Architexturez South Asia
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Toilets first, temples second: adopting heritage in neoliberal India
No full textIndia’s BJP government headed by Hindutva icon Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 with a campaign slogan: ‘Toilets first, temples second.’ Drawing on Gandhi’s philosophy and legacy some 150 years after his birth, Swachh Bharat or Clean India is a monumental project with sweeping programs, propaganda, and political agendas. Gandhi famously said that ‘sanitation is more important than independence’ and Modi has leveraged that sentiment to fuel everything from urban renewal and heritage gentrification to outsourcing controversial corporate-funded infrastructures within World Heritage properties. India’s vast archaeological and historic legacy is now being marketed, tendered, auctioned, and ‘adopted’ by corporations within a neoliberal strategy that leverages the past for the future. And while it is easy to cynically caricature these moves, it is more difficult to offer pragmatic alternatives for a nation of 1.3 billion people, millions of whom are without basic services like water and sanitation. How is the burden of protecting a vast patrimonial landscape justified when necessities for the nation’s citizenry are so precarious?</p
Between Village and Town: Small-Town Urbanism in Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textIn the next twenty years, urban populations in Africa are expected to double, while urban land cover could triple. An often-overlooked dimension of this urban transformation is the growth of small towns and medium-sized cities. In this paper, we explore the ways in which small towns are straddling rural and urban life, and consider how insights into this in-betweenness can contribute to our understanding of Africa’s urban transformation. In particular, we examine the ways in which urbanism is produced and expressed in places where urban living is emerging but the administrative label for such locations is still ‘village’. For this purpose, we draw on case-study material from two small towns in Tanzania, comprising both qualitative and quantitative data, including analyses of photographs and maps collected in 2010–2018. First, we explore the dwindling role of agriculture and the importance of farming, businesses and services for the diversification of livelihoods. However, income diversification varies substantially among population groups, depending on economic and migrant status, gender, and age. Second, we show the ways in which institutions, buildings, and transport infrastructure display the material dimensions of urbanism, and how urbanism is planned and aspired to. Third, we describe how well-established middle-aged households, independent women (some of whom are mothers), and young people, mostly living in single-person households, explain their visions and values of the ways in which urbanism is expressed in small towns. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of this urban life-in-becoming of small towns for urban planning, emphasizing the importance of the development of inclusive local governance. Ultimately, we argue that our study establishes an important starting point for further explorations of the role of the simultaneous production and expression of urbanism in small town urbanization.</p
Renegotiating Sectarian Space through the Realia and Monasteries of Early Medieval Bengal
No full textThis article considers the practices about ‘the special dead’ related to the monastery at Pāhāṛpur (‘Hill–town’) in the Rājshāhī region of North–Western Bangladesh. This Early Medieval community was rich in religious diversity from the Gupta to Pāla periods—dense with evidence of Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist activity. There are a number of stūpa structures throughout the grounds for the burial of revered teachers and leaders such that the living comingled with the dead in an academic and religious setting. The Pāla era monastery was dedicated to advanced learning, meditation, worship, student housing, and burial. At the centre of the monastery is a large stūpa that has been celebrated widely for its diverse imagery in the form of terracotta plaques and relief sculptures with Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain themes. This article focuses on the reception history of this site and especially on its unique role as a mediator of religious voices from the region’s past. Under Dharmapāla, the site became branded as Buddhist as part of a broader imperial effort to promote Buddhist networks. Locally, however, the site maintained and promoted relationships to Hindu and Jain communities as well as Buddhist ones. Its endurance as a sacred site through complex interreligious permutations is intriguing though not surprising. Death and learning were not separated. Evidence from Pāhāṛpur raises questions about the communities who lived there as well as our understanding of their approach to death in practice in the Bengal region.</p
Touchable Gods
No full textVillage and tutelary deities have been characterized as fierce, capricious, or at least ambiguous. This article explores another facet of these polysemous divinities: their kinship with their adherents. Against the thrust of recent emphases on the gentrification of rural cults, the interventions of ritual specialists and the establishing of distance between deities and laity, these gods remain messily tactile and persist in being directly touchable. Villagers make their gods themselves with profane materials and through routine actions; enact rituals to them unmediated by priests, marked by informality and tinged with irreverence; and relate to them through instrumentalist but loving interactions. From the mundane acts and exegetic narratives through which devotees make sense of and organize their religious experiences, I materialize a local theology that articulates the nature of these gods and how they become present and active in human social worlds. Privileging co-residence, substantive congruence with, and ethical obligations between, villagers and their tutelaries, this theology presumes kinship with their gods. Taking these gods for granted, only intermittently worshipping them, and even neglecting sacrificial obligations, denotes profound intimacy between them and their devotees. Sublimity and intimacy are simultaneously part of the productive ambiguities that underpin the charisma of this sacred.</p
Challenging infrastructural orthodoxies: Political and economic geographies of a Himalayan road
No full textNational and international development narratives frame Nepal’s Karnali region as synonymous with remoteness and food insecurity. These narratives often position food insecurity as a direct outcome of geographical remoteness associated with the lack of motorable road. Road building is thus presented as the solution to food insecurity. I challenge this orthodox narrative using the concept of “infrastructural orthodoxies”. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on infrastructures and critical human geography scholarship on vulnerability, I argue that rather than resolving food insecurity, road increases vulnerability. This occurs in at least two ways: 1) through the proletarianization of wage workers and petty contractors in the road building market, and 2) through increasing dependence on cash and distant markets for the production and reproduction of local social lives. However, I neither suggest road building as inherently negative nor limit my discussion to the normative evaluation of the success or failure of road. Instead, I ask: what is it that these road projects are actually doing? This question helps turn our attention to the multivalent effects of road and illustrate why the orthodoxy is problematic. I thus present two unintended effects of road that exceed and are obscured by the orthodoxy: 1) road as key sites of electoral politics, and 2) road as vectors of new economic and labor geographies in the Himalayan borderlands. This paper contributes to the knowledge on the relationship between road and food (in)security, and to the interdisciplinary literature that view infrastructures as contingent and always in the process of becoming.
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Participatory Urban Development in India: A Tale of Two Townships
No full textThis paper intends to offer a critical understanding of citizen engagement in the process of city making using two case studies within the Indian context, namely, Magarpatta City in Maharashtra and Auroville in Tamil Nadu. As an initial foray into the issue, it engages with contemporary discourses on the scope and nature of public participation in urban development within the framework of a neoliberal economy. This is followed by a qualitative analysis based on unstructured interviews, which capture the live experiences of the local landowners and residents in each location. The findings indicate that citizen engagement is instrumental in producing socially equitable urbanization. If harnessed well, it offers the possibility for an effective departure from the traditional state-market dynamics, which presently underlie forms of neoliberal urbanism in developing countries. This paper, therefore, makes the case for mainstreaming citizen participation for urban development as an attempt to create a sustainable built environment that caters to the needs of citizens.</p
Walking off the beaten path: Everyday walking environment and practices in informal settlements in Freetown
No full textWalking is the dominant mode of transport in informal settlements of the global south, especially in African cities where structural deficits, morphological challenges and ineffective urban development constrains sustainable transport planning for low-income areas. Despite emerging scholarship on walking in Africa, the literature pays little attention to everyday realities of the walking environment. This paper presents preliminary results of a pilot study that examined the walking environment and everyday walking practices in an informal settlement in Freetown, Sierra Leone, using web-based mapping and a qualitative questionnaire. The results show that walking remains the predominant means of mobility in the settlement mainly as a result of the topography and poor infrastructure. Residents have resorted to improvisations through self-constructed routes to mitigate risks and improve walking experiences, as well as self-provided street lights or benches for rest stops. Our results show that local improvisations influenced residents' positive experiences of walking. The paper highlights the need for collaborative and participatory local interventions that are built on everyday walking practices to support co-production methodologies for understanding and improving local walking experiences. Through context-specific understandings of the everyday walking environment, the research provides avenues for urban transport and development planners to work with local actors for improving accessibility in informal urban neighbourhoods facing acute structural deficits for urban mobility and access to essential everyday services.
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Influence of Colonial Planning Legislation on Spatial Development in Zimbabwe and Zambia
No full textMost African countries in the world currently face significant conflict on how colonial spatial planning legislation governs contemporary spatial planning practices. Spatial development is controlled by various pieces of spatial planning legislation, which include statutes and bylaws. The spatial planning legislation that was in place before Zimbabwe and Zambia attained independence influenced development and this continues to date. This paper focuses on how colonial spatial planning legislation influenced and still influences spatial development in Zimbabwe and Zambia. The methodology of this paper includes a review and analysis of published documents on spatial planning. The spatial planning legislation for both countries will be reviewed. This paper noted that British colonial spatial planning legislation was biased toward Europeans and disadvantaged Africans. This paper reveals that colonial spatial planning legislation influenced spatial development in both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe and Zambia. The implanted aspects of the legislation were difficult to recover from, especially in Zimbabwe. However, Zambia reviewed its spatial planning legislation in 2015 and adopted sustainable integrated development plans.</p
Multidisciplinary perspectives on the origins of past foodways and farming practice in South Asia
No full textToday, over half of the people living in South Asia are employed in an agricultural sector that supports one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. Yet the origins of agriculture in this environmentally and culturally diverse region have received relatively little attention compared to other parts of the Old World. Narratives of agricultural origins have frequently been monocausal, treating this massive landmass as a single entity. Recently, multidisciplinary applications of diverse methods (including archaeobotany, systematic radiometric dating, stable isotope analysis, and ancient DNA) have facilitated more nuanced insights into the origins, as well as the social and environmental consequences, of different farming foodways in prehistory. Here, we review the current application of these techniques across the Indian Subcontinent, focusing on the insights they have provided into cultivation and herding practices, dietary reliance on particular foods and culinary techniques, demographic turnover, changing settlement patterns, and the environmental impacts of agricultural practice in the Holocene. We argue that such approaches are essential if we are to properly understand the diverse drivers of different farming practices, as well as their demographic, ecological and dietary outcomes on the production and consumption of food in different parts of South Asia. Only then can we begin to discuss the prehistoric origins of the culinary and agronomic diversity that characterises this region today.</p
Navigating Community and Place Through Colloquial Street Names in Fingo Village, Makhanda (Grahamstown)
No full textToponyms can be conceptualised as both symbolic capital and symbolic resistance – as means to express hegemonic power or to resist it. They have been cast as a means of transformation and restitution in the post-apartheid landscape of South Africa. The naming and renaming process has, therefore, been seen as a political act of representation and part of the nation-building project. These official names and official naming processes are only one layer of the toponymic landscape, however. There exists, parallel to these official names, the world of colloquial names which are used to express the history, landscape, politics and identity of local settlements and communities. The present research has given focus to the phenomenon of colloquial street names in Fingo Village in Makhanda (Grahamstown). Colonial and apartheid era names remain as the official toponyms on maps and street signs, but the community has developed colloquial names in parallel to them. The findings suggest that these names are organic in origin, express local identity and landscape, allow for everyday navigation and are inherited over generations, even as there is not always consensus on some of their origins and meanings. They serve as symbolic capital in delimiting the local community – defining insiders and outsiders. They can be seen as symbolic resistance inasmuch as they implicitly challenge the imposed official names.</p