Neighbourhoods in Urban India
Neighbourhoods in Urban India

Author: Sadan Jha

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9390252687

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'...a brilliant exploration of urbanism between the concept city and the lived city.... The volume focuses on urban life lived between home and the world, institutions and experiences, representations and affects.... Its fascinating range of empirically rich and analytically sophisticated excavations of neighbourhoods make the volume a must-have in the bookshelf on South Asian urban studies.' -Gyan Prakash, Princeton University 'A must-read for those who wish to study the micro aspects of contemporary urbanity.' -Sujata Patel, Savitribai Phule Pune University 'This book is a powerful addition to the study of Indian urbanism.' -Ravi Sundaram, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) In the last couple of decades, the global South, in general, and India, in particular, have witnessed a massive growth of cities. In India, more than one-third of its population lives in cities. However, urban development, growth and expansion are not merely about infrastructures and enlargement of cityscapes. This edited volume focuses on neighbourhoods, their particularities and their role in shaping our understanding of the urban in India. It locates Indian experiences in the larger context of the global South and seeks to decentre the dominant Euro-American discourse of urban social life. Neighbourhoods in Urban India: In Between Home and the City offers an understanding of neighbourhoods as changing socio-spatial units in their specific regional settings by underlining the way value regimes (religiosity and subjectivities) give neighbourhoods their social meanings and stereotypes. It unpacks discourses and knowledge practices, such as planning, architecture and urban discourses of governance. It further discloses the linkages and disjunctures between the social practices of neighbourhoods and the language, logic and experiences of dwelling, housing, urban planning and governance, and focuses on the particularities and heterogeneities of neighbourhoods and neighbourliness.

Neighbourhoods and Neighbourliness in Urban South Asia
Neighbourhoods and Neighbourliness in Urban South Asia

Author: Sadan Jha

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-04-25

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1000563537

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This volume examines urban South Asia through the ideas of neighbourhood and neighbourliness. With a focus on the affective socio-spatial and sensorial experiences of non-metropolitan, small and intermediate cities, the chapters in the volume look at neighbourhoods as a key to exploring the textures of urban life. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, urban studies, planning, and social history, the book highlights urban heterogeneity and contemporary transformations in South Asia. It discusses the linkages between urban lived spaces and social life; memory, migration, and exile; and the city and its society through practices of everyday life in neighbourhoods. With studies from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and India, the volume addresses a wide range of issues pertaining to urban experiences in their regional specificities and in a broader context of the Global South. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of urban sociology, anthropology, urban studies, planning and development, social history, political studies, cultural studies, geography, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners and policymakers, architects, planners, civil society organisations, and thinktanks.

The Meaning of the Local
The Meaning of the Local

Author: Geert de Neve

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2007-01-24

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 1135392153

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By zooming in on urban localities in India and by unpacking the 'meaning of the local' for those who live in them, the ten papers in this volume redress a recurrent asymmetry in contemporary debates about globalisation. In much literature, the global is associated with transnationalism, dynamism and activity, and the local with static identities and history. Focusing on a range of locales in India's metropolitan areas and provincial small towns, the contributions move beyond the assertion that space is socially constructed to explore the ways in which social and political relations are themselves spatially and historically contingent. Using detailed ethnography, the authors highlight the vitality of place-making in the lives of urban dwellers and the centrality of a 'politics of place' in the production of power, difference and inequality. The volume illustrates how urban spaces are increasingly interconnected through wider social and spatial processes, while local boundaries and group-based identities are at the same time reconstructed, and often even consolidated, through the use of 'traditional' idioms and localised practices. All contributions relate detailed case studies of everyday activities to a range of contemporary debates that highlight various spatial aspects of cultural identities, economic restructuring and political processes in India. The volume provides an interdisciplinary perspective on urban life in rapidly changing political and economic environments. It offers a contribution to policy-orientated debates on urban livelihoods and urban planning as well as a wealth of ethnographic material for those interested in the spatial dimensions of urban life in India.

Urban India
Urban India

Author: Renate Bornberg

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-03

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 3031237374

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This book discusses the importance of socio-spatial patterns in cities that are embedded in the cultural heritage and self-understanding of a society, showing that Indian cities follow different urban concepts. In nine episodes (nine is a sacred figure), it highlights the principal influences and social impacts on cities from ancient times to contemporary city developments. As such, it provides planners and architects with insights that can easily be applied in contemporary cities and towns and help foster India’s cultural heritage—a much-needed, but little-discussed approach. Indian cities are the result of various factors, some imposed, others following local traditions that shaped them. They were founded around social needs, landscape conditions and production routines, as well as the religious influences of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity and animism. However, Western town-planning models are often implemented, blurring the traditional way of life in cities. For sustainable town development, it is of key importance to find solutions that deal with Indian city models.

Neighbourhoods in Urban India
Neighbourhoods in Urban India

Author: Sadan Jha

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-04-30

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9390252644

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'...a brilliant exploration of urbanism between the concept city and the lived city.... The volume focuses on urban life lived between home and the world, institutions and experiences, representations and affects.... Its fascinating range of empirically rich and analytically sophisticated excavations of neighbourhoods make the volume a must-have in the bookshelf on South Asian urban studies.' -Gyan Prakash, Princeton University 'A must-read for those who wish to study the micro aspects of contemporary urbanity.' -Sujata Patel, Savitribai Phule Pune University 'This book is a powerful addition to the study of Indian urbanism.' -Ravi Sundaram, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) In the last couple of decades, the global South, in general, and India, in particular, have witnessed a massive growth of cities. In India, more than one-third of its population lives in cities. However, urban development, growth and expansion are not merely about infrastructures and enlargement of cityscapes. This edited volume focuses on neighbourhoods, their particularities and their role in shaping our understanding of the urban in India. It locates Indian experiences in the larger context of the global South and seeks to decentre the dominant Euro-American discourse of urban social life. Neighbourhoods in Urban India: In Between Home and the City offers an understanding of neighbourhoods as changing socio-spatial units in their specific regional settings by underlining the way value regimes (religiosity and subjectivities) give neighbourhoods their social meanings and stereotypes. It unpacks discourses and knowledge practices, such as planning, architecture and urban discourses of governance. It further discloses the linkages and disjunctures between the social practices of neighbourhoods and the language, logic and experiences of dwelling, housing, urban planning and governance, and focuses on the particularities and heterogeneities of neighbourhoods and neighbourliness.

Adapting to Climate Change in Urban Areas
Adapting to Climate Change in Urban Areas

Author: David Satterthwaite

Publisher: IIED

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 184369669X

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This paper discusses the possibilities and constraints for adaptation to climate change in urban areas in low- and middle-income nations. These contain a third of the world's population and a large proportion of the people and economic activities most at risk from sea-level rise and from the heatwaves, storms and floods whose frequency and/or intensity climate change is likely to increase. Section I outlines both the potentials for adaptation and the constraints. Section II discusses the scale of urban change. Section III considers direct and indirect impacts of climate change on urban areas and which nations, cities and population groups are particularly at risk. This highlights how prosperous, well-governed cities could generally adapt, but most of the world's urban population lives in cities or smaller urban centres ill-equipped for adaptation. A key part of adaptation concerns infrastructure and buildings - but much of the urban population in Africa, Asia and Latin America lack the infrastructure to adapt. Most international agencies have long refused to support urban programmes, especially those that address these problems. Section IV discusses innovations by urban governments and community organizations and in financial systems that address such problems, including the relevance of recent innovations in disaster-risk reduction for adaptation. It notes how few city and national governments are taking any action on adaptation. Section V discusses how local innovation in adaptation can be encouraged and supported at national scale, and the funding needed to support this. Section VI considers the mechanisms for financing this and the larger ethical challenges that achieving adaptation raises - especially the fact that most climate-change-related urban (and rural) risks are in low-income nations with the least adaptive capacity, including many that have contributed very little to greenhouse-gas emissions.

Developing National Urban Policies
Developing National Urban Policies

Author: Debolina Kundu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-17

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9811537380

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This book discusses and analyzes past and ongoing national urban policy development efforts from around the globe, particularly those that can lead the way toward smart and green cities. In view of the adoption of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, especially the goal to have cities that are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, urban policies that can help achieve this goal are urgently needed. The UN-Habitat (HABITAT III) puts national urban policies at the heart of implementing and rethinking the urban agenda, and identifies them as being integral to the equitable and sustainable development of nations. Against this background, this important book, which gathers contributions from academics, planners and urban specialists, reviews existing urban policies from developing and developed nations, discusses various countries’ smart and green urban policies, and outlines the way forward. As such, it is essential reading for all social scientists, planners, designers, architects, and policymakers working on urban development around the world.

The Illegal City
The Illegal City

Author: Ayona Datta

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1317027930

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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.

SECULAR, SOCIALIST & RELIGION IN INDIA - THE MISCONCEPTIONS
SECULAR, SOCIALIST & RELIGION IN INDIA - THE MISCONCEPTIONS

Author: PRAHALAD RAO

Publisher: Blue Rose Publishers

Published:

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13:

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Constituent Assembly Debates, which made the Constitution of India, are the original source to understanding how the Constitution was made. The debates are bold and blunt, conducted using soft expressions and language. Rather than reading the Constitution as it is, what we discovered over the last fifty years of its adoption is that it is read differently, suiting the persons of the political parties speaking as they selectively suppress the spirit of the Letters. Terms such as socialist" and "secular were later inserted in the Preamble through the 42nd Amendment in 1976 and that opened up Pandora's box. Unfortunate derivation continued to progress, opening up opportunities to influence the meaning of socialism, secularism, and religion. Politicians didn't even glance at the spirited debates, on how those very words were used to rench the consensus collectively among them. Inequality continued to increase year after year, which should not have been there after the insertion of those words. Politicians and religious leaders at that time considered it more appropriate to convert those words as more relevant terms like religion, caste and creed. There onwards, the country started experiencing a different taste of socialism, secularism, and religion. In the author's view, all such conceptions were solely serving self-interests. This is where we stand today. The author has made a humble effort in this book to highlight the misconceptions of these terms as envisioned in the Constitution. People tend to be generous when sharing their nonsense, fear, and ignorance. And while they seem quite eager to feed you their negativity, please remember that sometimes the diet we need to be on is a spiritual and emotional one. Be cautious with what you feed your mind and soul. Fuel yourself with positivity and let that fuel propel you into positive metion." - Dr. Steve Maraboli.