[Reader-list] By-Pass: Everyday Life and Contemporary Urbanism in India and China, Final Program & Abstracts - De Balie, Amsterdam, November 15
Eric Kluitenberg
epk at xs4all.nl
Tue Nov 11 21:55:07 IST 2008
F I N A L P R O G R A M & A B S T R A C T S
By-Pass
Everyday Life and Contemporary Urbanism in India and China
International symposium
www.debalie.nl/bypass
De Balie, Amsterdam
Saturday November 15; Time | 10.00 - 17.00 hrs
Admission | € 17,50 / 12,50 (including lunch)
For the first time the majority of the world population today lives in
cities. A significant part of the new urban expansion in the past
decade has been in Asia, where urban expansion, crisis and mass
migration emerged in the context of a boom culture.
By-Pass is an international symposium about urban culture and everyday
life in the rapidly transforming mega cities of India and China. The
symposium will bring together a renowned group of scholars and
practitioners to examine these changes specifically at the ground
level. Here, urban structures are continuously reconfigured by 'the
Bypass'. The bypass is not formal, but at the same time, more than the
informal forms that have always existed in cities. The Bypass is a
tactic that is deployed by all kinds of urban groups - slum dwellers
engaging in incremental development; street level entrepreneurs
establishing newer networks of production and selling; civil society
organisations and formal planners short-circuiting policy and planning
processes, private and governmental agencies employing tactical ways
to assemble land, urban media forms that disrupt official channels
etc. The language of the Bypass cannot be articulated through
mainstream ideas of formality, legality, planning, public etc. - it
warrants a newer creative engagement. Asian cities offer an important
site for this engagement.
The symposium will focus on discussing and engaging with the
complexities of the Bypass. This will be done through an exploration
of newer ideas on incrementality, entrepreneurship, piracy, mapping,
networks, media-urbanism and image of the city by architects,
urbanists, historians, geographers and media scholars.
By-Pass is organised by De Balie in Amsterdam in collaboration with
Sarai in Delhi and CRIT in Mumbai.
With:
Awadhendra Sharan (Historian, Delhi), Juan Du (Architectural theorist,
University of Hong Kong), Martijn de Waal (Media scholar, Amsterdam /
University of Groningen), Prasad Shetty (CRIT, Mumbai), Ranjani
Mazumdar (Film maker and theoretician, Delhi), Ravi Sundaram (Sarai,
Delhi), Rupali Gupte (Architect, Mumbai), Solomon Benjamin (Political
scientist Bangalore / University of Toronto), Wing-Shing Tang (Social
geographer, Hong Kong),.
Symposium editors: Prasad Shetty (CRIT); Ravi Sundaram (Sarai); Merijn
Oudenampsen (Urban sociologist); Eric Kluitenberg (De Balie).
A web dossier has been set up for the symposium, which brings together
various background materials: www.debalie.nl/bypass.
The symposium can also be followed live via internet at: www.debalie.nl/live
. Recordings of the symposium will later be made available in the web
dosssier.
-------------------------------
SPEAKERS
Awadhendra Sharan is a historian and Fellow at the Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies (Delhi, India). His work involves
research that connects environmental issues to urban space, with
reference to the city of Delhi. He also works with Sarai, Delhi and
offers guest lectures at the School of Planning and Architecture,
Delhi and School of Environmental Studies, Delhi University.
Juan Du is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture,
University of Hong Kong and Principal of IDU architecture. She teaches
architectural design and contemporary urban theory. She has practiced
and taught in the United States, Europe and China and co-curated
“Performative-Cities" in the 2007 Shenzen - Hong Kong Biennale
Martijn de Waal is a researcher on urban and social issues and digital
media at the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam.
Contributed an essay on Chinese urban visuality to the recent
anthology "The Chinese Dream" published by the Dynamic City Foundation
(Rotterdam / Beijing), Fall 2008.
Ranjani Mazumdar is an Independent Filmmaker & Associate Professor of
Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru
University (New Delhi, India). Her publications and films focus on
urban culture, popular cinema, gender and the cinematic city. She is
the author of "Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City" (University of
Minnesota Press, 2007). Her current research focuses on globalization
and film culture, film and history and Bombay's cinematic city in the
1950s
Rick Dolphijn is assistant professor at Humanities, Utrecht
University, where he lectures and writes on communication theory,
cultural theory, philosophy of science, media theory, linguistics, art
and cultural studies. He has visited and studied cities in China and
India and has written on Asian urbanism and Deleuzian theory in
architecture magazine Volume, amongst others.
Rupali Gupte is an architect and urbanist. She works is a Senior
Lecturer at the Kamala Raheja Institute of Architecture (Mumbai,
India) and is also an executive member of CRIT, Mumbai. As an urban
researcher she has worked in India and Africa and lectured at UK, US,
and the Netherlands. She recently showed a work on mapping post
industrial landscapes at Manifesta 7: The European Art Biennale in
Italy, Her works includes studies of housing types in Mumbai, a novel
on a semi-fictional history of Mumbai's urbanism and writing on the
city's tactical infrastructures.
Solomon Benjamin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of
Political Science, University of Toronto. He researches the way land
(mostly incrementally developed), economy (mostly constituted around
small inter-connected firms), locates in a mainstream 'everyday
politics'. Disrupting high modernism. The emergent urbanism poses new
conceptual spaces beyond the current anxiety with progressive policy
and activism.
Wing Shing Tang is Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Hong
Kong Baptist University. His research focuses on urban (re)development
and planning in Hong Kong and mainland China. Current research
projects include "land (re)development in Hong Kong: the land
(re)development regime, hegemonic construction and the people",
"utopian urbanism in Hong Kong", "the geographies of power of
sustainable development in Hong Kong: an inside-out approach", "the
urban revolution in China: meeting Foucault with Gramsci and Lefebvre",
-------------------------------
PROGRAMME
10.00 - 10.30
Introduction
The Conference as intervention
Eric Kuitenberg
The problematic of Asian Urbanism
Ravi Sundaram
Session 1 - Setting the Frame
Prasad Shetty (Moderator)
10.30 - 10.50
Three Petitions and a City: the Public and the Private
Awadhendra Sharan
10.50 - 11.10
People's Activities in an Urban Village in Guangzhou: Beyond Informality
Wing Shing Tang
11.10 - 11.30
Indian & Chinese Occupancy Urbanism: Disrupting the Nation State &
appropriating High Modernism
Solomon Benjamin
11.30 - 11.50
Back to the Future
Juan Du
11.50 - 12.30
Discussion
12.30 - 13.30 - LUNCH BREAK
Session 2 - Imagining the City
Eric Kluitenberg (moderator)
13.30 - 13.50
Workforms + Playforms
Rupali Gupte
13.50 - 14.10
Two City Forms: Axionometric Vision and Linear Perspective
Rick Dolphijn
14.10 - 14.30
The Urban Fringe
Ranjani Mazumdar
14.30 - 14-50
Green Tea, Black Coffee, Splendid Cities?
Urban culture in contemporary Chinese visual culture
Martijn De Waal
14.50 - 15.30
Discussion
15.30 - 16.00 - BREAK
Session 3 - Open Session & Closing Discussion
Merijn Oudenampsen
(chair)
16.00 - 17.00
Round-Table with Solomon Benjamin, Rupali Gupte, Juan Du, Rick
Dolphijn & Ravi Sundaram
-------------------------------
ABSTRACTS
Three Petitions and a City
AWADHENDRA SHARAN
In December1985 oleum gas leaked from a unit of the Shriram Foods and
Fertilisers industry located in Delhi. Coincidentally, earlier the
same year the lawyer-activist M. C. Mehta had filed a public petition
before the Supreme Court of India arguing that the operations of the
factory were hazardous for the communities that lived in the
vicinity. In that same year, Mehta filed two other writ petitions,
subsequently referred to as the Delhi land Use Case and Vehicular
Pollution case. I will address these three petitions, in their
invocation of the idea of 'public', in this presentation. The
presentation is by way of an initial inquiry into the limit of the
idea of the 'public' to suggest other ways in which we may imagine a
new project of the commons in the contemporary.
Mehta had suffered no personal injury. He spoke instead as a citizen,
acting as a custodian of public rights and interests. The burden of
the petitions was several. Local authorities had failed to discharge
their public functions. Smoke and highly toxic gases were being
allowed to pass into the air and effluents were being discharged into
the water. Industries, both hazardous and illegal, were functioning
unchecked in the city, posing constant danger to millions of people
and causing diseases ranging from tuberculosis to asthama, skin
diseases to cancer. Toxic wastes, their collection, treatment and
disposal, were ill attended to. There were also problems in the rural
areas of the city, with many legal and illegal insecticide units
operating in them. Humans were not alone to suffer, Mehta argued, the
toxics affecting tress, shrubs and agricultural crops too. Historic
sites of the city - the Red Fort, Jama Masjid, Old Fort, India Gate
and Jantar Mantar - were also mute sufferers.
My presentation is about the slippages between the different terms
deployed in Mehta's petition - polluting, hazardous, (il)legal,
dangerous, (un)safe, rural/urban to argue that it is precisely through
such slippages that what is imagined as the 'public interest' related
to the 'environment' remains always necessarily enmeshed in other
dimensions of the urban everyday that are about spaces for living and
work, modes of travel and recreation. Indeed, I shall argue, the plea
for better environment may potentially also pose new risks for these
other spaces/ modes of being.
One response to this, in India and elsewhere, has been to re-enact the
public, through arguments roughly phrased as 'claims to the city.'
This, I shall suggest, is increasingly inadequate both in terms of
understanding the contemporary everyday and as a mode of intervention
in it.
Back to the Future
Juan Du
With an official municipal history of only 25 years, Shenzhen's
stunning speed of urban development has been the subject of much
analysis and debate. While some applaud the city as a successful
model of modern planning in Asia, others consider it devoid of history
and culture. However, these opposing positions overlook the very
complex and nuanced process of urbanization that is contemporary
Shenzhen. The historical presence and transformations of the former
agrarian villages within the city is one of the most important
instruments for the on-going urbanization process in Shenzhen.
Developed outside of the jurisdiction of municipal planning and
regulations, these village sites have each become urban environments
in their own right, together presenting a rich variety of informal
modes of urbanization. Analysis of these village sites presents a re-
evaluation of existing theories on the development process of Shenzhen
and demands radical reformation to the process of modern urban planning.
Green Tea, Black Coffee, Splendid Cities?
Urban culture in contemporary Chinese visual culture
MARTIJN DE WAAL
In the past decade or so, China, a country of farmers, has become a
nation dominated by megacities. Where once farmers plowed the yellow
earth, now mirror-glassed high rises have appeared to demarcate yet
another emerging 'CBD' (Central Business District). Official ideology
- and its visual culture - saw a similar turn. Up to the era of the
cultural revolution, the countryside was eulogized, cities were
vilified. Now modern cities are portrayed as places of joy, as sites
where one can gloriously get rich. Postcards, tv series, billboards,
city marketing videofilms eagerly portray this newly minted Chinese
Dream of middle class life in a modern urban setting. But how do these
representations relate to more direct experiences of city life? And
where can we find the dissonants to this new official urban mythology?
In the work of some contemporary Chinese artists and filmmakers we
find a more critical eye on the new urban society that is emerging in
China.
The Urban Fringe
RANJANI MAZUMDAR
Globalization in India has brought about many shifts in the nature of
the relationship between cinema and the urban experience. These shifts
need to be located within a map where the expansion of television, the
rise of multiplexes, the global circulation of DVDs and the rise of a
new cinephile culture, have led to speculations about a new imaginary
film spectator who can handle a different kind of cinema in India. It
is this contemporary context that has given rise to a cinema on the
margins of the popular, which we can provisionally call the Fringe.
Emerging from the periphery of the Film industry, the Fringe is
struggling against prevailing forms to create a new cinematic
language. These films speak in a global language to evoke a crumbling
urban world which appears unfamiliar in relation to the melodramatic
form commonly associated with India's popular cinema. Influenced by
Hollywood, European, and Asian cinema, the Fringe circulates like a
virus alongside the delirium of globalisation today. In a context
where "Bollywood" has emerged as a chapter in Indian diplomacy and
advertisement for India's global rise, the new urban fringe suggests a
very different world.
Two City Forms: Axionometric Vision and Linear Perspective
RICK DOLPHIJN
In order to conceptualize two very different strategies for urban
change, art history offers us two perspectives (that of axonometric
vision and that of linear perspective) that give us better insight in
how cities, especially in its European and in its East-Asian
appearance, are subjected to processes of Change. Connected to the
Deleuzian concepts of the fold/ the unfold and of the this
presentation intends to show in what way our two main concepts allow
us to rethink concepts like public space, the street, the facade and
several other ideas important for architectural theory.
Workforms + Playforms
RUPALI GUPTE
Modern Urban Planning deals with issues of Working, Living and Leisure
through ideas of ideal standards and equitable provisions. These then
get manifested into regulations, neatly drawn out urban plans and
rules for their enforcement. These ways of planning have been dominant
in Indian contexts as well. However contemporary Indian urbanism has
shown that it spurs multiple patterns of everyday life, of inhabiting
urban space, that somehow do not fit in the neatly parcelled plans.
Work, living and leisure manifest themselves in multiple ways,
occupying unique spaces in the city. This paper will discuss two
studio projects conducted at the Kamla Raheja Institute for
Architecture in Mumbai titled: Workforms and Playforms that build on
this understanding. The paper would not only discuss the various,
often bizarre, patterns through which work, living and leisure are
acted out by various constituents in the city; but also the
difficulties in mapping them through conventional methods. The paper
will further discuss innovative methods that were explored in the
studio to map these conditions and possibilities that design
interventions provide in these fragile situations.
Indian & Chinese Occupancy Urbanism: Disrupting the Nation State &
appropriating High Modernism
SOLOMON BENJAMIN
Indian and Chinese cities show significant urbanisms to lie beyond the
ambit of the nation state to disrupt and appropriate policy frames to
be 'globally competitive'. We look at Bombay, Bangalore, as well as
'Small commodity' centers like Yiwu in China's Wenzhou districts.
Essential to this politics is local authority's embedding in popular
society via land -- reconstituted into complex tenure forms to defy
centralized planning. Such embeddings spur an everyday politics where
real estate surpluses fuel an economy of 'suitcase entrepreneurs'.
These economic networks shape a vibrant globalization 'from below'.
Not surprisingly, these developments are un-palatable to international
investors: High powered NYC lawyers cry foul over 'legal
protectionism' around unplanned land development in Guangzhou's
cities; Procter and Gamble hired academics portray Yiwu to the US
Senate, as centers of: 'piracy, counterfeit culture, and even possible
terrorist funding'. These urbanisms also disrupt Mike Davis's
narrative of future cities as violent slum-scapes, rife with social
and political disintegration. Instead a more useful conceptual frame
comes from legal pluralism derived 'porous legalities', notions of
'subaltern cosmopolitanism', and a consideration of the Everyday
State' that returns us to Polyani's economy embedded into society.
People's Activities in an Urban Village in Guangzhou: Beyond Informality
WING SHING TANG
One prominent feature of China's current urban landscape is the
prevalence of 'villages-in-the-city', or simply abbreviated as 'urban
villages' (in Chinese, it is called Chengzhongcun). Chengzhongcun is
the outcome of urban encroachment on rural villages, sometimes former
production brigades and clan villages, both inside, and on the fringe
of, the city. Nowadays, tens of thousands of migrant workers relocate,
mostly temporarily, from the countryside to these urban villages to
sell their labour power in the city, while some indigenous villagers
might have already relocated themselves to newly built apartments
elsewhere. Concomitantly, a kind of new urban community starts to form
in the city. There, people live a way of life different from the
urban, which is now very much commodified, albeit still under
étatisation one way or other. The way of life found in Chenzhoncun is
usually characterised as self-help or informal by the literature, in
that their non-state behaviour of, on the part of indigenous
villagers, renting land for real estate development and building extra
floor space on the top of their own houses for renting-out purposes,
and, on the part of migrant workers, entering into residential
contract with owner-occupiers, opening new petit-bourgeois, small
labour-intensive businesses of offering catering, personal services,
and transport and errand services to service the community. This paper
challenges the self-help or informal concept and, instead, argues to
understand their new way of life as a kind of innovative techniques to
survive in the context of widespread hegemonic and sub-hegemonic
construction. This argument is illustrated with a case study of Shipai
Village in the city of Guangzhou.
www.debalie.nl/bypass
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