The Crowd outside the Lettered City: Imagining the Mass Audience in 1920s India
Drawing on the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report of 1928 and the transcripts of its hearings and interviews, this essay shows how middle-class elites in colonial India imagined the mass public...
View ArticleUrban and rural sign language in India
A comparison is presented of Indian urban and rural sign languages of the deaf. The structures of both languages are designed for efficient communication but have developed differently in response to...
View ArticleGossip on the Doxiadis ‘Gossip Square’: Unpacking the Histories of an...
Understanding the historical complexities surrounding Doxiadis Associates’ idea of ‘gossip squares’ in housing projects helps frame larger theoretical questions about the potential significance of the...
View ArticleIslamabad, The Creation of a New Capital
[excerpt] My subject is the problems inherent in the creation of a new capital city and their solutions. My analysis and presentation will be as of a general case of interest to all of us, and by way...
View ArticleWith the Declining Significance of Labor, Who Is Producing our Global...
This article engages the question of what happens to labor as Indian cities become transformed into “global cities.” It does so by focusing on the convergence of three interrelated trends over the past...
View ArticleConcepts and Responses: International Architectural Competition for the...
This book reflects the vast range of responses and cultural approaches to a unique architectural challenge - the designing of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, a sprawling cultural...
View ArticleSprawl and Jurisdictional Fragmentation
The subject of sprawl as it relates to jurisdictional fragmentation begs for analysis in the tradition of industrial organization. There are obvious advantages to the comparison between general purpose...
View ArticleUrban chaos and perplexing dynamics of urbanization
A city with fractal structure used to be thought of as a kind of spatial chaotic attractor. Several chaotic attractors indeed can be found by simulating urbanization dynamics through numerical...
View ArticleUrban growth in India: Demographic and sociocultural prospects
This paper explores some of the complexities of India’s urban growth since its first post-Independence census of 1951. Two levels of analysis are pursued as they affect one another: numerical or...
View ArticleCellular Automata Based Model of Urban Spatial Growth
In the study reported in this paper an attempt has been made to develop a Cellular Automata (CA) model for simulating future urban growth of an Indian city. In the model remote sensing data and GIS...
View ArticleUrbanisation of Peri-urban Regions: Is It a Boon or Threat to the Liveability...
Populations of cities are increasing rapidly and people from nearby rural areas have been migrating to cities at unprecedented rates during the last 15–20 years. Is it a problem? Why is there so much...
View ArticleA peaceful realm? Trauma and social differentiation at Harappa
Thousands of settlements stippled the third millennium B.C. landscape of Pakistan and northwest India. These communities maintained an extensive exchange network that spanned West and South Asia. They...
View ArticleMigrants, Slums and the Construction of Citizenship in Gandhi's...
This article explores Gandhi's engagement with the industrial workers of Ahmedabad city and his effort to integrate them into urban society. As the emergence of a large textile industrial sector shaped...
View ArticleLandscapes, soils, and mound histories of the Upper Indus Valley, Pakistan:...
The site of Harappa in central Pakistan has been the primary source of information on Indus Valley cultural and natural landscapes in the Upper Indus Basin. While the site has been excavated for over...
View ArticlePostcolonial Modernism and Beyond
This chapter explores a prominent issue in international architectural culture during the last decades of the twentieth century, that of cultural identity. It asks: How can one represent one’s own...
View ArticleEarly Modern South Asia
This chapter discusses how the cities of early modern South Asia were transformed by new dynasties in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The leaders in these developments were two Muslim emperors...
View ArticleEmpire Building
This chapter discusses how colonialism transformed the architecture of both colonizers and the colonized. Between 1800 and 1940 every country in Africa and most countries in Asia came under European...
View ArticleInterrogating Difference: Postcolonial Perspectives in Architecture and Urbanism
Postcolonial perspectives in architecture and urbanism offer ways of thinking about built form and space as cultural landscapes that are at once globally interconnected and precisely situated in space...
View ArticleOrientalist modes of modernism in architecture : Colonial/Postcolonial/Soviet
This article aims to propose a comparative analysis of modernism in architecture, which appeared at the end of the 19th and especially during the 20th century in colonial Maghreb, postcolonial India...
View ArticleBuilt Space, Environment, Modernism: (Re)reading ‘Tropical Modern’ Architecture
This first chapter of Part II (on tropical modern architecture) introduces Sri Lanka's tropical modern architectural style and the kinds of environmental experience it aims to afford users. By engaging...
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