[Reader-list] By-Pass - Everyday Life and Contemporary Urbanism in India and China, De Balie, Amsterdam, November 15 2008
Eric Kluitenberg
epk at xs4all.nl
Wed Oct 29 15:34:47 IST 2008
Dear members of the Readers List,
We ae very happy to announce the symposium By-Pass - Everyday Life and
Contemporary Urbanism in India and China, which will take place at De
Balie in Amsterdam, November 15, and is a co-production with Sarai and
CRIT (Mumbai).
The whole event will be documented in detail on the Balie website and
the whole symposium will be available as video documentation afterwards.
We will provide further details about the on-line coverage of this
event as preparations proceed.
best wishes,
Eric
---------------------------
A N N O U N C E M E N T
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.
----------------------------------------------------
Confirmed speakers & biographical information:
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
Prasad Shetty is an executive member of the Collective Research
Initiatives Trust, Mumbai and also works with the Mumbai Metropolitan
Region Development Authority. His work involves research and teaching
on contemporary Indian urbanism and has been a consulting urban
management expert in India and abroad. His work on mapping new
urbanism has been exhibited in India, UK, Denmark and Italy. His
current work includes research on politics of property and
entrepreneurial practices.
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
Ravi Sundaram is a Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, Delhi and is one of the initiators of Sarai, Delhi. He has
written extensively on contemporary intersections of technology, media
and urban experience. He has taught in the United States and India; in
Spring of this year he was a Fellow of the Sheldon Cullom Davis Centre
in Princeton University. In Delhi he is regularly teaches at the
School of Planning & Architecture. His “After Media: Pirate Culture
and Urban Life” is due from Routledge, London in 2009. His current
work is on urban fear.
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. Before coming to Toronto, he
was an urban researcher operating from Bangalore, India. His interests
lie in the politics of land and tenure and have been working on issues
relating to the way big business re-shapes city governance.
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”,
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.
Kadir van Lohuizen is a venerated photojournalist, working with
photoagency Hollandse Hoogte in Amsterdam en Agence Vu in Paris. He
won the prestigious Visa d'Or news at Visa Pour L'Image with his work
on Chad published in Le Monde. Recently he has made a series on
migrant workers in the context of the Chinese Olympics. (tbc)
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.
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