, geophysical survey, geoarchaeological analysis, linked to architectural and engineering studies, to begin to evaluate and assess the damage to, and seismic adaptations of, historic structures within Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Where possible, we draw on archaeoseismological approaches for the identification and classification of Earthquake Archaeological Effects (EAEs) at selected monuments damaged by the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake. Lessons learned from evidence of potential weaknesses, as well as historic ‘risk-sensitive tactics’ of hazard reduction within monuments, are now being incorporated into reconstruction and rehabilitation initiatives alongside the development of methods for the protection of heritage in the face of future earthquakes.</p
The making of slums: An analysis of Indian parliamentary debates, 1953–2014
No full textSlums are a highly debated topic with an ever-shifting political position. These political positions address to intervene and eradicate slums, although research has for decades shown that slum is a mere symptom of inequity and not its cause. This article investigates the rationality and discourse which legitimizes state actions and uncovers how slums are discursively produced. It does so by analysing the debates from the question hour of the upper house of the Indian parliament from 1953 until 2014 and complements it through the analysis of slum-related policies and legislation. The article outlines the historical progression of slum conceptualizations, the rationale around it, and how this rationality reigns policy and legislation debates. The article demonstrates how, over a period of 61 years, the slums were created in the parliament and how they have been transformed from a political subject into a technical object. The article concludes with calls for a greater engagement with discourses and rationalities to counter state’s disenfranchising slum policies and the shrinking political space.</p
Fijian infrastructural citizenship: spaces of electricity sharing and informal power grids in an informal settlement
No full textInfrastructure has historically been absent in informal settlements in Oceania. Oceanic governments have deliberately withheld infrastructure to these settlements denying them essential resources, human rights, and ways of life. Current reforms in urban policy seek to rectify this record by promising more inclusive infrastructures. In this article, I investigate the effect a promised electricity infrastructure had in an informal settlement in Suva, Fiji. Prior to development, residents created their own infrastructures that equitably shared electricity in spaces of electricity sharing. The initiation of infrastructural works destroyed this local infrastructure embedded in local social relations. While residents waited for this promised infrastructure to be constructed, they erected informal power grids that mimicked the exclusive and commoditised provision of electricity of the planned infrastructure. I argue that the promise of infrastructural development in informal settlements in Oceania is reshaping previously inclusive forms infrastructural citizenship in favour of more exclusive infrastructural relationships.</p
Behind the Scaffolding: Manipulations of Time, Delays, and Power in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul
No full textTaksim 360, located in the Tarlabaşı neighborhood of Istanbul, is one of the first state-led urban transformation projects in Turkey. Originally scheduled to be finished in 2014, the project is still under construction. Concordant with broader discussions, Tarlabaşı’s urban transformation has been largely studied through spatial lenses centered on accumulation by dispossession and displacement. These works assume that urban transformation projects necessarily follow a linear trajectory from inception to completion. Building on and diverging from this body of research, I examine the relationships between construction companies, subcontractors, and politicians involved in Taksim 360 through ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis with a critical emphasis on temporality. I argue that urban transformation in fact works through manipulations of time, which necessitates a temporal analytical lens that does not take teleologies of buildings projects for granted. It is specifically through delays that economic and political power is exerted, navigated, and negotiated within Taksim 360 using legal contracts, work stoppages, and stand-offs; conjuring of continued investment; and improvisations with labor and political capital. And so, delays emerge as modus operandi of urban transformation rather than measures of its failures or successes.</p