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Social innovation in times of flood and eviction crisis: The making and unmaking of homes in the Ciliwung riverbank, Jakarta
No full textThis study considers displacement occurring around the Jakarta flood mitigation projects between 2015–17 and explores the emergence of social innovation by affected kampung communities along the Ciliwung River. A framework combining theories on domicide and social innovation is developed to scrutinize two main case studies, Bukit Duri and Kampung Tongkol, revealing their connection to the city's urban development trajectory as well as the continuous struggle over adequate housing for low-income groups. The study questions official plans, policies and responses towards flood-induced displacement and resettlement planning. It also brings social innovation into the debate to unpack how displacement became a key moment for transformative change. The paper argues that, although urban eviction is related to globalization, outcomes are not foreclosed. Predominant urban mechanisms are contested, shaped, and transformed by local communities.</p
Transnational mobilities of the tallest building: origins, mobilization and urban effects of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa
No full textThe media and scholarly descriptions and understandings of the tallest building in the world, namely the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, generally, have been simplified. Either celebrating or condemning it, these explanations typically stress the unique technological solutions, the symbolic and political motivations or the financial risk and economic gamble. This manuscript documents the origins – in terms of both its generation as centrepiece of the large-scale development project called Downtown Dubai and the mobilization of antecedents of Dubai’s icon (including the Kuala Lumpur City Centre, the Samsung Tower Palace Three, Seoul). Drawing on secondary data and prior research materials, the paper analyses the mobilities of architectural, engineering and real estate experts and solutions, arguing that this urban spectacle worked at multiple scales, that multiple actors embraced it for different purposes: the government celebrating the nation and the city, the developer gaining a distinct landmark in a massive development to market it internationally, enticing partners and regulators in subsequent transnational operations and the design experts testing unprecedented technological solutions. The conclusions concentrate on the diverse motivations behind this architectural piece and the importance of a place-based yet critical and multiscalar understanding of similar urban transformation processes and their uneven urban effects.</p
Colonized by the development discourse: life and living heritage in the shadow of antiquities
No full textPurpose: Tangible and intangible aspects of living heritage shape the identity of communities whose daily experience is integrated into heritage cultural spaces. Interference in this intricately woven, historically rich context may have significant sociocultural and material consequences for the people inhabiting it. Using the example of the ancient Theban Necropolis and “modern” Gurna, the paper looks at the loss of contemporary cultural heritage in favor of Pharaonic antiquities to question the model of heritage management and development practiced through violence in Egypt.
Design/methodology/approach: Written from a decolonial perspective, the paper is positioned within the post-development school of thought. It applies subjectivist epistemology to argue for pluriversality.
Findings: Focusing on the historical context of the community of Gurnawis, the paper highlights power inequalities among heritage stakeholders and discusses the violence of coloniality that challenges the freedom of human experiences and representations.
Social implications: Decolonial in nature, the paper has a futuristic horizon. It calls for decolonization of the discourse of development, which remains marred by the Western understanding of “civilizational advancement” seen as modernization, industrialization and economic growth. It further argues for imagining alternatives to the current social realities, which would account for the diversity of human experiences and consider a pluriverse of meanings.
Originality/value: The paper applies a decolonial perspective to the study of heritage to demonstrate the impact of colonial rationality on the theory and practice of the discipline of archaeology, as well as its consequences for heritage management in Egypt. Speaking from the standpoint of the marginalized population of Gurna, the paper further reveals the damage done by the colonial discourse of development to those who dare to create and live their own reality.</p
Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo
No full textIn this paper, I perform an approach for a material and affective geography of the postcolonial city that is developed from within the spaces of Cairo and its archives. I propose storytelling the city through its geopoetics, where geopoetics emphasizes the elemental materiality of space. Taking inspiration from Angela Last, the geopoetics in this essay denotes disruptive aesthetics: intersection between word, aesthetics, and the geophysical materiality. This essay proceeds with a series of personal vignettes based on fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt. What if the narrative of downtown Cairo as a paradigmatic starting point in its history was explored through its consumption in fire? What could dust—the banal and irritating feature of the city is made central in probing its affective making and breaking? The essay is concerned with the ways we narrate and make meaning of this megacity of the Middle East.</p
Towards a Socio-Economic Model for Southwest Asian Cereal Domestication
No full textMechanisms of selection for domestication traits in cereals and other annual plants are commonly explained from agro-technological and genetic perspectives. Since archaeobotanical data showed that domestication processes were slow and protracted, research focused on genetic constraints and hypothetical ‘non-selective’ management regimes to explain the low selection rates. I argue that these factors only partially explain the observed patterns and develop a model that contextualises the archaeobotanical data in their socio-economic settings. I propose that developments towards individual storage by small household units and the gradual increase in storage capacities with the development of extended households represent key factors for establishing the conditions for selection, as these practices isolated individually managed and stored cereal subpopulations and gradually reduced the need to replenish grain stocks with grains from unmanaged populations. This genetic isolation resulted in stronger and more persistent selection rates and facilitated the genetic fixation of domestication traits on a population level. Moreover, individual storage facilities within buildings reflect gradual developments towards households as the social units that mobilised agricultural labour, which negotiated new sharing principles over cultivated resources and drove the intensification of cultivation practices. In this sense, selection rates and the slow domestication process can be understood as a function of limited food sharing networks and increased labour-inputs into early arable environments—socio-economic processes that also unfolded gradually over a protracted period of time. </p
Save IIM Dormitories, Ahmedabad
No full textSave IIM Dormitories, Ahmedabad
Jan 1st 2020
Greetings Nandan,
Particularly in a time when what’s durable is often conflated with what’s ephemeral, I want to add a voice in protest to the threatened demolition of L Kahn’s llM dormitories.
By coincidence I spent yesterday visiting Salk in La Jolla, California.
Sometimes what endures is a matter of intent, sometimes of accident. To the extent possible let’s join the forces of intention to preserve the dorms at llM.
All the best,
Eric Owen Moss FAIA</p
Early water management in South Asia: Geochronology and micromorphology of rock pools and small‐scale water catchment features in Karnataka, India
No full textArchaeologists and historians of South Asia have long emphasized the significance of large-scale irrigation reservoirs to historical developments and precolonial land use. However, comparatively little attention has been directed at an extensive corpus of small-scale water-retention features, such as culturally modified weathering pans and rock pools. In this contribution, we provide the first geoarchaeological evidence from such features in southern India. Geochronological assessments, depositional models, and sediment and micromorphological analyses from two sites in northern Karnataka indicate that inhabitants used and modified these features in at least the first millennium BCE. Throughout later historical periods, even after the development of large-scale, primarily elite-sponsored, irrigation reservoirs, inhabitants continued to rely on small, dispersed water-retention features. Our findings have implications for current debates concerning the introduction of water-management practices in southern India, which appear to begin in association with dispersed land-use practices rather than intensive irrigated agriculture, and also corroborate the importance of decentralized water management to historical processes more globally.</p
Urban statecraft: The governance of transport infrastructures in African cities
No full textThrough the lens of infrastructure governance, this article explores the configurations and operations of the urban state in sub-Saharan Africa. We deploy and extend the concept of ‘statecraft’, drawing on the recent scholarship within urban studies which explores city and municipal statecraft. Consolidating insights across several studies on transport governance in African cities, we identify three ‘sites’ of urban statecraft evident in urban Africa. First, we look at sectoral authorities, which we analyse through the common experience of ringfenced national road agencies. Carving off urban functions can fragment power over urban infrastructure. Second, we look at metropolitan authorities, which we analyse through bus rapid transit (BRT) agencies. Metropolitanisation crafts new scales of governance in Africa’s larger cities. Finally, we turn to the regulation of informal service delivery systems, which we analyse through popular transport regulation. The regulation of minibus and motorcycle taxis shows the central importance of everyday practice in urban statecraft in Africa. The case of transport governance provides a particularly vivid display of the institutional fragmentation that exists between state agencies and institutions in African cities. In this context, the urban state is not a static municipal entity, but is enacted through complex and multi-scalar relationships. These relationships relate not only to the assignment of functions or territorial design, but also to the practices which animate infrastructural systems. More generally, we argue that there is ample scope within the African urban governance debates for deeper interrogation of statecraft.</p