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
From ancient metropolises like Pueblo Bonito and Tenochtitlán to the twenty-first century Oceti Sakowin encampment of NoDAPL water protectors, Native people have built and lived in cities—a fact little noted in either urban or Indigenous histories. By foregrounding Indigenous peoples as city makers and city dwellers, as agents and subjects of urbanization, the essays in this volume simultaneously highlight the impact of Indigenous people on urban places and the effects of urbanism on Indigenous people and politics. The authors—Native and non-Native, anthropologists and geographers as well as historians—use the term “Indian cities” to represent collective urban spaces established and regulated by a range of institutions, organizations, churches, and businesses. These urban institutions have strengthened tribal and intertribal identities, creating new forms of shared experience and giving rise to new practices of Indigeneity. Some of the essays in this volume explore Native participation in everyday economic activities, whether in the commerce of colonial Charleston or in the early development of New Orleans. Others show how Native Americans became entwined in the symbolism associated with Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C., with dramatically different consequences for Native and non-Native perspectives. Still others describe the roles local Indigenous community groups have played in building urban Native American communities, from Dallas to Winnipeg. All the contributions to this volume show how, from colonial times to the present day, Indigenous people have shaped and been shaped by urban spaces. Collectively they demonstrate that urban history and Indigenous history are incomplete without each other.
In City Indian, Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck tell the engaging story of American Indian men and women who migrated to Chicago from across America. From the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to the 1934 Century of Progress Fair, American Indians in Chicago voiced their opinions about political, social, educational, and racial issues. City Indian focuses on the privileged members of the American Indian community in Chicago who were doctors, nurses, business owners, teachers, and entertainers. During the Progressive Era, more than at any other time in the city’s history, they could be found in the company of politicians and society leaders, at Chicago’s major cultural venues and events, and in the press, speaking out. When Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson declared that Chicago public schools teach “America First,” American Indian leaders publicly challenged him to include the true story of “First Americans.” As they struggled to reshape nostalgic perceptions of American Indians, these men and women developed new associations and organizations to help each other and to ultimately create a new place to call home in a modern American city.
All over India, the shortage of power is a reality that affects all walks of life, all kinds of people. Among its most tangible impacts is the shortage of electricity in the domestic sector. Despite the fact that India's capacity to generate power has grown from 1362 MW at the time of Independence to over 100 000 MW in 2001, there is still, on an average, an eight per cent shortfall.Each person in India can use about 350 kW of power every year, and this is among the lowest per capita averages in the world. Hours of load shedding, sweltering summers, and cold winters without enough power are all common experiences for the average Indian. Generators and inverters are fast competing with refrigerators and televisions as hot-selling consumer goods.'Empowering the Indian city: scenarios and solutions' is an attempt to bring into focus the various issues that confront development in the Indian power sector, with special reference to the urban power supply to the domestic sector. It puts forth a multitude of choices that exist before the Indian citizen, the government, and the industry to create a future where electricity can be a resource not so ridden by scarcity and bad quality. Many of us have often thought about what alternatives exist before us, other than buying a cost-intensive, polluting generator, or an inverter that will hike our electricity bills considerably. This concise book tries to list out a few ways of bridging this shortage by focusing on alternative energy sources, energy-efficient lighting, and governmental reform, which is already in the pipeline.It is a book not just about shortage of power. It is also about the theft of power, bad management practices in the sector and the misuse of power, faulty tariff systems, and low quality in what is supplied to the consumer as usable power. It is also about the future of power reforms in the country and which way they are headed.
Raj Chandavarkar was one of the finest Indian historians of the twentieth century. He died sadly young in 2006, leaving behind a very substantial collection of unpublished lectures, papers and articles. These have now been assembled and edited by Jennifer Davis, Gordon Johnson and David Washbrook, and their appearance will be widely welcomed by large numbers of scholars of Indian history, politics and society. The essays centre around three major themes: the city of Bombay, Indian politics and society, and Indian historiography. Each manifests Dr Chandavarkar's hallmark historical powers of imaginative empirical richness, analytic acuity and expository elegance, and the collection as a whole will make both a major contribution to the historiography of modern India, and a worthy memorial to a major scholar.
