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Investigating the relationship between housing policy and accessibility, based on developing a multi-perspectives accessibility index: a case study in Tehran, Iran
No full textQuality of life has become a challenge for today’s world, which is associated with the transportation and land-use requirements, especially housing. Accessibility-based planning as a land-use transportation integration planning has turned growing attention in urban decision making in recent decades. Since there is a strong relationship between accessibility and housing policies such as housing price, this study tries to cover these relationships. In this context, we proposed a novel four-stage methodology. Firstly, a comprehensive, multi-perspectives accessibility index is being developed based on GIS for spatial analyses and GMCDM for aggregating experts’ views and then the index is compared with housing price. In order to verify the comparison and functionality of the parameters on accessibility and housing policy, sensitivity analysis is conducted. The results indicate, keeping structural features constant, the housing price shows a moderate negative correlation of -0.552 with accessibility in the study area. Although the GAHP weights and SA analysis results showed a positive correlation, the housing policy did not follow the same. The results of this research are meaningful in explaining the effect of especially neighbourhood characteristics for city policymaking and housing market analyses.</p
Pipe dreams? Practices of everyday governance of heterogeneous configurations of water supply in Baruipur, a small town in India
No full textThis article compares a networked and a non-networked artefact and the diverse practices of everyday governance around these localised configurations of water infrastructure in Baruipur, a peripheral and rapidly urbanising small town in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area. Plagued by arsenic contamination, the state has been pushing to expand and consolidate a networked piped infrastructure bringing in treated surface water. This shift threatens to reconfigure the existing diverse infrastructure configurations that are fragmented, incremental in nature. We examine the scholarship on the situated and embodied forms of Urban Political Ecology to understand how everyday social relations and plural practices at the level of the town, the ‘para’ (roughly neighbourhood), and the household shape socio-material artefacts. The shift in the socio-technical configurations, in turn, lead to new forms of power coalitions, network conflicts, and collaborations. Through an in-depth qualitative examination, we conclude that heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and everyday practices are not only gendered but also intricately embedded within intersections of social affinity, intimate geographies, and embodied class power relations in the ‘para’.</p
Exposing Necroburbia: Suburban Relocation, Necropolitics, and Violent Geographies in Manila
No full textWhen accumulation in southern cities entails the dispossession of informal settlers, where do they go and what spatialities emerge out of their dispossession? In Manila, this occurs through a violent form of suburbanisation. To make way for modern and investment‐friendly spaces, informal settlers are exiled to relocation sites in the suburban fringe. This process of accumulation by suburban relocation engenders necroburbia, a dystopic suburban periphery constituted by distant relocation sites where evicted settlers are subjected into violent and asphyxiating everyday geographies. It serves as a spatial fix to enable metropolitan accumulation. Drawing on Achilles Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, I expose necroburbia as a deceptive and violent space, produced through three spatialities: (1) demolition; (2) relocation; (3) necro‐suburbanisms, or everyday ways of necropolitical living. These processes illustrate how urban fantasies of growth in cities like Manila are predicated upon necropolitical realities rendering informal settlers as expendable populations, deserving of everyday brutalities.</p
China's Belt and Road Initiative and the emerging geographies of global urbanisation
No full textChina's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is heralded as the largest investment in infrastructure in history and is expected to re‐shape the geographies of urbanisation in the coming decades. In this paper we review the burgeoning, yet still embryonic literature on the BRI. Our aim is to move beyond currently dominant framings of the BRI as a geopolitical or economic strategy that tend to overlook the complex embeddedness of infrastructure. Drawing on theories of planetary urbanisation, we argue that the BRI constitutes a form of urbanisation that is bound up with the socio‐spatial and ecological restructuring of global capitalism. We illustrate this by mapping and analysing energy projects under the BRI. Overall, we outline a research agenda on the BRI that calls for (1) a more nuanced analysis of its spatial and scalar politics; (2) approaching the BRI as a distinctly urban question; and (3) a disruption of the dominant China‐centric discussions through critical in‐depth case‐study analysis.</p
Reconnection and reflexivity in Islamabad, Pakistan
No full textThis article explores the role of informal food spaces and flows in Islamabad, Pakistan. This paper aims to address two key questions in the areas of food and urbanism in Islamabad: How do the city’s residents perceive and experience the so-called “non-urban” food spaces and flows in their everyday lives? How do these spaces contribute to a nuanced understanding of global food systems? This paper considers that these spaces are critical in engendering nostalgia for past food habits and behaviours, a trigger for reflexive consumerism, and sites for reconnecting with different aspects of the country’s food system. The paper also explores how such spaces can be conceptualised within urbanism and geography, in the context of Islamabad’s unique spatial and socio-cultural identity. Informed by urbanism and food geography, this paper considers analytical and theoretical strategies for advancing the study of the urban in the global south, and specifically in Pakistan.</p
The Bureaucrat’s Wage: (De)Valuations of Work in an Irrigation Bureaucracy
No full textDrawing upon ethnographic research conducted in Pakistan’s Punjab, the country’s agricultural heartland and home to the world’s largest contiguous irrigation network, this essay posits a structure of feeling of devaluation among officials of an irrigation department. It examines everyday practices of supplementing salaries, anti‐corruption measures, World Bank intervention, and officials’ efforts for an enhancement of the bureaucratic scale and refusals of work. It argues that alienation from official roles, erosion of authority, knowledge practices amid patchy information, and ill will vis‐à‐vis donor organizations cohere as a structure of feeling of devaluation. The devaluation is inflected by individual career trajectories, challenged, and deepened even as quotidian corruption yields gains. Examining corruption as part of the labor process, the essay expands the scholarly lexicon of corruption and bureaucratic work.</p
Infrastructure Disruption in ‘Silicon Savannah’: Exploring the Idea of the Creative Class and their Relation to Quality of Place in Nairobi, Kenya
No full textDebates around urbanization, infrastructure disruption and the creative class rarely appear alongside each other in research on African cities. This article connects these different narratives, which are currently exerting their influence on the future direction of these cities. The economic value of the creative class is that their work centres on innovation—a quality seen as essential to ‘new-economy’ urban growth. Quality of place (that which makes ‘New York New York’) is said to attract the creative class to certain cities, as lifestyle amenities are valued as much as employment opportunities. Nairobi is an example of an African city currently attracting both Kenyan and expatriate creative class workers, particularly in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. In this article we take Richard Florida's creative class theory as a departure point to offer insights into why this group chooses to live in Nairobi and to describe Nairobi's quality of place, with a particular focus on infrastructure disruption. The case study reveals that Nairobi's quality of place differs fundamentally from the normative attributes prescribed by creative class theory and, in some instances, it is considered to be highly frustrating and unattractive.</p
Skewed Urbanisation and the Contagion
No full textAlongside the dearth of healthcare infrastructure, unplanned and market-driven urbanisation further challenges the containment of the outbreak of infections like Covid-19, in India. In this context, the prospects of an inclusive urban land use plan are also focused on.</p
Mangalore Tile Factories
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Of all the Basel Mission Industries, the tile industry left the strongest material mark on the Malabar Coast. Its factory buildings and chimneys characterize riverside settlements throughout the Malabar Coast, and the use of Mangalore tiles became ubiquitous on pitched roof structures throughout the wet regions of India and beyond.
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The telegram that changed my life
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In my years of teaching I am often asked by my students why did I join architecture. I do give them some sort of an answer. But this time, the COVID-TIME, I have the time and I wrote down a answer, a long one. Read it if you have the patience and interest.
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