Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Contemporary global space is as much located in immaterial spaces as it is in physical, and this immateriality appears only to be accelerating. One consequence of this shift is the way it implicates material spaces, now increasingly inseparable from and even configured by these immaterial sites. In Indian urban spaces, where, in the last few decades entire new cities have risen alongside older ones, cityscapes are so altered that their pasts have vanished into their new facades. Projections show that India will soon be the most populous country in the world, and along with other Asian and African nations it will house some of the largest and youngest megacities. These emerging megacities are at the center of a planning crisis often cited in urban Indian studies. Mass displacement, unemployment, urban densification, rural migration, environmental degradation are all part of this center. At the same time, the intensification of the Hinduvata movement, nationalism and the deepening divides between regional/linguistic boundaries are fueled by the unprecedented acceleration of technologies of transmission. The informal sector, despite these conditions, finds ways to turn the governance failures to its advantage. Thinking with such possibilities and examples, particularly with the psychical-social ecologies in which the built environment is realized, offers a way of apprehending contemporary urban networked spaces against an overly deterministic and data driven model.