Architexturez South Asia
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New evidence of early Iron Age to Medieval settlements from the southern fringe of Thar Desert (western Great Rann of Kachchh), India: Implications to climate-culture co-evolution
No full textTwo hitherto unexplored settlements at Karim Shahi and Vigakot are reported from the uninhabited hyper-arid region of the western Great Rann of Kachchh (GRK), located near southern fringe of Thar Desert, Gujarat, NW India. The archaeological evidence, supported by radiocarbon and optical chronology indicate presence of settlement from the Early Iron Age to Early Historic ( 3100–2300 years B.P.) and Historic to Medieval ( 1500–900 years B.P.) periods. This would imply that following the Harappan decline, the GRK was still a hospitable terrain for the sustenance of human settlements' during the Early Iron Age. Isotopic and micro-botanical evidence indicate that relatively higher rainfall than today sustained the hydrological system until around the Medieval period. We propose that the early withdrawal of the late Holocene Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and resultant monsoon decline accounts for the abandonment of settlement in the western (Sindh-Baluchistan) domain. As a consequence, the rivers in the western domain dried early, while the fluvial system in the southern/eastern domain (Sorath/Cholistan in Gujarat/Ghaggar-Hakra-Nara interfluve) was sustained due to monsoonal rain at least up to 1600 years B.P. The settlements were subsequently disrupted due to a combination of hyper-arid climate and infrequent tectonic activity sometime between the late Medieval and recent time. The settlement migration in the southern/eastern domain, as far into the Rann and desert fringe during this period was possibly a nonpareil ancient analogue of modern “climate refugee and refugia” (Warner, 2011; Morelli et al., 2016) induced by anthropogenic climate change.</p
What drives urban growth in Pune? A logistic regression and relative importance analysis perspective
No full textProactive planning and management of rapidly urbanizing cities using up-to-date spatially explicit datasets is an urgent need. This requires a good understanding of the driving factors responsible for urban growth. Using Pune metropolis as test site, this paper presents an approach to assess the relative importance of urban growth driving factors from inexpensive geospatial datasets with respect to (i) urbanization process, (ii) urban planning (iii) urban growth modelling by utilizing relative importance analysis (RIA) as a supplement to logistic regression. Furthermore, this research proposes a new approach to reduce the parameterization and data requirement of urban growth models. Our research shows, that proximity to essential infrastructure has the highest predictive power in explaining urban growth of Pune. The importance of policy factors increase with time. Our results reveal that RIA is a suitable method, which can assist planners in deeper understanding of the urbanization process and to devise sustainable urban development strategies, utilizing a limited amount of data, which can be easily updated from geospatial datasets. The proposed break point method based on RIA to reduce parameterization of urban models performed at par with the model results achieved with the traditional AIC approach using less than half of the total number of driving factors.</p
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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Plot by Plot: Plotting Urbanism as an Ordinary Process of Urbanisation
No full textWith this paper, we analyse an ordinary urban process, which has received little attention so far, and propose a new concept to take account of it: plotting urbanism. It is usually subsumed under terms like “urban informality” or “incremental urbanism” and not studied as a distinct process. In comparing Lagos, Istanbul and Shenzhen we captured four defining features of plotting urbanism: first, it unfolds in a piecemeal fashion with limited comprehensive planning. Second, it emerges from specific territorial compromises often resulting from conflicts between overlapping modes of territorial regulation, land tenure and property rights. Third, plotting is based on commodification of housing and land, which might accentuate socio‐economic differentiations between property‐owners, who often live in the same area, and their tenants. The term “plotting” highlights the key role of the plot in the process. It also alludes to strategic acts of collaboration for individual and collective benefit.</p
Root cause of demand–supply gap in Malaysian low-cost housing: housing developers perception
No full textIn 1982, Malaysian Government made it compulsory for housing developers to construct low-cost housing (LCH). Yet, inaccessibility to homes for the low-income groups is high; leading to an increase in LCH demand–supply gap. Therefore, this paper examines housing developers perception regarding the root cause of the Malaysian LCH demand–supply gap. Also, it proffers possible policy solutions to bridge the LCH demand–supply gap. These were achieved through a qualitative approach. The study found five main root-cause of LCH demand–supply gap, which include lax housing state policy and enforcement, lax state registration for low-income group, high development and construction costs, issues surrounding LCH purchase, and leakages in low-cost housing. The paper concludes that the government should lead and create an enabling environment for the commencement of the industrialised building systems. Also, recommended is the proposed cumulative ruling on LCH development, enforcement of computerised open registration system across the states, upward review of ceiling price from RM42,000 to RM65,000/unit among others. As part of the practical implications, this paper is advocating for the transformation of low-cost housing provision for liveable sustainable cities across Malaysia. Also, planned to stir-up relevant stakeholders and bring to the front burners new openings for further research.</p
Anchoring innovations in oscillating domestic spaces: Why sanitation service offerings fail in informal settlements
No full textA persistent conundrum for practitioners and researchers in the development context is that, often, newly provided and improved basic services are not maintained by users despite seemingly superior functionality and user convenience. We argue that one major reason for this is an insufficient understanding of the context in which users have to manage their daily lives. We therefore propose an approach to analysing the embedding of basic services that focuses on the users’ daily practices. We do so by borrowing insights from ‘socio-technical transitions’ and ‘practice theory’ in developing our concept of oscillating domestic spaces. The concept reflects the need for people to constantly respond to quickly changing and precarious circumstances by rearranging their daily practices in time and space and developing a multiplicity of alternative options and partial solutions. We illustrate the analytical approach in a case study of sanitation access in informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya. The analysis shows how the introduction of a container-based toilet resulted in partial embedding. The innovation anchored to only a part of the oscillating domestic spaces and was in disarray with the needs of users most of the time. The conceptual approach contributes to the understanding about how users take part in sustainability transitions as well as the added value of the time-space dimension in analysing practices in highly complex contexts. We conclude by reflecting on the potential applicability of the analytical approach to transition cases in the Global North.
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Back to basics: returning to the evidence and mapping knowledge in south Asian archaeology
No full textIn this article we advocate a return to the consideration and examination of the basic building blocks of archaeological enquiry: the evidence. Reacting to a widely held perception that archaeology now understands various commonalities of human experience, we suggest that such concepts and the inevitable oscillation towards “big picture” approaches that stems from them are problematic. They engender a type of scholarship that does not always engage fully with the evidentiary bases of interpretation and that risks assuming a great deal about large parts of the world that have not been studied in as much detail as others. We explore this by looking at the South Asian context, where archaeologists are forced to contend with a number of constraints, chief among which is a relative absence of archaeological evidence. Focusing on one particular sub-region, we piece together exactly what evidence exists and consider what can (and cannot) be said from it. On one level this serves as a useful comparator for those working in other parts of the world who may not appreciate the evidentiary constraints that exist elsewhere. Yet beyond this and simple questions of analogy, we suggest that detailed consideration of an area such as the one presented here forces us to return to even more fundamental questions relating to when archaeological research becomes “interesting”, “ground-breaking”, and “new”; and who decides this.</p
Concern regarding proposed demolition and redesign of Dormitory buildings of the Old Campus of IIM-A
No full textDisputing ‘market value’: the Bombay Improvement Trust and the reshaping of a speculative land market in early twentieth-century Bombay
No full textUrban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.</p
Spatial constraints, environmental hazards and Bedouin in Israel: towards spatial conceptualization of a changing Indigenous society
No full textWe examine the prevalent issue of political, economic, social and cultural conditions of Indigenous groups in Western states as spatial constraints when they choose to stay put in their birthplace, even under conditions of environmental hazard. These constraints are imposed upon them by the government, the enveloping dominant culture and their own internal cultural codes and social structure. These issues are examined among two unrecognized Bedouin villages in Israel susceptible to industrial environmental hazards. The various spatial constraints are interpreted as spatial bars that become thicker under the environmental hazard. In conceptualizing this unique situation, we propose the concept of confining space that dwells within the wider conceptualizations of production of space and time.</p