Architexturez South Asia
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Concreting the frontier: Modernity and its entanglements in Sikkim, India
No full textSikkim is a geopolitically sensitive frontier state in India sharing borders with Bhutan, China and Nepal. As distinctions between urban and rural dissolve across the Himalaya, concrete narrates the transformation of these landscapes and the assemblages that hold them together. Using Cloke and Jones’s (2001) notion of ‘dwelling’ we explore Sikkim's concrete manifested in tourism, hydropower and housing to make four arguments. First, concrete is central to the way development is conceived and enacted in Sikkim and offers a critical reading of the ways landscape is imagined, reproduced and politicised. Second, concrete foregrounds the ways peoples' aspirations are materialised in the built environment of a ‘remote’, yet geopolitically significant territory. Third, concrete is an integral component of Sikkim's political culture, part of the assemblage of incongruent elements that undergird the state's dependency. Finally, concrete has further entangled Sikkim within India, producing a loyal border state out of a recently independent polity.</p
Southern Theory without a North: City Conceptualization as the Theoretical Metropolis
No full textThere have been calls to broaden urban theory to incorporate learnings from the Southern or ordinary cities (periphery). These calls are often placed as a counter to the hegemony of the Northern cities (metropolis), which have long been the sites for producing theory. If the metropolis is a concept to describe clustering of power and knowledge, then geographical located-ness of this metropolis in the North is theoretically stifling. Therefore, we need to investigate the formation of metropolises within various cities, to study them in their own right, rather than merely pitching them against the northern cities or theory. Building on the qualitative study of street food sellers, users, and producers, I illustrate contrasting narratives from Colombo and Delhi. I take the lunch-packet sector in Colombo to develop narratives of the city and read it alongside those of the momos (dumpling) sector in Delhi. Through these everyday urban narratives, I build a set of urban imageries, distinct in both cities, and compare them with their planning histories via master plans. Using this juxtaposition, I argue that for the city to be rendered outside of the North’s knowledge hegemony (i.e., for Southern theory), we need to have an interiorized ontological probing.</p
Tamed Interventions
No full textThis chapter exposes readers to the more complex evolution of the urban, comprising tangled interactions between urban-environmental and technical-social dimensions. Applying D’Souza’s concept of “colonial hydrology” to Kolkata, it reveals how urban hydraulic projects were geared towards profits on investments through a series of tamed interventions facilitating the evolution of networked infrastructures that performed parallel functions of trade-transportation and drainage-sewerage-sanitation. Using the perspective of urban political ecology of networked infrastructures to better understand colonial urban environmental history, this chapter explores debates and discussions surrounding various plans and designs relating to canal excavation and marsh reclamation among the different wings of the government, including the Military Board, the Corporation, the Irrigation and Waterways Department, the Public Works Department, and different committees appointed by the government. Consulting administrative and revenue records between the 1770 s and 1920 s, the chapter weaves the complex web of city, nature, and technological history, reflecting on the colonial encounter with nature and native in a volatile, vulnerable, uncertain, “unhygienic,” and “unruly” fluid scape.</p
Letters from International Community in response to a call by the Council of Architecture (India)
No full textProblems and Policies of Metropolitan Growth in India
No full textContemporary metropolitan planning is a dynamic and evolving process in which population movements, economic fluctuations, and social dynamism play a crucial role. The metropolitan growth of population indicates that unplanned spatial expansion covering fringe areas and the development of satellite towns around these cities is inevitable in the future. Indian metropolises are in a stage of massive urban transition as mega industrial corridors are emerging in a big way. Due to the effect of globalization, liberalization, and privatization, the Indian economy is oriented towards a gradual structural transformation. This chapter gives stresses on Indian metropolitan growth since the last century and analyses their situations in the light of the achievements made under various new government initiatives like Smart Cities Mission, National Rurban Mission, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY), Housing for All (Urban), and National Urban Livelihood Missions (NLUM), etc. The study also focuses on the contemporary metropolitan development in India and traces the economic and spatial restructuring of peripheral areas of metropolitan cities as part of economic liberalization.</p
Blinded like a state? Urban sanitation, improvement and high modernism in contemporary Myanmar
No full textThis article explores urban sanitation in the city of Mandalay, upper Myanmar, as an entry point to better understand the issue of improvement in the country in the current era of political change. Based upon qualitative data gathered in Mandalay between 2015 and 2018, the article focuses on the state's ways of seeing urban improvement after 2016, when the National League for Democracy government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi took office. The article builds upon James Scott's work on statecraft to frame the analysis, and it uses this framework to argue that a localized form of authoritarian high modernism is emerging and shaping urban improvement in Mandalay today. The case is noteworthy as high modernism in Mandalay is not associated with attempts to render the city more legible; on the contrary improvement seems to be carried out by a state unwilling, or unable, to see and thus being blinded. The article develops this argument to make a twofold contribution, to discussions on statecraft and the “failure of development” in contemporary Myanmar from the perspective of political geography; and to debates on states' ways of seeing and the practice of improvement in postcolonial contexts.</p
Commoning the Established Order of Property: Reclaiming Fishing Commons in Mumbai
No full textThis article narrates how a fisherfolk community comprising original inhabitants of Mumbai has been spatially squeezed and choked by surrounding urban developments, compelling them to turn away from their customary livelihoods and ways of living. The community resists this through a political project of indigenous reclaiming. The project is material in nature—focused on reclaiming alienated lands—but also imaginative—reasserting a newly imagined, albeit contested, identity as a fishing community founded on repurposing its fishing commons and reconfiguring the dominant notion of property as private. Using the lens of boundaries allows us to understand the closures and opportunities presented by these complex urban transformations. Overall, the fishers’ reclamation is directed at redefining, contesting, blurring and ‘commoning’ the established ordering boundary of private property that erases their customary claims—their remembered boundary spans not just the village settlement but also the land–sea commons—and is seen as unjust.</p
Equity impacts of informal private water markets: case of Kathmandu Valley
No full textSouth Asia is a hotspot for populations and economies adversely impacted by poor water security. This is evident in the case of Nepal where it has been estimated that 20% of households have no access to a domestic water source and two-thirds of the urban households live with inadequate water supply. Therefore, many depend on private solutions, such as private wells and purchasing water from informal water markets, to meet household water needs. Within this context, this paper examines whether private water vendors provide equitable access to both poor and wealthy households, whether they practice discriminatory pricing and whether poor households face a greater financial burden in meeting their household water needs. The analysis uses primary data collected from a 1,500-household survey conducted in 2014 and uses regression analyses to derive the results. The results reveal patterns of inequity in the private water market, but seemingly not purely due to an inherent bias against poorer households. Regardless, the market does not serve the poor adequately and given the lack of alternatives that poor households have, it points to an urgent need for the government to step in to counterbalance the deficiencies of the market.</p
Ayodhya Ram Mandir: Symbol of 'Hindu pride' marks culmination of colonial view of Hinduism, project of Partition
No full textThe construction of the Ayodhya Ram Temple is a symbol of the return of Hindu power in the direction of restoring a Bharat of yore — a Bharat that never actually existed.
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Bihari Muharram processions in Dhaka city: religious performance as a means of territorialising urban public space by a disenfranchised ethnic minority
No full textThe Biharis in Bangladesh are a heavily persecuted ethnic minority confined to slum like camps for nearly five decades. Using data from ethnographic research carried out in a Bihari camp and its surrounding areas in Dhaka city, this visual essay examines the ways in which the Biharis use religious processions to claim visibility, assert community identity and territorialise urban public space in a city that systematically denies them access to citizen rights.</p