Architexturez South Asia
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Disrupted Networks
No full textThis chapter historically traces the degradation of Kolkata’s canal network by contextualizing it within the contemporary research on urban rivers, where water historians and political ecologists discuss how water bodies and tracts have been “thoroughly conquered” and “denatured” (Castonguay and Evenden 2012, p. 2). However, it rejects the linear explanation of this disruption portrayed in scientific literature and media reports which consider the colonial period as the “golden era” and the post-independence period as the stage dotted with bureaucratic reluctance, civic indifference, and overall apathy and lack of awareness with regard to protecting these canals. Shedding light on a succession of technologies, from inland boat traffic to steam navigation to the railways, this chapter illustrates how Kolkata’s canal network succumbed under the pressure of emerging networked infrastructures (like railways) which appeared more lucrative, promising huge investment returns to the state. Reading “archival silence” (with declining availability of records on the canal trade and investments since the early 20th century) as an indicator of decreasing colonial enthusiasm for the canal network as arteries of trade, the chapter also explores debates and discussions among proponents and opponents within the government and conflicts of interests among municipal officials and the state regarding the functioning of the canal system as a navigation network or a receptacle of the city’s wastewater. It ends with a discussion of the social and ecological costs of this disruption, complicating the mainstream “development” and “encroachment” narratives of contemporary times.</p
Urban Mountain Waterscapes: The Transformation of Hydro-Social Relations in the Trans-Himalayan Town Leh, Ladakh, India
No full textSocio-economic processes and climate change impact the socio-hydrology of many small towns in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), such as Leh in Ladakh. The rapidly urbanising town experienced a shift from agricultural livelihoods towards incomes mainly relying on the tourism sector. As results of this research show, the limited water resources essential to the everyday life of urban citizens have become increasingly important for the tourism sector and the urbanisation process. This study aims to understand the transformation of the urban mountain waterscape and the role of different actors involved. The waterscape approach frames hydro-social relations in a specific spatial context and additionally captures diverging hydromentalities within local actor constellations. Related discourses are materialised as water governance impacting the everyday life of urban citizens. A combination of quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods allows for a differentiated picture of current developments. Based on 312 household questionnaires, 96 semi-structured interviews, and a participatory photography workshop, this study provides evidence that urban restructuring induced by development imaginaries produces uneven water citizenships in Leh. Along with socio-economic shifts, the community-managed water regulation system is replaced by a technocratic scheme, centralising water supply and sanitation. While some of Leh’s citizens benefit from urban restructurings, others are confronted with environmental and social costs, such as a deteriorating water quality and a further reduction in quantity.</p
Overcoming Barriers to Urban Flood Resilience: A Case of Hyderabad, India
No full textCities are increasingly faced with frequent floods disrupting everyday lives. Adapting to flood risks and conserving eco-sensitive sites are central to social ecological resilience. Rapidly expanding cities are found short of mitigating the adverse environmental impacts. For enhancing flood resilience, it is important to understand the interaction of the key stakeholders and its impact on governance and land use in the cities. Land use change in urban space is constantly influenced by negotiations among various interest groups. The urban governance structures are increasingly dominated by neoliberal approaches of profit maximization. Following a heuristic framework for policy analysis of land use change and governance, the present study assesses the barriers in building flood resilient cities. We apply the framework to Hyderabad city of Telangana, India, which has faced the recurring challenge of flooding. Results demonstrate the lack of urgency in implementing disaster management initiatives and contradictions in existing policies. This study points out the redundancy of elected municipal bodies for taking flood resilience measures, due to increasing proliferation of nondemocratic administrative bodies and underlines the need to bridge the gap through agendas cutting across sectors and institutions.</p
Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship: Water, Infrastructure, and Gender in the Global South
No full textScholars have demonstrated that citizenship is tied to water provision in megacities of the Global South where water crises are extensive and the urban poor often do not have access to public water supplies. Drawing from critical feminist scholarship, this article argues for the importance of analyzing the connections between embodied intersectionalities of sociospatial differences (in this instance, gender, class, and migrant status) and materialities (of water and water infrastructure) and their relational effects on urban citizenship. Empirical research from the largest informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as surrounding affluent neighborhoods, demonstrates that differences in water insecurity and precarity not only reinforce heightened senses of exclusion among the urban poor but affect their lived citizenship practices, community mobilizations, and intersectional claims-making to urban citizenship, recognition, and belonging through water. Spatial and temporal dimensions of materialities of water and infrastructure intersect with embodiments of gender, class, and migrant status unevenly in the urban waterscape to create differentiated urban citizens in spaces of abjection and dispossession. The article argues that an everyday embodied perspective on intersectionalities of urban citizenship enriches the scholarship on the water–citizenship nexus.</p
Multi-Period Regional Survey Data from Vidarbha, Maharashtra, India
No full textPresented here are the data collected during regional surveys of Vidarbha, India, which were collected to reconstruct the societal and cultural changes that took place in this region during the mid-first millennium CE. Following an overview of the data and their research context, we describe the methods that were used to collect, process and analyse them. This is accompanied by a critical assessment of the factors that constrained the survey and our results. The dataset is then described in detail, with a thorough account of each data group and how they are arranged, presented and archived. Finally, we discuss how these data can be reused in the continued archaeological study of this region, and comparative studies of site distributions.</p
Letters from International Community in response to a call by the Council of Architecture (India)
No full textWater governance and the colonial urban project: the Dharmambudhi lake in Bengaluru, India
No full textThis paper uses the example of a lost urban lake – the Dharmambudhi within the south Indian city of Bengaluru to illustrate the profound and long-standing effects of historical socio-technical infrastructural change. We demonstrate processes by which capitalist urban development and notions of the sanitary city in the nineteenth century led to the collapse of the lake system and its conversion into a bus station. We also show how by removing the use of the water body, it became possible to destroy a critical urban ecological infrastructure, thus making it unusable to people who depended upon it to sustain their lives and livelihoods. This coupled with technocratic narratives of efficiency and scarcity led to the co-opting of the resource rendering them separate from urban life.</p
‘Without water, there is no life’: Negotiating everyday risks and gendered insecurities in Karachi’s informal settlements
No full textThis article provides new insights into the politics of water provisioning in Karachi’s informal settlements, where water shortages and contaminations have pushed ordinary citizens to live on the knife edge of water scarcity. We turn our attention to the everyday practices that involve gendered insecurities of water in Karachi, which has been Pakistan’s security laboratory for decades. We explore four shifting security logics that strongly contribute to the crisis of water provisioning at the neighbourhood level and highlight an emergent landscape of ‘securitised water’. Gender maps the antagonisms between these security logics, so we discuss the impacts on ordinary women and men as they experience chronic water shortages. In Karachi, a patriarchal stereotype of the militant or terrorist-controlled water supply is wielded with the aim of upholding statist national security concerns that undermine women’s and men’s daily security in water provisioning whereby everyday issues of risk and insecurity appear politically inconsequential. We contend that risk has a very gendered nature and it is women that experience it both in the home and outside.</p
Rashtriya Sainika Smaraka, and the Veeragallu National Military Memorial
No full textAdrian Forty has written extensively on the 'non-memorial' speaking about the materiality of monuments can be seen to elicit a particular collective mode of remembering which shapes the consumption of the past as a shared cultural form of memory.</p