Architexturez South Asia
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LIFE: Community Medical Facility
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Close to 7 million people globally have now been infected with the coronavirus that has claimed nearly 400,000 lives so far. India logged more than 2 lakh cases of coronavirus and became the seventh of the top 10 nations hit by the disease.
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The Portal: Reading the Kerala Students Union Building (ca. 1969) by Thomas Panicker and A.K. Jayachandran
No full textDemocratic decentralization, microcredit, and the workings of local government in rural India
No full textWhile democratic decentralization in India has commonly been studied as a project of deepening democracy, this article discusses decentralization as a form of state spatial restructuring in the epoch of market reforms. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the shift in the nature of elected local bodies and their retooling to deepen financial markets in rural India. The case of the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana, the Indian state’s largest microcredit program, reveals the rise in the salience of local governments as the site of state spatial policy in the 21st century, and the restructuring of decentralized local governance to deepen financial institutions’ penetration in rural areas. Local governments called panchayats have emerged as state organizations of microgovernance as capital moves to new scales in search of value. Findings from Gujarat, India’s leading state of pro-market reforms, reveal panchayats’ role in metagovernance—the governance of government, and the ascendance of information and communication technologies in panchayat practice to annihilate spatio-temporal barriers for the circulation of financial and material capital.</p
‘Firing cannons to kill mosquitoes’: Controlling ‘virtual streets’ and the ‘image of the state’ in Bangladesh
No full textThis article examines the historical, social and political legacies of the Information and Communication Technology Act (ICT Act) (2006–2018, amended in 2013) and the Digital Security Act (DSA) (2018–) in the Bangladeshi state’s attempt to control the ‘virtual streets’ of Bangladesh. The application of ICT and DSA has become an increasingly visible and controversial means to provide the spectacle of a state that extends disciplinary power and governmentality into proliferating online spaces—akin to ‘firing cannons to kill mosquitoes’. We use the lens of Tim Mitchell’s structural-effect (1991, The American Political Science Review 85(1), 77–96) to understand the state beyond the frameworks of its salience or elusiveness, arguing that the criminalisation of online speech has enabled the creation of ‘digital vigilantes’ who are predominantly the powerful, the sycophants, and the multitude of attention seekers who are driven by their personal contestations and ambitions. The legal outcomes, however, have been more ambiguous and uncertain—but the effect is to produce fear as an ‘environment’ (Virilio 2012, The Administration of Fear. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press) through frozen/suspended charges with the potential to be redeployed in different contexts.</p
Measuring multiple housing deprivations in urban India using Slum Severity Index
No full textAround one billion people who live in slums globally have low quality housing and poor living conditions (UN, 2020). However, such global estimates do not provide a full description of different types of deprivations experienced by the urban poor, often resulting in inaccurate estimates of the extent of housing challenge. An all-encompassing, single analytical category of “slums” limits its usefulness for planning and policymaking purposes. Slum population as an urban metric also presents challenge for comparative analysis mainly because slum definitions vary country by country. We argue that current approaches of slum enumeration fail to recognize the true extent and nature of housing deprivations, effectively undermining the urgent need to address housing issues for urban poor in developing countries and rarely providing any basis for concrete policy actions. We use a methodological framework originally developed by Patel et al. (2014) and apply it to a large-scale dataset from Census of India (2011) consisting of 1% sample of India's entire urban population. This is one of the first studies to use a large-scale micro-data to provide reliable estimates of the extent and nature of multiple housing deprivations in the country. This paper demonstrates how India's official slum statistics underestimate the extent of housing problems in India. Moreover, we show how levels of multiple deprivations may be useful in identifying the most deprived populations and, by logical extension, targeting the most deservingbeneficiaries of slum policies. Further, the paper discusses how such an approach can be helpful in determining types of interventions and targeting beneficiaries. The approach can be easily expanded to other countries and significantly contribute to current debates about measurement and monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals pertaining to housing and basic services for the urban poor across the globe
Assessing 40 years of spatial dynamics and patterns in megacities along the Belt and Road region using satellite imagery
No full textThe Belt and Road (B&R) region, a vital area with historical, economic, cultural and political significance, has undergone rapid urbanization in the past several decades, especially in the form of urban expansion. In this study, 20 megacities in the B&R region were selected to explore different spatiotemporal patterns of urban expansion. Object-oriented support vector machines (SVM), annual growth rate (AGR) models, and landscape metrics were employed to delineate the urban areas and characterize spatiotemporal characteristics and landscape patterns of these megacities during 1975–2015. All urban maps presented high overall accuracies (80.70%–95.90%) and overall Kappa coefficients (0.76–0.95). The study revealed that megacities in the B&R region have undergone different types of urban sprawl, mainly adopting a ‘concentric circle’ pattern in inland areas and a ‘sector’ pattern in coastal areas. Besides, six expansion modes were summarized according to the AGRs of individual megacities. Differences existed in megacities of the developing and developed countries and among five sub-regions. Moreover, ‘dispersion, gathering, and re-dispersion’ and ‘coalescence’ were two major landscape patterns of megacities in developing and developed countries. Results of this study can provide a scientific reference for urban planning and aid in sustainable development of local areas.</p
Recomposing Aesthetic Anxiety and Perforating Suburban Infrastructures: Informal Religious Meeting Places in Melbourne
No full textA permit for a Buddhist place of worship in suburban Melbourne was rejected by the local Planning Committee. The application by the Mirror of the Dhamma Society to hold small religious gatherings in a semi-detached single storey house in an area zoned General Residential was deemed inappropriate. The paper focuses on this event that circulated contagious global white affects of anxiety and fear in response to potential changes in the Australian suburban infrastructure. What escaped scrutiny, however, was state-sanctioned aesthetic judgements of appropriate suburban infrastructures that were underpinned by invisible but dominant social and cultural norms. This paper calls for undoing these norms, recomposing white affects, and remaking Australian suburbia in ways that veer away from stigmatising or exoticizing material expressions of cultural diversity in the built landscape. Responding to Felix Guattari’s call for a new aesthetic paradigm with ethico-political implications, I explore the possibilities for new suburban ecologies that transcend the secular/sacred binary. The paper is written from my shifting positionality as a first-generation migrant woman and Australian of Indian heritage who arrived in Melbourne 19 years ago. It is informed by my broad research agenda on everyday multiculturalism, grounded religiosity, and belonging in cities with white majority cultures.</p
Dr. John Matthai (1886–1959): between ‘Bombay Plan’ and ‘Planning Commission’
No full textDr John Matthai held key ministerial offices in New Delhi during a time of transition from pre- to post-independent India. He was Finance Minister twice (1946, 1948–50) and, in between, held the portfolios of Industry & Supply and Railway & Transport. Matthai had been an academic in Madras, an administrator with the central government and an economist in Bombay with the Tata group. His wide expertise and diverse experience brought him a range of opportunities in those partisan times, including as Chairman of Taxation Enquiry Committee (1953) and State Bank of India (1955). Matthai’s ministerial appointments were unusual, his administrative challenges were unfavourable and his exit from government unexpected. In this article, I argue that his short-lived and scattered ministerial life and the record he left of it provides a unique vantage from which to view the interim times of 1946–1950 in India, with their paradigm of ‘continuity and change’.</p
Roads, tribes, and identity in Northeast India
No full textAlong with military expeditions and social and anthropological surveys, road-building projects were prominent strategies of the British in India when it came to dealing with tribes and territorialization of the frontier regions. Roads for territorial expansion and resource extraction were the core agenda of the colonial project in Northeast India. The post-colonial Indian state on the other hand built roads in the region for securing the borders, promoting national integration, and linking external markets. This article posits that road building has always been an act of power, which has at different times been aimed at smoothening relationships, securing borders, (dis)connecting people, enabling trade, creating spaces of contestation, or diluting boundaries between varied ethnic groups. The article analyzed the colonial state-making project through road construction and linked to the contemporary Indian state approach to infrastructure development in tribal-dominated areas of Northeast India.</p
Vernacular performance, memory construction, and emotions: warrior epics, Akhārās, and giant Jinas in Gwalior
No full text[excerpt] … Scholars of contemporary South Asia have highlighted the role of performance in the production of political violence.1 They have shown how this takes place against a discursive framework that involves the active construction of memory, among others in history books and pamphlets, which highlights selected wrongs in the past.2 Such narratives of outrage are linked with current events and disseminated and rehearsed in particular in vernacular media.3 At crucial moments, the constructed memories are activated in staged performances that embody historical or mythical characters to further emotional outrage. This strengthens group identities, which can then be mobilized as voting blocks. Every election cycle vividly demonstrates the centrality of such enactments in strategically chosen spaces to reconfigure and redeploy mytho-historical narratives of identity. An obvious example is the BJP’s 1989 procession, called Rath Yatra, led by L.K. Advani who embodied Rāma, with the stated goal to reclaim the god’s birthplace in Ayodhya, where a temple is believed to have been destroyed to make way for a mosque. Significantly, the Rath Yatra started in front of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, which in the past similarly had been raided by another ‘Muslim invader’.4
1. The classic is Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence, summarized 364–69.
2. E.g., Pandey, “The Appeal of Hindu History.”
3. It is commonly appreciated that there is a palpable difference in emotional tone of reports in the English- as compared to the vernacular-language press.
4. The historical background for which has been extensively researched by Romila Thapar, see her Somanatha.
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