Architexturez South Asia
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De-exoticizing Cambodia’s archaeology through community engagement
No full textFrench colonizers introduced archaeology to Cambodia with the emphasis on the restoration of Angkor monuments. The Cambodian public’s perception of archaeology as a field of the exotic, populated exclusively with international researchers, is fuelled by misconceptions of the discipline. Public awareness is hindered by the lack of heritage education outreach and human resources, and the excessive focus on Angkor. In this paper we argue that the recent increase in the visibility of archaeology through its expansion beyond the Angkor region, public outreach efforts, the rise of social media, and dedicated community engagement has helped de-exoticize Cambodian archaeology and make it meaningful to communities beyond other archaeologists, looters, or hired labourers for international research. Community members participating in archaeological research can serve as valuable mediators who convey the objectives of archaeological research and its raisons d'être to their communities as part of the process.</p
From fragmentation to integration and back again: The politics of water infrastructure in Accra’s peripheral neighbourhoods
No full textThis paper examines the dynamics of fragmentation and integration in Accra’s water infrastructure. Inspired by figurational sociology, we analyse infrastructure as both reflective and constitutive of interdependencies between different class fractions and parts of the urban region. We draw on historical archives, the in‐depth ethnographic study of one suburban neighbourhood, a survey of eight additional neighbourhoods, and statistics from Ghana’s census to investigate the mechanisms and drivers of infrastructural integration as well as fragmentation. Our analysis shows that, following Ghana’s independence, the piped water network gradually expanded to integrate different class fractions and parts of the urban region. But this process has more recently hit its limits on Accra’s peri‐urban fringe, where the wealthy are disconnecting from the public piped water network and, by implication, from those who still depend on it. The progressive expansion of the pipe network thus grinds to a halt, giving way to a fragmented constellation of water infrastructures.</p
Global aspirations and local (dis-)connections: A critical comparative perspective on tramway projects in Casablanca and Jerusalem
No full textThis article puts emphasis on the political representation of tramway projects in Casablanca, Morocco, and Jerusalem, Israel/the Palestinian territories. In this paper, we discuss both tramway projects as flagships of national worlding strategies that try to promote the respective city on global markets of attention, competing for international investors and tourists. As such, they are majorly driven by national political interests, fostering the hegemonic position of the central state in cooperation with private actors. The tramways are aimed at portraying modernity as well as political and economic stability, while aspiring to a supposed international urban world-class. At the same time, governments frame tramways as tools to promote socio-urban integration and to improve local transport systems. However, the paper shows that although governments are eager to stress the integrative role of tramways, they continue with violent politics of urban exclusion at the same time. Thus, the integrative wording behind tramway planning has to be understood against political (and economic) pressures to regain political legitimacy in a moment of crisis - both domestically and internationally. Consequently, the paper uses interview data and applies methods of discourse analysis to shed light on the worlding of tramways and its ambivalent practices of symbolic inclusion and exclusion.
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Implications of density bonus tool for urban planning: relaxing floor area ratio (FAR) regulations in Tehran
No full textThis article, by using empirical evidence from Tehran, looks beyond the West to explore the implications of the reliance of the entrepreneurial local government on private capital for the urban planning system. The main premise of this paper is that the financial dependence of Tehran Municipality on income generated from increasing construction density (density bonus tool) paid by developers has led to planning that is responsive to property market interests rather than the city’s strategic needs or the public interest. This paper makes a contribution to the literature of urban planning by providing a new case study of density bonus tool focused in Tehran; that allows a better understanding of the issue of how municipal financial tools (such as density bonus) could affect planning decisions.</p
Military/warrior legacy, the Taj and the Sikh-Canadian diaspora in <i>Breakaway</i>
No full textThis study examines the portrayal of the Sikh diaspora in Canada in the film Breakaway/Speedy Singhs (2011). In particular, I explore two scenes that are at the intersections of transnational configurations and homeland paradigms: (i) the depiction of the Taj in specific aesthetic ways (ii) the micro-interplays of the use of the ancestral material object – the metal headgear resembling a pagri belonging to Sikh warriors that injects a new dimension of how materiality can be recast to generate fresh meanings. These and the other themes in the film gesture at integrative practices and reconceptualizing of tradition, thereby resonating with Sikhism as an everyday experience.</p
Complexities of practicing architectural regionalism in India: An interview study
No full textThis paper presents the results and analysis from an interview study conducted with practitioners of architectural regionalism in India. The interviews sought to gain in-depth understanding of the strategies, mechanisms, and tools they employ to realize contextualized architecture that responds to local needs and potential. A sample composed of nine eminent Indian architects who regularly integrate the ideas of critical regionalism in their designs is selected and subsequently interviewed with regard to the varied aspects of their architectural practice. Findings are useful for practitioners and scholars of contemporary architecture in India for understanding the means employed by leading regionalist architects, while placing their work in the context of local building traditions, urban landscape, sociocultural conditions, technology, and climate.</p
Explorations at Mohra in Trans-salt Range Zone, Northern Punjab, Pakistan: The Evolution of Early Harappan Phase
No full textThe archaeological inquiries in Trans-Salt Range Zone of northern Punjab, Pakistan have unveiled the multifaceted data for the cultural development of the Early Harappan-Kot Diji phase of Indus Civilization during third millennium BC. Up until now, the urbanism of Indus Civilization is missing in the area while absolute dating at Sarai Khola, Jhang-Bahater & Hathial, has shown that Kot Diji phase has evolved in the Trans-Salt Range Zone parallel to Harappan phase of Indus Plains. The latterly found Kot Diji phase Mohra site in the area further strengthens this cultural phenomenon. This article will propose the data for the late development of Kot Diji phase at Mohra and its connection to other adjacent sites in a more wide spread context.</p
The Calcutta Improvement Trust: Racialized Hygiene, Expropriation, and Resistance by Religion
No full textIn the last chapter, I discussed how the British tried to reduce all Indian neighbourhoods into an insanitary black town. In this chapter, I argue that the black town facilitated massive land acquisitions that powered a lucrative market in land. The British began to plan Calcutta in the wake of the plague epidemic in 1898. The plague outbreak showed that earlier town improvement committees had failed to improve the city's health. Improvement committees, such as the Lottery Committee and the Justices of Peace, had planned new streets and filled up water bodies, but these were localized projects. The ravages of the plague mandated a complete reordering of the entire city that assisted colonial land acquisitions. In 1911, the state commissioned a town planning committee—the Calcutta Improvement Trust—to draw a fresh plan for the city. The Trust's plans embraced Victorian notions of hygiene and advocated a new spatial order for Calcutta that required levelling and rebuilding Indian neighbourhoods.
In Victorian London, the state instructed citizens in hygiene. Health officers schooled city dwellers in scientific ways to dispose garbage, clean their houses, and maintain healthy bodies. But hygiene in nineteenth-century London meant more than clean spaces and bodies. It was tied to notions of respectability. The obsession of wealthy Londoners with hygiene contrasted with the sweatand dirt-covered bodies of the workers, casting the former as respectable and the latter as embodiments of shame. This divide also informed city spaces, forcing the poor to live in separate neighbourhoods away from the rich. The state was aware of the wretched living conditions in the poorer neighbourhoods but refused to extend civic amenities like modern streets or sewers. Instead, health officers labelled the poor ‘inherently unhygienic’, carriers of disease. This, in turn, strengthened class divides in the city.
The language of hygiene that nourished a class hierarchy in Britain, when imported to India, fuelled a hierarchy of race. Colonial health officers viewed the Indians in the same way as they viewed the urban poor in London. To that end, they employed hygiene—defined entirely according to English standards of sanitation—to condemn Indians as unhygienic by nature.</p
Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water governance in Delhi
No full textIn Indian cities, a variety of state and non-state political actors and institutions play a role in regulating infrastructures in the everyday. Anthropological approaches to the everyday state have demonstrated how residents experience and discursively construct the state in relation to key services and amenities. However, less is known and theorized regarding how city-dwellers and public authorities understand and experience political space and power related to urban infrastructure that includes a variety of actors operating in tandem with, or even outside the bureaucracies and purview of, the state. This article partially addresses this lacuna through ethnographic research on (1) residents’ experiences and narrations of the everyday infrastructural governance of water and (2) the practices of key political actors who engage in regulating urban water infrastructures in Delhi’s neighborhoods. This research demonstrates that political actors’ and residents’ narratives and practices related to the infrastructural governance of water sharply contest both singular and dichotomous (state/non-state) readings of state power, instead revealing nuanced and situated understandings of hybrid and negotiated forms of “infrastructural power.” In particular, the practices and narratives of both residents and political authorities bring attention to the ways social and political power is decentered in the everyday and the porosity of the institutions of everyday infrastructural governance. My findings show the complex ways that infrastructures are tied to differing experiences, understandings, and articulations of power in relation to urban environments.</p