Architexturez South Asia
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Urban Informality as a Site of Critical Analysis
No full textAcross the Global South, the realities of urban informality are changing, with implications for how we understand this phenomenon across economic, spatial, and political domains. Recent accounts have attempted to recognise the diversity of informality across contexts and dimensions, as well as its everyday lived realities. Reviewing key debates in the sector, and drawing upon the new empirical studies in the papers presented here, we argue for a shift away from seeing urban informality narrowly as a setting, sector, or outcome. We suggest that reconsidering informality as a site of critical analysis offers a new perspective that draws on and extends political economy approaches, and helps us to understand processes of stratification and disadvantage. We seek to highlight the significance of the informal-formal continuum at the same time as challenging this dichotomy, and to explore emerging theoretical and empirical developments, including changing attitudes to informality; the increasing salience of agency; and informality as strategy both for elite and subaltern groups.</p
Portraiture and Politics: Royal and Devotional Allegiances in the Paintings of the Garh Mahal, Jhalawar
No full textThis article analyses a selection of portraits that decorate the apartments of the Garh Mahal, a royal palace located in the city centre of Jhalawar in southern Rajasthan. The paintings were executed in two distinct periods: the first set dates from the time of Maharaj Rana Prithvi Singh (r. 1845–75) and can be dated to the mid-1860s; the second one was commissioned by Maharaj Rana Bhawani Singh (r. 1899–1929) between 1918 and 1921. The purpose of this investigation is to highlight the evolution and the peculiar ways in which the rulers of Jhalawar, who belong to the Jhala Rajput clan, visually manifested their legitimation to power and reinforced their political relevance after attaining independence from Kota in 1838. Their ideologies and aspirations are revealed by precise stylistic strategies and carefully assembled dynastic groups of portraits. In the dynastic groups, Jhala rulers are juxtaposed with other Rajput monarchs and Pushti Marg religious figures to emphasize royal and devotional connections. The first group of portraits focuses on anachronistic royal affiliations executed in ‘Rajasthani’ style, a visual idiom not attributable to a specific school of painting and suggesting, therefore, a Rajput social and political cohesion. The second group highlights Bhawani Singh’s relationship with his contemporaneous royal peers and Nathdwara religious figures. This set of portraits was executed by a team of painters supervised by the famous Ghasiram Hardev Sharma of Nathdwara (1869–1931). The murals display a variety of visual idioms, including the traditional Nathdwara miniature painting style, ‘photographic aesthetic’, and Victorian academic realism.</p
Indoor air quality among Mumbai's resettled populations: Comparing Dharavi slum to nearby rehabilitation sites
No full textThis study presents results from an experimental investigation of the severity and sources of household air pollution across two low-income housing archetypes in Mumbai. Experimentation was carried out in Dharavi—one of the world's largest slums—and two nearby communities representing Mumbai's current slum resettlement scheme. Household surveys were conducted to understand aspects of occupant behavior that impact indoor air quality. Multi-pollutant logging sensors were installed inside units and in nearby outdoor locations to measure concentrations of particulate matter (PM2.5) and CO2. While rehabilitation architecture and gas cookstoves are often assumed to provide higher indoor air quality than in traditional slums, field monitoring and occupant behavior surveys demonstrated that indoor pollution levels were consistent across the two typologies even after infrastructure enhancements and ubiquitous gas cookstove usage. Indoor PM2.5 measurements ranged between 150 and 300 μg/m3, substantially higher than World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. PM2.5 indoor/outdoor (I/O) ratios spiked during cooking periods but were otherwise less than 1.0 in over half of logged instances in rehabilitation units, highlighting the role of particle deposition phenomena and ambient-sourced PM2.5 in indoor environments. To minimize the impact of both indoor and outdoor pollutant sources while respecting culturally-normative occupant behavior, this study points to the need for architectural design guidelines and enhanced indoor air quality interventions.</p
Worthy Objects of Charity: Government, Communities, and Charitable Institutions in Colonial Bombay
No full textThe British colonial government received requests for assistance in the establishment of charitable institutions in Bombay in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter underscores the role of the colonial government as protector of the European community in Bombay, in contrast with similar efforts towards native communities (ethnic and religious) in the city. In particular, it demonstrates how a study of Bombay’s charitable institutions provides a deeper understanding of what British colonials deemed as “worthy objects of charity” in western India. It is not simply the dichotomy between colonial engagements with charitable institutions for Europeans and native communities that is of interest. What is unexpected and enlightening is that the government's relationship with the charitable institutions of native religious communities---Parsi, Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish--was not always the same. Based on these varied engagements, this chapter reveals the colonial government’s complex and diverging ideas of “worth.”</p
Entry by Aakar Design Consultants
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An Invited Design Competition for “The Police Training Centre” Khalal (Near Ahmedabad) was held in August, September 2020, this is an institute imparting a yearlong intense training for 2500 cadets, expandable to 5000, with all requisite’s facilities for a residential campus.
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Nostalgia as Affective Landscape: Negotiating Displacement in the “World City”
No full textBangalore, an aspiring “world city”, is rapidly transforming as factories and mills are sold to private developers. As their neighbourhoods now accommodate multi‐million‐dollar gated communities and post‐industrial labour markets, residents experience an in situ displacement, staying in place while landscapes around them dramatically reconfigure. This paper makes sense of how old‐time residents locate themselves within such urban growth through nostalgic invocations of the past. Emplaced within histories and geographies of neighbourhood change, nostalgia creates “affective landscapes” through which residents invoke their closeness to past landscapes of abundance and involvement in community‐making. Such affective landscapes bring together embodied, sensorial, and more‐than‐human fields of action to shape an everyday politics in which residents narrate their marginalization within the world city and articulate their own value here.</p
Hydrating Hyderabad: Rapid urbanisation, water scarcity and the difficulties and possibilities of human flourishing
No full textThe city of Hyderabad plays a significant role in urban transition processes at play in India. Cyberabad, a section of the city of Hyderabad, developed through the rapid urbanisation of rural villages and land, becoming a high-tech, state of the art, globally connected enclave. On weekday mornings in the neighbourhood of Madhapur, smartly dressed HITEC City workers, with ID tags, emerge from hostel accommodation and walk alongside large, black buffalo being herded into rundown dairies. This paradoxical use of space is replicated in the urban fabric of Cyberabad and surrounding Madhapur. Cheek-by-jowl urbanisation has created two very different types of urban locale: Cyberabad – air-conditioned, gardened, watered – a space of hydration and flourishing; and Madhapur – hot, dusty and desiccated – a space of dryness and water struggles. This paper explores whether aspects of urban flourishing and resilience are possible in the newly formed Telangana state and its capital, Hyderabad, through an examination of the past, present and future of the city’s water.</p
Conflicting Material Imaginaries
No full textThere is a mud volcano on the periphery of Gwadar, a coastal town in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, locally known as “sumunder ki naaf,” or the belly button (umbilical cord) of the sea. For a long time, local people believed this was where the sea received its nourishment, just as they received theirs from the sea through fishing and trade. There was an intimate and reciprocal relationship between the sea and Gwadar, with sumunder ki naaf at its center. However, with the cartographic mapping conducted by colonialists and others, people came to realize that this was just one of a string of mud volcanoes dotted along the Mekran coast.1 It may no longer be the center of their world, but the volcanoes connect a region and a people together. Gwadar has long been an important free port in the Arabian Sea, strategically located for the shipping routes across the Indian Ocean connecting South Asia, the Gulf and Northern Africa.2
Some today consider Gwadar the center of a world again, but this time a very different world, one that is derived from the flow of logistics and capital. The newly operational Gwadar Port is the terminus point of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). CPEC is an important link within the wider Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as Gwadar Port is the only point connecting China’s Silk Road in Central Asia to the Maritime Silk Road in the Arabian Peninsula and Northern Africa. It is therefore considered a crucial hub, or the “jewel in the crown” of the BRI masterplan.3 This is also how Gwadar appears in the Pakistani national imaginary: as a potential new Dubai to be developed in a remote coastal town, where large-scale infrastructure will not only bring much needed investment and development to the region but also to the country. CPEC is, of course, only one small part of the wider BRI and Digital BRI project, but in the context of Pakistan it holds geopolitical and economic significance. With over $60 billion USD of investment planned over several years (2017-2030), its development consists of road, rail, and fiber optic projects as well as special economic zones and some agriculture.4
1. George Delisle, “Mud Volcanoes of Pakistan: An Overview,” Mud Volcanoes, Geodynamics and Seismicity, ed. Giovanni Martinelli and Behrouz Panahi (Springer, 2005): 159–69.
2. Due to this, it proved to be an important base for the British colonialists who were stationed in Gwadar, as well as the Indo-European telegraph line in 1867–1870.
3. Voice of Gwadar, “Gwadar Is the Jewel in Crown of CPEC – the Key Pillar of BRI,” Voice of Gwadar, September 12, 2019. https://www.voiceofgwadar.com/gwadar-is-the-jewel-in-crown/
4. For a full list of projects, see “CPEC Vision & Mission,” China Pakistan Economic Corridor. http://cpec.gov.pk/vision-mission/3
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Entrepreneurial relationship marketing in 19th century India – The case of railway contractor Joseph Stephens
No full textOur article is based on the diaries of Joseph Stephens, a 19th century Swedish railway contractor in British India. The Stephens’ diaries, discovered in 2008, are the only one of their kind, offering an insight into the life of a railway contractor from that era. The diaries reveal a web of networks and relationships that helped Stephens achieve success as a small-scale railway contractor. We use the theoretical lens of Gummesson’s entrepreneurial relationship marketing to analyse Stephens’ network of social and work relationships and find a connection between his networks and Gummesson’s framework. We contribute to literature by presenting a different perspective on railway contractors from that period and propose that business practices of the past can be studied vis-à-vis contemporary theories of entrepreneurship and marketing.</p
Can Haphazard Growth in Urban Villages Be Prevented? Experience from the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar Region
No full textThis chapter examines the challenges associated with planning and regulating haphazard growth in urban villages in the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar region of Gujarat, India. The capital city of Gandhinagar, also known as the Gandhinagar Notified Area, was developed in the 1960s by the state government using eminent domain. The Gandhinagar New Capital Periphery Control Act was enforced in 1961 to maintain pristine rural environment in the peripheral area of Gandhingar, freezing urban development for over 40 years, even thought here was high demand in the local land market. The private sector was not allowed to participate in Gandhinagar’s development, which constrained the local land markets, created artificial scarcity, and inflated prices, resulting in illegal and haphazard growth around urban villages. This chapter discusses the specific strategies undertaken to adopt more market-oriented land readjustment (LR) mechanism to accommodate new growth around high growth villages. The villages experiencing intense development pressure were identified, and LR plans were systematically planned and implemented that carved lands for installing village infrastructure, curbed informal growth, while providing a framework for planned, organized, and regulated development. It further highlights the opportunities that smart visualization technologies can offer for enhancing urban design scenarios for improved outcomes for formulating place-based regulations.</p