Development as Urban Imaginary: Post-colonial Planning and Heteroglossic Cities of India

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Institutional Planning ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Contemporary India’s tryst with development continues to revolve around cities, and the latter remain the locus of India’s development narrative. But instead of seeing the city as already constituted or as a backdrop for economic activities, the present article proposes to implicate the city as a producer and product of social relations as well as a site of resistance and conformity. While doing so, it moves away from conventional modernist paradigms of imagining the city as the highest rung of development geography or the Marxist/subaltern studies formula of reading the city as a space of unredeemable inequality leading to the insurgency of the marginalised. What is proposed here is that the idea of city is emergent which expresses itself neither through its official representations nor through the radicalism of dissent but through multiple unstructured articulations of everyday life as well as the contingency of power and resistance. This is corroborated by drawing upon the experience of Thyagaraya Nagar (T. Nagar) which provides a representative Indian urban experience and where social and political relations spill out of institutional planning templates.

The coloniality of UNESCO’s heritage urban landscapes: Heritage process and transnational gentrification in Cuenca, Ecuador

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (15) ◽  
pp. 3060-3077 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Unesco World Heritage ◽  
Municipal Governments ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Real Estate Markets ◽  
Urban Upgrading ◽  
The City ◽  
Rights To The City

The article analyses heritage conservation and urban upgrading in Cuenca, Ecuador, in order to reflect on global inequality and rights to the city at the crossroads of transnational lifestyle mobilities and the globalisation of real estate markets. Processes of gentrification in Cuenca reproduce colonial social relations and marginalise the popular economic activities of informal vendors. Under the auspices of UNESCO World Heritage designation, the Inter-American Development Bank and successive municipal governments have sought to increase property values in the historic El Centro neighbourhood. Rather than relying on a local middle-class return to the city, heritage urban upgrading in Cuenca is dependent on higher-income global middle classes attracted to the city’s historic urbanism. The subsequent higher-income appropriation of urban improvements takes the form of dispossession of use and exchange values of lower-income groups, especially of informal vendors.

Dante and the Medieval City

2020 ◽  
pp. 350-367
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Christine De Pizan ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Urban Representations ◽  
Francois Villon ◽  
A Site ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Heavenly City ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This chapter explores the paradox that the most sustained and influential literary representation of the medieval city is set in the afterlife. The chapter begins with a discussion of Dante’s reproduction of the vertical Christian cosmos within the horizontality of everyday life in the city. It then looks at the place of hell within this city, the types of urban experience represented within it, and the relationship of the infernal city to the heavenly city as which Dante figures paradise. The final section of the chapter surveys the dissemination of this urban model into the diverse cityscapes of Boccaccio, Chaucer, François Villon, and Christine de Pizan. The chapter concludes that late medieval urban representations are characterized by the growing insistence on the city as a site of representational difference and local autonomy that remains nevertheless deeply embedded in the spatial dynamics of verticality.

scholarly journals On the move in the (post)colonial metropolis: The Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic fiction

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110539
Author(s):  
Anna-Leena Toivanen
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Public ◽  
A Site

Literary texts convey the complexities of the urban experience in a tangible way. While there is a wide body of work on literary representations of Paris, the role of public transport as part of the (postcolonial) urban experience has not received much attention. This article sets out to analyse the meanings of the mobile public space comprising the Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the mid-20th century to the 2010s. The reading demonstrates how the texts represent the public space of the Metro as a symbol of modernity, a space of disappointment and alienation, an embodiment of social inequalities and as a site of convivial encounters and claims of agency. Through this analysis, the article highlights the role of literature in elucidating the intertwinement of mobility, public space and postcolonial urbanity.

scholarly journals History of the Moluccan's Cloves as a Global Commodity

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Hatib Abdul Kadir
Keyword(s):  
16Th Century ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Trading Activities ◽  
Spice Trade

Abstract This paper focuses on the history of spice trade in Moluccas. Using two main approaches of firstly, Braudel, I intend to examine the histoty of spice trade in Moluccas in the 16th century in relation with the changing of the structure of economy that affected the social and political relations of the Moluccans. Secondly, applying Wallerstein approaches, I find out that trading activities from the 16th century until today have created a wide gap between post-colonial Moluccas and the Europeans. To conclude, I argue that economic activities have always been accompanied by forcing political power, such as monopoly and military power. Consequently, they have created unequal relations between the state and society

scholarly journals Theorizing urban social spaces and their interrelations: New perspectives on urban sociology, politics, and planning

2020 ◽  
pp. 147309522097694
Author(s):  
Yosef Jabareen ◽  
Efrat Eizenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Urban System ◽  
Planning Theory ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
The City

This paper proposes a new theoretical perspective for understanding urban social spaces and their interrelations. In an effort to understand these multifaceted, complex relations, an inquiry committed to a flat ontology was deployed. Accordingly, we draw our theorization on the Lacanian ontological lack, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Laclau and Mouffe’s discursivity of social reality. Thus, we propose that urban social spaces are discursive and real entities with real and sensual qualities and constituted through specific relations. They are located within discursive social relations, where each urban social space has a “differential position” in an urban system of relations. Each urban social space has an “identity,” defined by its specific mixture of social groups and its specific real and sensual qualities. These qualities construct a sensual object with a specific sensual identity within the web of different urban social spaces. Therefore, urban social spaces are being made through multiple interrelations and are constituted through their location in a nexus of positions. The proposed framework that captures the interrelations among urban social spaces is based on three interrelated logics: the logic of difference, the logic of equivalence, and the fantasmatic logic. Understanding the relations of urban social spaces through these logics offers multifaceted social, political, psychological, and spatial illumination, details, and a more nuanced and flexible investigation of the formation and change of these spaces. Hereby, the city is conceived as comprised of spatiotemporal configurations where social spaces have social and political relations ranging from harshly antagonistic to inclusive and equivalent. This proposed framework informs both sociological and political realms of planning theory. It provides planning theory with new perspectives for understanding the city as a web of interrelated social spaces. Furthermore, it allows a more critical understanding of urban reality by illuminating inequality, injustice, antagonism, and the formulation of “otherness.”

The Indian City and its ‘Restive Publics’

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
DEBJANI BHATTACHARYYA
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Indian City ◽  
World Class ◽  
City Water ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Abstract How do we write about cities in a world of deepening inequality, real-estate geopolitics, and the planetary water crisis that is unfolding in parts of Asia and elsewhere? Indian urban studies, which began to gain ground as a legitimate subject of scholarly enquiry two decades ago, has now emerged as a site to study political society, state-making, and citizenship, and to offer rich accounts of how post-colonial urban governance and law-making work. In this review, I explore the powerful analytics developed in three recent books in urban studies: Anindita Ghosh's historical work on colonial Calcutta, Claiming the City: Protest, Crime and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1860–1920 (2016); Asher Ghertner's geographical analysis of neoliberal Delhi, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (2015); and Nikhil Anand's ethnographic account of restive publics and citizenship in Mumbai, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (2017). This recent scholarship on urbanization has moved away from earlier rubrics of segregation, biopolitical disciplining, and resistance to offer rich accounts of the frictions that make and unmake political societies, critical tools to study the life of law in post-colonial cities, infrastructures as sites for the production of citizenship, and new financial and legal assemblages of risk-management, building lobbies, and syndicates around which urban politics is swirling. These accounts also deepen our understanding of the long genealogy of the contemporary moment, including populism, electoral politics, and post-colonial state-making. Indeed, the future of urban studies in a rapidly urbanizing world should be one that helps us to understand the nature of politics, contestations around legalities, environmental crises, and new financial geographies of power and dispossession.

scholarly journals PHARMACY, MONEY AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN DAKAR

Africa ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noémi Tousignant
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Public Health Research ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Government Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commercial Work ◽  
The City ◽  
Ways Of Being

ABSTRACTPharmacy students at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar must research and write a thesis to graduate. Thésards who took topics in analytical chemistry and toxicology describe their thesis work as a temporary opportunity to perform ‘street-level’ public health research that they regard as ‘relevant’ to the quality of people's lives. Expecting futures in the private commercial sector, thésards regretfully leave the thesis behind. This article explores the parenthetical nature of this moment – its brief openings and more durable closures – as part of the history of ways of being a pharmacist in post-colonial Senegal. The thesis as an interlude in students’ biographies, curtailed by narrowed horizons of expectation, evokes other contractions: in the range of professional roles open to Senegalese pharmacists, and in the circuits of public health with which they might engage. For thésards, fieldwork, government work and commercial work entail spatial practices and imaginations; different ways of moving around the city and of tracing urban space that define pharmacists’ roles in terms of the modes through which they engage with broader collectivities. Mapping thésards’ parenthesis in Dakar is a means of capturing both their urban experience of work and the intertwining spatial, temporal and affective dimensions associated with this work. The past, probable and possible trajectories of pharmacy work are imprinted and imagined in the space of the city as field, market and polis. Pharmacists’ prospects and aspirations are caught up in broader shifts in how education, (un)employment and entrepreneurship animate relations of association and exchange in Senegal.

Exploring Potentials for Culinary Tourism through a Food Festival: The Case of Thessaloniki Food Festival

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-125
Author(s):  
George Chatzinakos
Keyword(s):  
Strategic Planning ◽  
Planning Tool ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Local Networks ◽  
Culinary Tourism ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
New Destination ◽  
Structural Networks ◽  
The City ◽  
Culinary Culture

This paper seeks to conceptualize the way Thessaloniki is promoting culinary tourism, whilst supporting and building upon local networks; engaging and co-creating an urban experience with its citizens and visitors. The aim of the paper is to suggest a potential framework that can be used as a strategic planning tool for the promotion of culinary tourism in Thessaloniki. In this direction, a food festival is being investigated. The last, is conceived by the organizers as the foundation of the idea of culinary tourism in the city. However, the findings indicate that there is a lack of active participation by the locals and not enough communication among various assets that are associated with the culinary identity of the city. In general, Thessaloniki seems to embody the ongoing struggle of a new destination, which is dealing with the complex process of branding and marketing without having the proper tools and the vital required collaboration between its structural networks. Accordingly, the research provides a lens through which the culinary culture of Thessaloniki can be used as a strategic pillar for stimulating a sustainable way of “consuming” and promoting the city’s identity; enhancing Thessaloniki’s appeal as a culinary destination.

How a Lingua Franca Spreads

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Mc Laughlin
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Speakers Of Other Languages ◽  
Realistic View ◽  
Atlantic Language ◽  
The City

This chapter considers how Wolof, an Atlantic language spoken in Senegal, has become an important lingua franca, and how French has contributed to the ascent of Wolof. The nature of social relations between Africans and French in cities along the Atlantic coast in the 18th and 19th centuries were such that a prestigious urban way of speaking Wolof that made liberal use of French borrowings became the language of the city. As an index of urban belonging, opportunity, and modernity, Wolof was viewed as a useful language, a trend that has continued up to the present. Four case studies illustrate how the use of Wolof facilitates mobility for speakers of other languages in Senegal. By drawing a distinction between the formal and informal language sectors, this chapter offers a more realistic view of everyday language practices in Senegal, where Wolof is the dominant language.

Global Justice at the Municipal Scale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fonna Forman ◽  
Teddy Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Global City ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Cities or municipalities are often the most immediate institutional facilitators of global justice. Thus, it is important for cosmopolitans and other theorists interested in global justice to consider the importance of the correspondence between global theories and local actions. In this chapter, the authors explore the role that municipalities can play in interpreting and executing principles of global justice. They offer a way of thinking about the cosmopolitan or global city not as a gentrified and commodified urban space, but as a site of local governance consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitan moral aims. They work to show some ways in which the city of Medellín, Colombia, has taken significant steps in that direction. The chapter focuses especially on how it did so and how it might serve as a model in some important ways for the transformation of other cities globally in a direction more consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitanism.

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