9206LA: Reimagining India: A New Urban Enterprise?
Department of Landscape Architecture
Independent Research Study
4 credits
limited enrollment
Thursday 11:30 - 2:00
508 Gund Hall
Instructor(s)
Nazneen Cooper, Niall Kirkwood
Course Description
This course will attempt to build a current view of the physical condition of modern urban India. In particular it will assemble the primary sites for emerging forms of urbanism through both an investigation of the urban spaces and built environments in which projects, experiments and interventions have been undertaken, as well as the discursive writings and organizations in which new ideas and theories are being discussed. Topics under review include industrial clusters, new residential townships, metropolitan peripheries, and the inner cities including new forms of bazaars, colonies and wadis. Students will prepare and present case studies based on course materials and individual research.
Background
There have been numerous attempts by government officials and institutions to understand the transformation of the urban environment across India since its Independence in 1947. It has also been recognized across research in the social sciences, planning and design, engineering, social work and activism, public health, and the arts and cultural industries that there has been an intellectual vacuum in an understanding of urbanism in India and in particular, the role of the agency of creative planning and design to shape the urban environment taking account of social, cultural, and environmental pressures. Most studies of cities in India have either been narrowly empirical, with a general bias towards simple (or not so simple as it turns out) problem-solving in areas of housing, open space, transportation, sanitation and other civic amenities, or the descriptions of the city fabric have been overly generalized into single categories such as the pre-colonial, the post-colonial the pre-industrial or the post-industrial. Reports such as the India Vision 2020 by the New Delhi Foreign Service Institute or Vision Mumbai by the McKinsey Group in 2003 or the display statistics to represent urban conditions as "crises" requiring urgent intervention - for example the problem of housing, the crisis of over-congestion, the collapse of infrastructure. The use of statistics to describe complex physical urban conditions has similarly been reflected in the use of abstract concepts to define the emerging city such as "the mosaic of cultures," "contested terrains," or "local urbanism." While these concepts are inadequate for capturing changed conditions, they become dangerous in formulations such as "encroached streets," "deteriorating environment" and even the commonly used term of "public and private space." Such concepts guide design and planning interventions that respond to generalized conditions and disguise the many ways in which the urban environment is currently inhabited and understood by its citizens. Furthermore, these generalizations fail to acknowledge the complex conditions of multiple tenancies, interstitial spaces, mixed land uses, legal and illegal commerce, and the tactical negotiations of the street, which characterize the contemporary Indian metropolis. In short, the observer, the critic, the planner, the politician, and those who make decisions about, or continue to shape the urban environments, are estranged from their object of understanding.
A prerequisite for students taking this course is previous academic research with the materials, resources, and references to the urban environments of historic and contemporary India. This seminar is open to graduate students enrolled in programs in the Graduate School of Design as well as students with an interest in the contemporary Indian city enrolled in other schools at Harvard and MIT.