Ayona Datta

New urban utopias of postcolonial India ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat

Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India, in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws. First, I argue that Dholera smart city is part of a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning that emerged as a response to the challenges of development and modernity in post-independent India. Second, that Dholera highlights a shift towards an ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in a regional state interested in scaling up a ‘Gujarat model of development’ for emulation at the scale of the nation. Finally, that in Dholera ‘speed’ is a relative term across its scales of manifestation from the global to local, where short ‘bursts of speed’ in conceptualization and investment is matched by significant ‘bottlenecks’ via local protests. The article concludes that Dholera’s fault lines are built into its utopian imaginings, which prioritizes urbanization as a business model rather than a model of social justice.

Places of Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: East European Construction Workers in London

I illustrate how cosmopolitanisms among East European construction workers in London are shaped by the localised spatial contexts in which encounters with difference take place. Their cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviours arise from both survival strategies and a taste for cultural goods, thus challenging the elite–working-class divide in current cosmopolitanism literature. Through semistructured interviews and participant photographs of twenty-four East European construction workers who have arrived in London since the European Union expansion in May 2004, I illustrate how these ‘new’ European citizens develop varying degrees and multitudes of cosmopolitanisms in everyday places such as building sites and shared houses. These cosmopolitanisms are shaped by their transnational histories, nationalistic sentiments, and access to social and cultural capital in specific localised contexts. Thus subjective perceptions of gendered, ethnic, and racial notions of ‘others’ that are carried across national boundaries are reinforced or challenged as their encounters with ‘others’ produce perceptions of marginalisation or empowerment in these places. Finally, I suggest that cosmopolitanism should be understood not simply through class but rather also through access to power and capital in everyday localised contexts.

Spatialising performance: masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field

While there are many self-reflexive accounts of ‘field’ experience, few researchers have explicitly examined how different places within the field shape gender performances and subsequently the research process. This paper spatialises the notion of ‘performance’ by examining how male and female bodies in particular places of the field are perceived both by researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. The analysis is based on fieldwork in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi where the author and her research assistant conducted semi-structured interviews with the residents. The fieldwork highlighted how the embedded power structures in different places of the field created encounters between different gendered bodies and, in turn, how different relationships between researchers and participants shaped the field ‘experience’. I suggest that the ‘field’ should not be understood as a homogeneous terrain, but as a fragmented collection of places, each constructing multiple gender identities in research, and each telling its own research story.

The New Urban Agenda: key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice

The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito ‘New Urban Agenda’ that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reductionism in this new agenda, and argues for the reflexive need to be aware of the types of urban space that are potentially sidelined by the new trends in global urban policy.

India's Ecocity? Environment, Urbanisation, and Mobility in the Making of Lavasa

In a context of rapid urbanisation in the Global South the potential of ecocities to provide sustainable development is hotly debated within academic and policy circles. This paper will contribute to this debate by referring to Lavasa, Indias largest planned ‘hill city’, a fifth of the size of Mumbai. Mentioned in the influential McKinsey report as an emerging global city, Lavasa, the first ‘sustainable’ city developed in the Mumbai—Pune region, attempts to deal with urbanisation, environment, and migration in very particular ways. Yet, it has been riddled with controversies since its inception, and construction has been interrupted by the courts a number of times for alleged environmental violations. Using Lavasa as an example, I will examine the rise and rise of ecocities in India through their legal and policy context. I will argue that future ecocities in India run the danger of prioritising economic development over environmental sustainability in the absence of strong legal enforcement and monitoring of environmental performance. I conclude that strong environmental policy framing and regulation are crucial in this context if new planned cities in India are to have any potential in addressing the challenges of rapid urbanisation and sustainable development.

A 100 smart cities, a 100 utopias

In my response to the commentaries on my anchor article, I have taken on board the key question of how and why India has become the site of production of 100 proposed smart cities. I forward a notion of ‘technocratic nationalism’ to suggest that it is the young urban population in India who have largely bought into the smart city dream. Whilst drawing encouragement from the largely positive commentaries on my article, I then take on three main critiques of the article – first, that it has inadvertently promoted a hegemony of ‘city-ness’ by focusing on the imagined smart city to be; second, that the smart city has strong connections with colonial urban planning and third, whether Dholera should be considered the first smart city at all. I suggest that the article’s city-ness and postcolonial links to India’s urban planning is both political and heuristic, since it is the postcolonial ‘urban’ moment where India has situated its moment of modernity globalization and economic power. I contend that the final critique is based on a misinterpretation of the use of the word ‘first’, which was always intended to reflect a politics of innovation among cities. Finally, I suggest that the other ‘gaps’ in my article highlighted by one of the commentators is not a gap, rather beyond the scope and objectives of an exploratory article such as this.

‘Where Is the Global City?’ Visual Narratives of London among East European Migrants

Based on research conducted with men arriving from eastern Europe in London after the expansion of the EU in 2004, this article examines how migrants’ narratives of the city construct a counter-discourse to a ‘global’ London. It is argued that the use of ‘visual narratives’– a combination of participant-directed photography and semi-structured interviews as a methodology—allows for the exploration of embodied and material aspects of everyday lives in the city, which destabilise traditional urban pictorial approaches to the city. Such narratives of participants’ embodied movements through London relocate the observer as the everyday mobile-subject; they highlight the connections between urban and transnational mobilities; and they present participants’ constructions of different kinds of affective spaces in the city where they begin to negotiate home, belonging and return.

The possibilities and limits to dialogue

In this article, we explore the nature, value, and challenges of dialogue both within and outside the academy. After considering the possibilities and limits to dialogue, we divide our analysis into three sections, first discussing dialogue as a form of embodied action, next examining dialogue as a means of enacting a critically affirmative politics, and finally exploring the challenges of engaging in dialogue as a way of practicing public geographies. In each case, we raise a number of questions concerning the potential of, and limitations to, dialogue in an age of increasing social tensions and political divides. We conclude by suggesting that although there are times when dialogical disengagement is warranted if the conditions of possibility for meaningful dialogue are unfulfilled, scholarly dialogue continues to play an important role in fostering spaces of mutual engagement in a polarized age.

Gender and Learning in the Design Studio

Abstract This study examines the gender based learning issues of architectural education in a second year undergraduate architecture studio. It focuses on students’ learning dispositions, attitudes to, and perceptions of learning in the studio, their interpersonal relations with the tutors, and their learning motivations. By examining these issues, this study highlights that gender differences do exist in certain studio environments, and provides suggestions for change that would make learning in the studio more inclusive for all students.

‘Samudayik Shakti’: Working-class feminism and social organisation in Subhash Camp, New Delhi

This article illustrates the intersections between architecture and agency in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi, by ‘situating activism in place’. It highlights the significance of place in social action by examining the architecture of everyday places—the house, the street and the square—as the sites of both individual transformations and collective consciousness. Through observations of the activities of and interviews with members of Samudayik Shakti, a womens organisation and a mens panchayat, this article highlights a number of related processes in Subhash Camp: how different women experienced different places through everyday spatial practices; how the spatial practices in these places were shaped by different social structures at different scales, from the family to the state; how the architecture of these places was significant both as sites of control and of emancipation of womens bodies; and how this dynamic contributed to the making of social action in Subhash Camp.