City Requiem, Calcutta

City Requiem, Calcutta PDF Author: Ananya Roy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium -- where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty. City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory. Thus Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias. In doing so, her work expands the field of poverty studies by showing how a politics of poverty is also a poverty of knowledge, a construction and management of social and spatial categories.

City Requiem, Calcutta

City Requiem, Calcutta PDF Author: Ananya Roy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium -- where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty. City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory. Thus Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias. In doing so, her work expands the field of poverty studies by showing how a politics of poverty is also a poverty of knowledge, a construction and management of social and spatial categories.

Seeking Spatial Justice

Seeking Spatial Justice PDF Author: Edward W. Soja
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452915288
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City PDF Author: Deonnie Moodie
Publisher: Paperbackshop UK Import
ISBN: 0190885262
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
"Middle-class Hindus have worked to modernize Kālīghāṭ - the most famous Hindu temple in Kolkata - over the past long century. Rather than being rejected with the onslaught of European modernity, the temple became a facet through which Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as their cities' and their nation's"--

Contesting the Indian City

Contesting the Indian City PDF Author: Gavin Shatkin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118295846
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Contesting the Indian City features a collection of cutting-edge empirical studies that offer insights into issues of politics, equity, and space relating to urban development in modern India. Features studies that serve to deepen our theoretical understandings of the changes that Indian cities are experiencing Examines how urban redevelopment policy and planning, and reforms of urban politics and real estate markets, are shaping urban spatial change in India The first volume to bring themes of urban political reform, municipal finance, land markets, and real estate industry together in an international publication

Calcutta Poor

Calcutta Poor PDF Author: Frederic C. Thomas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315479230
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Calcutta is notorious for its pavement dwellers, street children, and scavengers that have become a portrait of the worst sort of human degradation. In this illuminating critique, Thomas investigates the standard solutions - improved housing, increased job creation, and intervention of social services agencies - only to come to the conclusion that such initiatives have little effect on the inherent nature of the problem of poverty. Based on historical and anthropological findings, and the author's visits to the slums of Calcutta, what becomes clear is that even in the midst of great poverty, there is a nobility of character, a vitality of ethnic and cultural ties, and an energy that bring out inventiveness and ingenuity in the lives of the poor. If Calcutta's poverty is not to be an intractable problem, these internal forces must be awakened to generate solutions. Illustrated with stunning photographs, Thomas's reflections provide new insight into an age-old problem.

Urban Development in India

Urban Development in India PDF Author: Pablo Shiladitya Bose
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317596722
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Indian diaspora has had a complex and multifaceted role in catalyzing, justifying and promoting a transformed urban landscape in India. Focussing on Kolkata/ Calcutta, this book analyses the changing landscapes over the past two decades of one of the world’s most fascinating and iconic cities. Previously better known due to its post-Independence decline into overcrowded poverty, pollution and despair, in recent years it has experience a revitalization that echoes India’s renaissance as a whole in the new millennium. This book weaves together narratives of migration and diasporas, postmodern developmentalism and neoliberal urbanism, and identity and belonging in the Global South. It examines the rise of middle-class environmental initiatives and Kolkata’s attempts to reclaim its earlier global status. It suggests that a form of global gentrification is taking place, through which people and place are being fundamentally restructured. Based on a decade’s worth of field research and investigation in multiple sites - metropolitan centers connected by long histories of empire, migration, economy, and culture - it employs a multi-methods approach and uses ethnographic, semi-structured interviews as well as archival research for much of the empirical data collected. Addressing urban change and policies, as well as spatial and discoursive transformations that are occurring in India, it will be of interest to researchers in the field of urban geography, urban and regional planning, environmental studies, diaspora studies and South Asian studies.

Cultures of Servitude

Cultures of Servitude PDF Author: Raka Ray
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804760713
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Employers and servants in Kolkata reveal through their own stories how their evolving culture of servitude has produced, preserved, and disrupted ideas of gender and class in India and beyond.

The Illegal City

The Illegal City PDF Author: Dr Ayona Datta
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409483371
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The Illegal City explores the relationship between space, law and gendered subjectivity through a close look at an 'illegal' squatter settlement in Delhi. Since 2000, a series of judicial rulings in India have criminalised squatters as 'illegal' citizens, 'encroachers' and 'pickpockets' of urban land, and have led to a spate of slum demolitions across the country. This book argues that in this context, it has become vital to distinguish between illegality and informality since it is those 'illegal' slums which are at the receiving end of a 'force of law', where law is violently encountered within everyday spaces. This book uses a gendered intersectional lens to explore how a 'violence of law' shapes how 'public' subjectivities of gender, class, religion and caste are encountered and negotiated within the 'private' spaces of home, family and neighbourhood. This book suggests that resettlement is not a condition that squatters desire; rather something that is seen as the only way out of the 'illegal' city. The wait for resettlement is a temporal space of anxiety and uncertainty, where particular kinds of politics around law, space and gender takes shape, which transform squatters' relations with the state, urban development, civil society, and with each other. Through their everyday struggles around water, sanitation, social and political organisation and the transformation of their homes and families, this book shows that the desire for the 'legal city' is also the irony and utopia of home, which will remain an incomplete gendered project - both for the state and for squatters.

Cities in South Asia

Cities in South Asia PDF Author: Crispin Bates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317565134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Globalisation has long historical roots in South Asia, but economic liberalisation has led to uniquely rapid urban growth in South Asia during the past decade. This book brings together a multidisciplinary collection of chapters on contemporary and historical themes explaining this recent explosive growth and transformations on-going in the cities of this region. The essays in this volume attempt to shed light on the historical roots of these cities and the traditions that are increasingly placed under strain by modernity, as well as exploring the lived experience of a new generation of city dwellers and their indelible impact on those who live at the city’s margins. The book discusses that previously, cities such as Mumbai grew by accumulating a vast hinterland of slum-dwellers who depressed wages and supplied cheap labour to the city’s industrial economy. However, it goes on to show that the new growth of cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Madras in south India, or Delhi and Calcutta in the north of India, is more capital-intensive, export-driven, and oriented towards the information technology and service sectors. The book explains that these cities have attracted a new elite of young, educated workers, with money to spend and an outlook on life that is often a complex mix of modern ideas and conservative tradition. It goes on to cover topics such as the politics of town planning, consumer culture, and the struggles among multiple identities in the city. By tracing the genealogies of cities, it gives a useful insight into the historical conditioning that determines how cities negotiate new changes and influences. There will soon be more mega cities in South Asia than anywhere else in the world, and this book provides an in-depth analysis of this growth. It will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian History, Politics and Anthropology, as well as those working in the fields of urbanisation and globalisation.

Architecture and Urbanism in a Contact Zone

Architecture and Urbanism in a Contact Zone PDF Author: Mark Mukherjee Campbell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429829213
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book explores how histories of migration, cultural encounter and transculturation have shaped formations of urban space, domestic architecture and cultural modernity in Kolkata from the early colonial period to the beginning of the era of India’s economic liberalization. It charts how these themes were manifest in what was an important ‘contact zone’ in the history of globalization and the modern city. Drawing on a wide range of resources and representations, from urban plans and architectural drawings to European travel journals and Bengali literature and cinema, the book investigates the history of Kolkata through an examination of key urban and architectural spaces across the colonial and postcolonial epochs. Through illustrated chapters, it sheds new light on questions of difference and segregation, cultural hybridity, migration, and entanglements of tradition and modernity in the city, analyzing spaces inhabited by a diverse range of cultures, including several neglected in previous studies. Architecture and Urbanism in a Contact Zone offers an instructive contribution to the fields of global architectural history and theory, urban studies and postcolonial cultural studies for scholars, researchers and students alike.