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The southern Central Asian mountains as an ancient agricultural mixing zone: new archaeobotanical data from Barikot in the Swat valley of Pakistan
No full textThe mountain foothills of inner Asia have served as a corridor of communication and exchange for at least five millennia, using historically documented trade routes such as the Silk Road and the Tea-Horse Road. Recent research has illustrated the important role that this mountain corridor played in the dispersal of crops and farming technology between northeast and southwest Asia 5,000 to 1,000 years ago. However, the role of the mountain valleys along the southern rim of the Pamirs and Himalaya in facilitating crop dispersals has not yet been fully explored. Notably, ongoing debates over secondary dispersals of Hordeum (barley) and Triticum (wheat) into China and the routes of dispersal for the East Asian crops Oryza sativa (rice), Prunus persica (peach) and P. armeniaca (apricot) into northern India are continuing topics of inquiry. In this article, we add to these discussions by focusing on archaeobotanical remains from the Barikot site (ca. 1200 BCE–50 CE) in the Swat valley of northern Pakistan. The Swat valley is an ancient settlement zone in the Hindu Kush-Karakoram foothills, whose cultural features have always had a strong link with inner Asia. The archaeobotanical assemblage illustrates that a diverse array of crops, with origins across Asia, were cultivated around the same settlement. Additionally, these farmers likely implemented seasonal cropping cycles and irrigation that required various labour inputs and water management regimes.</p
Being citizens of the City of Gaza: the resettlement of the Al-Shati Refugee Camp at Sheikh Radwan, 1967-1982
No full textThis article examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of urban citizenship. It focuses on the Israeli attempt to reshape urban citizenship in Gaza by planning and constructing Sheikh Radwan, a residential neighborhood designated as a permanent quarter for the refugees inhabiting the nearby Al-Shati camp. Although Gaza’s local residents, like the refugees, were deprived of national citizenship rights, they retained the privileges and rights of urban citizenship. The economic development and modernization plan that Israel implemented in the Gaza Strip after its occupation in 1967 disrupted this differentiation between refugee and resident. Israeli programs promoted, perhaps, refugees’ demands to the city, but when urban equality was promoted by the deporter, it provoked a contradiction between the Right to the City and the Palestinian Right of Return. This top-down enactment of civic right turns into a measure of control that perplexes some of the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of urban citizenship.</p
Infrastructure between Statehood and Selfhood: The Trans-African Highway
No full textFocusing on the 1960s–70s project to build a trans-African highway network, Infrastructure between Statehood and Selfhood: The Trans-African Highway argues for the need to develop a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between people and infrastructure than current architectural and urban scholarship affords. As Kenny Cupersand Prita Meier describe, African leaders imagined infrastructure as a vehicle of Pan-African freedom, unity, and development, but the construction of the Trans-African Highway relied on expertise and funding from former colonial overlords. Based on archival research, visual analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya, this article examines the highway's imaginaries of decolonization to show how infrastructure was both the business of statehood and a means of selfhood. From the automobile and the tarmac road to the aesthetics and practices of mobility these fostered, infrastructure was a vehicle for the production of subjectivity in postindependence Kenya. This new selfhood, future oriented and on the move, was both victim and agent of commodification.</p
Development cooperation and national planning: analysing Finnish complicity in postcolonial Tanzania’s decentralization reform and regional development
No full textArchitecture and planning projects dominated Finnish-Tanzanian development cooperation in the 1970s. While few previous connections between Finland and sub-Saharan Africa existed, the adoption of international aid operations in Finnish foreign policy provided a pathway for architects and planners to partake in the nation-building endeavours of socialist Tanzania. Through archival analysis, this paper provides a comprehensive perspective into how a Finnish development cooperation agency and development employees (architects included) worked for the benefit of the implementation of Tanzanian socialist policy and aimed to advance regional development as well as to serve the purposes of ujamaa and the authoritarian one-party governance system. The Uhuru Corridor Regional Physical Plan (1975–1978) that followed became the first attempt at large-scale regional planning in Tanzania and attempted to establish regional planning as a solid part of state management. The paper suggests that within the framework of national planning, the difference between a development cooperation project and a planning project is obscure, and it demonstrates that basing research on the conceptual likenesses between planning and development can provide fruitful approaches to planning history.</p
Climate change and the migration of a pastoralist people c.3500 cal. years BP inferred from palaeofire and lipid biomarker records in the montane Western Ghats, India
No full textHuman migration in response to climate change during the Holocene has been recorded in many regions of the world. The Todas are a pastoralist people who are believed to have colonized the higher elevations (>2000 m asl) of the Nilgiris in the Western Ghats, India, not earlier than about 2000 cal. yr BP. Vegetation shifts in response to changing climate in tropical montane forest-grassland mosaic of the Ghats have been well documented using stable carbon isotopes and pollen profiles; however, there have been no corresponding investigations of human presence and activity at the highest elevations. We used a number of other proxies to infer the human ecology of this montane region. Radiocarbon dated (~22,000 cal. BP to the present) peat samples from the Sandynallah basin (2200m asl, Nilgiri hills, Tamil Nadu State) were used to reconstruct fire history, animal abundance, and human presence since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). While the macro-charcoal record indicates fires at the LGM, macro- and micro-charcoal counts indicate intense fire at ~3500 cal. yr BP, coprophilous fungal spores indicate a large population of herbivorous mammals, and steroid biomarkers indicate human faecal remains for the first time. This period is also characterized by dry arid conditions and dominant grassy vegetation as inferred from n-alkane signatures. We thus infer that a pastoralist people, most likely the Todas, migrated to the highest elevations of the Western Ghats along with their buffalo herds in response to prolonged or abrupt climate change in peninsular India, about 3500 cal. yr BP or at least 1500 years prior to what historical accounts assume.</p
The Vernacular Grid in Senegal: The Popularization of an Elite Spatial Practice
No full textThe aim of this chapter is to trace the endogenous development of grid-planning as a spatial practice in Senegal. The common assumptions that the orthogonal planning of settlements in Africa must be attributed to the diffusion of the idea and the practice from western Europe, and that its introduction was conditioned by colonial rule over African territories, will be refuted. In the case of Senegal (historic Senegambia), grid planning emerged as an elite spatial practice in the sixteenth century and has developed without discontinuity ever since. It thus precedes the systematic use of grid-planning by the French, which got underway in the eighteenth century (the subject of Chap. 3), and the ideologies and social projects it promoted were unrelated to European colonial ones. The endogenous origin and development of grid planning in Senegambia will be presented here by discussing the two types of settlement, royal capitals and Muslim clerical towns, that employed it. Both were elite types of settlements, administered by hierarchic institutions and intended for particular types of inhabitants. This endogenous planning tradition developed in new ways during the age of formal colonial rule (1880s–1950s), most notably when it was popularized by the newly-established Sufi religious orders. These mass organizations applied it systematically to nearly all their settlements, urban and rural alike, from major shrine-towns to the smallest agricultural estates. The mass production of grid-planned settlements by the Sufi orders was synchronous with its systematic use by the French colonial authorities. Yet, beyond the formalistic similarity of their urban designs, the ideologies and social projects of these two actors remained quite distinct. Today, after three centuries of superimposition on the same territory, the two grid-planning traditions have become “entangled” (the subject of Chap. 4). Our primary sources on the settlements we present in this chapter include official oral histories of Senegambian kingdoms (transcribed and recorded in French publications early in the twentieth century), the accounts of contemporary European observers, the historiographies of the Sufi orders, both contemporary and archival maps, field observations and recent satellite images.</p
The state and the production of informalities in urban transport: <em>Vikrams</em> in Dehradun, India
No full textInformal public transport is generally understood as transport services that are provided in absence or violation of state regulations. This paper argues that attempts to define the informality of public transport through such liberal economic lenses are insufficient in explaining the processes which lead to production of informalities. Discussing the operation of Vikrams (individually-owned and privately-operated shared autorickshaws plying on fixed routes) in Dehradun, India, this paper uncovers the multifaceted role of the state in producing and sustaining informalities in public transport provisions. It offers a more nuanced view of informality in transport studies than its commonplace understanding as a spontaneous, self-regulating, entrepreneurial aggregate. The paper argues that informality in transport studies should be understood as a heterogeneous practice that is a product of wider structural contexts situated in the politico-historical understandings of public transport in evolving spatio-temporal moments. In the case presented in this paper these include imperial legal legacies and its intersections with shifting postcolonial political economies and territorial structures.</p
A megastructure in Singapore: The “Asian city of tomorrow?”
No full textThe People's Park Complex is one of two megastructures built in the early 1970s as prototypes for a new “Asian city of tomorrow” designed to humanize the urban expansion of Singapore through the creation of affective ensembles and connections, and would serve as an alternative to the state's forcible relocation of the population to alienating, cookie-cutter high-rise new towns. While the envisioned model of an expansive, affective urbanism failed to materialize in these megastructures, I examine how the transnational migrant and working-class communities that use the complex engage in other forms of affective placemaking that disrupt the narratives and temporalities in the state's recuperation of the surrounding old city by the state as a heritage and tourist district. I illuminate how affect can serve as an analytic to reorient a unilinear notion of architectural failure toward new temporalities, imaginations, and futurities.</p
Corruption as Infrastructure: Rendering the New Saigon Global
No full textCorruption is regularly treated as a barrier to infrastructure, development and growth. However, in Saigon, corruption itself has become an infrastructure in Vietnam's late-socialist urban transformation. This infrastructure facilitates not only growth in the form of transnational investment, property speculation and construction, but allows for different kinds of planning and development practice as well. Perceptions about corruption in Vietnam, and in Saigon specifically, shape market and planning practices that structure the terms on which interested parties from abroad and internally speculate upon and ultimately develop urban projects. This is not a static formulation of corruption. Rather, corruption and the various political and policy responses to it constantly shape how brokers, developers and financiers renegotiate how the city becomes a knowable object for investment, legible to the calculations of both risk and reward used by global investors as well as to those who enact the embedded bureaucratic, legal and political practices that create Saigon's built environment. In this article I argue that different definitions and policy responses to corruption in effect create variable ways of seeing the city (as well as modes of being seen) that have an impact on the material realities of the metropolis—the types of connections produced with transnational finance, the legal and regulatory structure under which urbanization unfolds, and the types of players, firms and officials involved.</p
Creativity and Innovation in the Geometric Wall Paintings at Çatalhöyük
No full textONE OF THE PARADOXES OF ÇATALHÖYÜK is that every time we excavate a new house we know approximately what we will find: we know roughly where the hearth and oven will be, where the burials will be, where the ladder entry will be, how much plaster will be on the main room and side-room walls, where we will find obsidian caches, and so on. And as we empty out the fill and come down onto the floors we always do find more or less what we are expecting. The rules are always followed to some degree: the northern floors are clean and white, the southern mixed with residues of cooking and production, whole pots are never found in burials, neither are whole animals. And yet, at the same time, every house is different; we are always surprised by the specifics of how things are arranged. A human body is found sprawled on a house floor, with its head removed, a sheep is found in a burial (although not quite because separated from the human body by a mat), in some cases we find the oven moved to the north part of the main room. The paradox of Çatalhöyük is that it stands out from many other sites because of the strict rule-bound repetition of houses tightly packed together in apparent conformity and order, while at the same time the site stands out as one of the great early flowerings of human creativity.</p