Architexturez South Asia
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Reinventing urban South Africa through global-Africanisation: The case of Johannesburg
No full textGlobalisation and Africanisation remain largely polarised and diametrically opposed to each other between the global and the local in much of the literature focusing on urban restructuring in South Africa in the 1990s. This polarisation has rendered invisible the in-between spaces of glocalisation which yield to new signs of urbanity, and the innovative sites of collaboration and contestation in the act of defining a new urban hood in South Africa. This paper seeks to go beyond the polar-opposite way of thinking about globalisation and Africanisation. It explores the glocal encounter between the two discourses by looking at how the local is created within the discursive terms of global culture and vice versa as well as the material crossovers, within and between the two discursive categories. The thrust of argument in the paper is that the post-apartheid reconstruction process has been driven by a new political culture of global-Africanisation whereby local aspirations and global orientations and vice versa, are now discursively accepted as co-determinants in the creation of South African urban identities.</p
Accepting Variation and Embracing Uncertainty: Creating a Regional Pottery Typology in South Asian Archaeology
No full textThis article presents the results of the analysis of archaeological ceramics collected during landscape surveys in the Vidarbha of Maharashtra, India; and offers the first attempt at a regional pottery typology for this area. Here, as in many other parts of South Asia, the pottery from archaeological sites have been subject to considerable scrutiny. Yet, so far approaches to their study have focussed on mainly their surface colour and feel. This has resulted in overly simplistic typologies that do not (and cannot) accommodate the full range of variation that exists within a ceramic assemblage, and so limit their value as archaeological evidence. Addressing this, we apply a chaîne opératoire-based approach to the analysis of a ceramic assemblage that we have been developing in this region. This results in a much more complex and detailed pottery typology than has so far been achieved. Throughout this study we also identify points of comparison with familiar parallels published elsewhere. In doing so, the resulting typology, while by no means the final word on the matter, provides a valuable and flexible resource that others working in this region and neighbouring areas can use for their own analyses and research. Moreover, in shifting the bases of categorisation and classification to the ways that pottery was made, we are able to incorporate far more of the variation that exists in the material itself. Indeed, the amount of variation can be somewhat bewildering in comparison to the standard (limiting) typological categories that populate earlier reports, and forces us to question those frameworks. Yet, we argue that it is precisely this sort of uncertainty that has to be embraced if the study of archaeological ceramics for the region of the ancient Vidarbha is going to continue to develop as a meaningful area of archaeological enquiry.</p
Competing for Jurisdiction: Practical Legitimation and the Persistence of Informal Recycling in Urban India
No full textHow did informal garbage collectors, who had long provided the only door-to-door and recycling services in Delhi, manage to survive the introduction of formal garbage collection trucks? This question raises the larger problem of why informal institutions—well-organized and socially recognized, but legally unauthorized and unregulated platforms for political and economic organization—have proven so persistent. I draw on evidence collected during 20 months of ethnographic research in Delhi, focusing on participant observation with informal collectors during their neighborhood routes and interviews with 50 informal collectors. Bringing together political and urban sociology, postcolonial urban studies, and institutional theory, the paper frames competition over city garbage and recycling as a relational matter. I argue that informal workers preserved their jurisdiction through practical legitimation, depending on everyday actions and social expectations rather than explicit laws or beliefs to secure legitimacy. I demonstrate how status-based relations, here based on caste and labor migration, can confer legitimacy and provide a source of regulation, as actors set out and meet implicit expectations for appropriate actions, relationships, and social boundaries.</p
Low-cost, adaptable solutions sell: Re-thinking off-grid solar diffusion at the bottom of the pyramid in India
No full textThis paper examines how the diffusion of solar technology to low-income populations in India is shaped by people’s requirements for low-cost and adaptable energy solutions. Recent energy scholarship suggests that businesses selling high-quality, low-cost, functionally-fixed ‘standardized’ off-grid solar products at volume can drive the mass diffusion of solar technology to low-income populations. High-profile solar businesses operate under the assumption that with this model they can capture demand in ‘bottom of the pyramid’ markets. The paper firstly challenges the assumption of homogenous bottom of the pyramid markets that this model relies upon. Based upon empirical data from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the paper then examines how solar businesses adopting this model have struggled, only selling significant numbers of units when subsidised. It looks at how informal shops are, in contrast, thriving by offering low-cost, improvised, and adaptable solar products, without subsidies. It shows how these products are meeting people’s requirements for low-cost solar solutions that are functionally flexible and which can be altered, added to incrementally, upgraded, and easily repaired locally. In conclusion, the paper argues actors working on energy access must re-examine promotion schemes and quality-standards that privilege functionally-fixed, standardized solar products. It suggests supporting modularity as one alternative compatible with demand for adaptability, both in function and time.</p
The Technopolitics of Infrastructure Breakdowns: A Historical Overview of Dumsor
No full textIn sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana is considered a beacon of success because of its high electricity access rate: 84.3 per cent as at 2018. Despite this success, the sector is entangled in a crisis. Crisis as used here refers to the crisis of electricity supply where supply deficits results in prolonged periods of blackouts and load rationing. Between 2012 and 2016, blackouts christened dumsor (Twi word for off/on) became a regular experience in Ghana with more blackouts than electricity supplied: 24 hours lights out, 12 hours light supplied. Using a historical narrative, this article provides a summarized account of how dumsor unravelled- the momentous cascading socio-economic interruption dumsor caused, the dramatic user responses it evoked and the ways in which it became the subject of intense political debate. Primary data was gathered from ethnographic fieldwork and secondary data from online and archival sources. This narration reveals the generative potential of uncertain infrastructure and its ability to foreground the “under the radar” interdependences between infrastructure and political power. It details how an “imperfect” electric infrastructure produced new user subjectivities, challenged the conduct of electricity governance and revealed electricity provisioning to be a starkly contested technopolitical process.</p
‘On the Road to Mandalay’: The Development of Railways in British Burma, 1870–1900
No full textThis article examines the history of railway development in British Burma between 1870 until 1900. In particular, it focuses on how railways and public works projects became a key site of contestation about Burma’s prospects, value, and future during the late nineteenth century, as well as how a litany of agents – both official and non-official – influenced the path of railway development in the colony. This article not only reveals the difficulties and disputes that impacted railway construction in Burma, but also how these debates led to the eventual privatisation of Burma’s railway system in the 1890s. In doing so, this article demonstrates how myriad agents with often competing aims affected the colony’s social and economic development, as well as how the results of these debates and the subsequent construction of railways produced a new geography of occupation in British Burma.</p
A New Black Town: Recolonizing Calcutta’s Bustees
No full textSwarajist efforts to transform paras into units of a Hindu-Bengali city-nation coincided with a steady influx of villagers to Calcutta. Groups of villagers first started to move to the city when famines forced them to flee their villages in the late nineteenth century. Between 1850 and 1899, twenty-four major famines had destroyed crops and wrecked villages in India. With the constant scarcity of food and loss of crops, the villagers fled to the cities to find new employment. The Swadeshi economic boycott in 1904 speeded up their movement. Swadeshi activists had called for a boycott on all products manufactured in Britain. They appealed to Indians to set up factories, arguing that only a strong economy could support their fight against colonialism. Inspired by Swadeshi ideals of economic self-sufficiency, nationalists like Dr Rashbehari Ghose and Dr Nilratan Sircar opened soap and match factories in Calcutta. Migrant villagers found employment at these factories. They became workers and earned wages that sustained their lives in the city. The Swadeshi factories attracted villagers not simply from Bengal but from the entire country. In the soap factory, for instance, the workers were from Punjab; in the match factories, they came from Bihar.
The arrival of large numbers of villagers resulted in a housing crisis in Calcutta. Neither the state nor factory owners had the wherewithal to house destitute villagers. When the villagers did not receive any support from the state, they started erecting makeshift settlements where they found empty plots of land. These settlements, known as bustees, materialized along busy thoroughfares, railway tracks, and municipal waste dumps, and extended as far as the outer rims of middle-class Hindu paras. The inhabitants of the bustee spoke little or no Bengali. Their diverse language, religion, and caste practices informed their neighbourhoods, distinguishing them markedly from the adjoining Hindu-Bengali paras.
In this chapter, I argue that bhadraloks reacted to the sense of threat they felt from the arrival of waves of non-Bengali, non-Hindu, and lower-caste bustee dwellers by looking inward. Emulating the British, they described bustees as inscrutable and engaged in a discursive production of bustees as spaces of filth and disease.</p
The Interdisciplinary Interaction in Economic History: Convergence of Economy and Archaeology, Çatalhöyük Sample
No full textThe main purpose of this study is to emphasize the necessity of starting a method by creating a cooperated excavation field based on archaeology which will lead to contribute of the economic history during the excavation. The priority of this study is not to create a method. This study emphasizes a necessity of a sub-discipline using economic methods and archaeological methods meeting on a common ground with the economic history and developing archaeology science. In this study, consumption, production, division of labor, property, art and religous based behaviors and habits in the prehistoric ages were studied in a interdisciplinary approach and Çatalhöyük was used as a sample with the rich data which Anatolia has given.</p
The multivalent nexus of redevelopment and heritage conservation: A mixed-methods study of the site-level public consultation of urban development in Macao
No full textDespite the vast literature on planning discourse at the regional level or heritage studies at the site level, lesser known are the trends and rationales of the redevelopment-versus-conservation tension generalised from development sites. In Macao, following its World Heritage inscription, mandatory public consultation and the increased authority of the Cultural Affairs Bureau (Instituto Cultural, IC) over development controls and urban design requirements have introduced a new dynamic to the constant conflict between redevelopment and conservation. This study focused on public consultation exercises for site-level urban condition plan (UCP) applications from 2014 to 2018. A mixed-methods approach was adopted to examine two interrelated aspects of public feedback: intensity (examined from a spatial perspective) and diversity (examined from a discursive perspective). The quantitative results of global and geographically weighted logistic regression analyses (n = 562) showed variegated spatial patterns of the likelihood of high public feedback, and the presence of IC recommendations had a positive effect on these patterns. Moreover, despite a downward trend of intensity over the years, the qualitative results of the content analysis (n = 55) showed that argumentative diversity remained strong with debates regarding various redevelopment/conservation methods and appeals on not only instrumental-technical but also moral-ethical and emotive-aesthetic grounds. Drawing attention to the procedural inclusiveness of UCP consultation and the de facto softening of conservation area boundaries, our empirical study engages with urban policy discourse by accentuating the theoretical and practical affinity of collaborative planning for historic urban landscapes.</p
