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The new cold war and the rise of the 21st-century infrastructure state
No full textThe unipolar international order led by the USA has given way to a multipolar order with the emergence of China as a great power competitor. According to many commentators, the deterioration of Sino–US relations in recent years heralds a “new Cold War.” The new Cold War differs from its namesake in many respects, and in this paper we focus on its novel territorial logic. Containing the USSR was the overriding objective of American foreign policy for nearly four decades, but in contrast, the USA and China are engaged in geopolitical-economic competition to integrate territory into value chains anchored by their domestic lead firms through the financing and construction of transnational infrastructure (e.g., transportation networks and regional energy grids). We show this competition poses risks as well as opportunities for small states to articulate and realise spatial objectives. We present cases from Nepal and Laos that demonstrate that by hedging between China and the USA and its partners, their governments are able to pursue spatial objectives. In order to achieve them, however, they must implement significant reforms or state restructuring. The result is the emergence of what we term the 21st-century infrastructure state, which seeks to mobilise foreign capital for infrastructure projects designed to enhance transnational connectivity.</p
‘Between the devil and the Bay of Bengal’: the Ford Foundation and the politics of planning in post-Independence Calcutta
No full textFrom 1960–1973, the Ford Foundation and the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organization (CMPO) engaged in a unique partnership that produced the Basic Development Plan, a bold strategy for the development of the world’s ‘most troubled city.’ The Ford-CMPO partnership brought together leading planning experts from the United States and India and resulted in innovative and abortive development plans and programmes, and was beset by the economic and political crises that came to define post-Independence Calcutta. This paper provides a detailed history of the Ford-CMPO partnership and highlights the myriad of political dilemmas that challenged the project and that provide a window in the politics of planning and urban development in post-Independence India.</p
The effect of kharkhona on outdoor thermal comfort in Hot and dry climate: A case study of Sistan Region in Iran
No full textFew, if any, studies have researched the effects of vegetation, water and shading on outdoor thermal comfort in the hot and dry climate. This study identified and examined the effect of kharkhona as an architectural element of Sistan Region, which is often used in closed spaces, on outdoor thermal comfort in the hot and dry climate of Sistan during the summers of 2019 and 2020 with the aim of improving the unfavorable climatic conditions of the region via building on a technique devised by the residents of Sistan. To this end, a kharkhona was designed, built and evaluated in an open urban space. Physiological equivalent temperature index, which has been shown to be highly associated with the sensation of thermal comfort, was used as the indicator for evaluation of outdoor thermal condition. The findings showed that kharkhona can reduce the PET index by 9.34 °C in the space inside kharkhona compared to the environment outside the construct and moderate the “hot” and “very hot” heat sensation of the space outside kharkhona to “warm” and “slightly warm” in the inner space of the construct. Kharkhona can be used as a reference model for designing natural ventilation and is a viable strategy for modification of outdoor thermal comfort since it can provide better comfort conditions than vegetation.
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Remembering the river: Flood, memory and infrastructural ecologies of stormwater drainage in Mumbai
No full textMumbai’s storm water drainage system is rapidly transforming as incidences of heavy rainfall rise. Its transformation is built on the idea of conserving the city’s ‘rivers’ that were lost to urban development. While this move to recuperate a heritage of rivers seems like a step in the right direction, Mumbai’s drainage system was largely cobbled together over time through piecemeal interventions in an estuarine landscape. This article shows how by engineering a history of rivers, the city’s planning authorities set in motion an agenda to train the expansive estuarine and improvisational systems into governable riverine channels contained within the state’s developmental visions. It focuses on one major channel, the Mithi, to show how the rationality of disaster preparedness, the emergent calculus of carrying capacities, as well as infrastructure are braided into constructed ecological histories to inscribe a new hydrological order on the city. For Mumbai’s engineers, these changes introduce new scalar logics and alter the nature of the drainage assemblage. Mithi’s transformation is emblematic of how articulations of nature, technology and urban development are emerging from the anxieties of climate change.</p
Reading Variegated Dispossession in an Asian Megacity
No full textThis paper reads multiple shades of dispossession in an Asian megacity. The multiple dispositions talk of dispossession as an instrument that limits the autonomy and the self-sufficiency in material and non-material dimensions. In that endeavor we emphasize taking a broader picture of dispossession while pursuing critical urban theory. Through unpacking four ethnographies in Kolkata, the essay looks into dispossession, and in that process displacement and accumulation, from multiple vantage points while stressing on urban as a process that lies at the cross-section of the global capitalist development. The essay intertwines it with postcolonial reading - assemblage and worlding as they enable nuanced and contextual reading of urban emergence, negotiations, and negations. The methodology through an extended ethnography arrives at a point that dispossession is a broader concept holding intense meanings that need to be read beyond abstraction and through quintessentially nuanced postcolonial urban studies. </p
Process and Dynamics of Mediterranean Neolithization (7000–5500 BC)
No full textWhy did the farming lifestyle appear and proliferate so rapidly through the Mediterranean basin between 7000 and 5500 BC? In this paper, I review the archaeological and bioarchaeological data pertinent to Mediterranean Neolithization, suggesting that a preponderance of evidence indicates that this process involved migration—long-distance, targeted colonization along the north Mediterranean littoral. I argue that this process was driven by rapid fissioning within early farming communities, fissioning in turn caused by competing centrifugal and centripetal economic forces within small-scale egalitarian groups.</p
Yaba housing scheme and the colonial ‘re-planning’ of Lagos, 1917–1952
No full textThe paper is a discussion of the urban renewal strategy of the colonial government of Lagos between 1917 and 1952, against the backdrop of 'slum dwelling', 'overcrowding', and 'insanitary conditions' on the Lagos Island and the plan to develop Yaba Estate for the housing of those displaced on the Island. The paper argues that even though from the colonial government's perception, it was 'very urgent' to embark on serious urban renewal policy to ameliorate the 'terrible condition' on the Lagos Island, the method employed by the colonial government for the re-housing of people at Yaba failed initially because of colonial government's policy of leasehold. This made it impossible for the displaced people to take up residence at Yaba with serious spatial implications for the urban development of Lagos. As they looked elsewhere for abode, they replicated the same problems that the colonial government was trying to abate on the Lagos Island.</p
Making railway land productive: The commodification of public land in Kenyan and Indian cities
No full textThis paper contributes to the current debates on public land commodification and privatization in a Global South perspective by comparing the disposal of railway land in Kenya and India. Turning public land into profits through inventory, sale, concession, real estate capitalisation is a growing phenomenon at the global level. The literature on large-scale urban development projects and political economy accounts on public land commodification often mobilize the prism of “the land grab” in their analysis to highlight the consequences of a predatory private property supported by State governments, leading to various forms of dispossession. In contrast to these works, we explore over a long period of time the professional cultures, the internal restructuring and the relations to central administrations of two public operators who are pushed to valorize their urban land and real estate properties. This vantage point from the inside of the organizations offers a specific account of the changing trajectories of land ownership, the generation of urban land value and the changing faces of public enterprises in an era of neoliberal reforms in cities of the Global South. It allows us to open a more complex and varied process of land commodification than it would appear from examples of the urban land grab debate.</p