Jindal School of Art and Architecture

Through an engagement with the histories of Muslim pasts, presences, and absences in the locality of Jangpura-Bhogal in the Indian capital city of Delhi, this article examines the constitutive relationship between displacements and city-making. It addresses Jangpura-Bhogal's post-colonial history (1947-present) through instances of the erasure of Muslim property, spaces, and histories, and the reoccupations, replacements, and redefinition of spaces, properties, and memories that they constituted. The article shows how protracted material displacements of Muslim property and spaces have contributed to the erasure of a Muslim historical presence from Jangpura-Bhogal. By tracing the afterlives of these material displacements, it tracks how narrative discourses draw on these Muslim absences and the sense of an abstract 'diverse space' to produce new sets of exclusions and practices of Othering in the present. The discussion focuses on the processual/everyday, 'below the radar', and, at times, invisible displacements, more than sudden eruptions of violence or overt ideological projects aimed at a deliberate Muslim erasure. Thus, Delhi's post-colonial history is not only about the well-rehearsed story of migrations and arrivals but equally about departures and displacements that have produced the neighbourhood and the city as particular kinds of majoritarian places and spaces. Current acts of Muslim displacement, that is, the Delhi 'riots' of February 2020 are enabled not only through visible and violent histories of Muslim marginalization, but also by longer histories of non-overt erasures, displacements, and replacements.

This paper examines space-making in the Jangpura-Bhogal locality of Delhi by documenting communal conflicts in the late 1920s and 1950s. First, it addresses the production of a Hindu religious space by disavowing Muslim ritual practices under a colonial regime seeking to control religious conflict. Second, it unpacks the diverse mechanisms used to produce a Sikh political space during a nascent postcolonial state’s management of linguistic subnationalisms. Grounded in power relations and cohesions around multiple social registers, these variegated spatial claims were made through political and religious processions, petitions and physical violence. These communal geographies highlight the importance of neighbourhood histories.

IntroductionAmbulance-based emergency medical systems (EMS) are expensive and remain rare in low- and middle-income countries, where trauma victims are usually transported to hospital by passing vehicles. Recent developments in transportation network technologies could potentially disrupt this status quo by allowing coordinated emergency response from layperson networks. We sought to understand the barriers to bystander assistance for trauma victims in Delhi, India, and implications for a layperson-EMS.MethodsWe used qualitative methods to analyse data from 50 interviews with frontline stakeholders (including taxi drivers, medical professionals, legal experts and police), one stakeholder consultation and a review of documents.ResultsRespondents noted that most trauma victims in Delhi are rapidly brought to hospital by bystanders, taxis and police. While ambulances are common, they are primarily used for interfacility transfers. Entrenched medico-legal practices result in substantial...

Urbanization can change the local climate of an area, one manifestation of which is a rise in the local temperature of built-up areas, a phenomenon known as an urban heat island. The thermal response of built-up areas in comparison to natural areas is quantified in terms of surface urban heat island (SUHI) intensity. The work presented here evaluates the seasonal SUHI intensities in Delhi using local climate zones (LCZs) and conventional SUHI indicators in parallel. Statistical analyses are carried out to determine the relationship between them and to delineate heat stressed zones in the Delhi city region. The present study is the first one that utilizes LCZs for seasonal SUHI analysis in Delhi. The land surface temperature (LST) is assessed using a hundred and five night-time images from MODIS. Unambiguous night-time SUHI effect is seen for all seasons. The maximum night-time SUHI intensity is 3.5°C, between "compact low-rise" (LCZ 3) and "low plants" (LCZ D) in summer and winter. The conventional indicator "Inside urban-Inside rural" gives the highest night-time SUHI intensity of 3.3°C, in autumn. Statistical analyses show that "compact low-rise" (LCZ3) and "large low-rise" (LCZ8) are the most heat-stressed LCZs. The largest number of distinct thermal zones is created in the monsoon, followed by summer and winter. The results suggest that in order to minimize the UHI effect, further urban expansion in the Delhi region should be restricted to LCZ 5 (open mid-rise) and LCZ 6 (open low-rise).

This paper presents exploratory research into data-intensive development that seeks to inductively identify issues and conceptual frameworks of relevance to big data in developing countries. It presents a case study of big data innovations in Stelcorp? a state electricity corporation in India. In an attempt to address losses in electricity distribution, Stelcorp has introduced new digital meters throughout the distribution network to capture big data, and organisation-wide information systems that store and process and disseminate big data. Emergent issues are identified across three domains: implementation, value and outcome. Implementation of big data has worked relatively well but technical and human challenges remain. The advent of big data has enabled some ?albeit constrained ?value addition in all areas of organisational operation: customer billing, fault and loss detection, performance measurement, and planning. Yet US$ tens of millions of investment in big data has brought no aggregate improvement in distribution losses or revenue collection. This can be explained by the wider outcome, with big data faltering in the face of external politics; in this case the electoral politics of electrification. Alongside this reproduction of power, the paper also reflects on the way in which big data has enabled shifts in the locus of power: from public to private sector; from labour to management; and from lower to higher levels of management. A number of conceptual frameworks emerge as having analytical power in studying big data and global development. The information value chain model helps track both implementation and value-creation of big data projects. The design-reality gap model can be used to analyse the nature and extent of barriers facing big data projects in developing countries. And models of power ?resource dependency, epistemic models, and wider frameworks ?are all shown as helping understand the politics of big data.

A more detailed version of the paper also came out as a working paper in Development Informatics at the University of Manchester, a copy from which is uploaded here

This paper takes note of the recent spurt in non-metropolitan urbanisation unearthed by the Census of 2011 in India to refocus attention on the ‘small town’ as an object of research. It takes stock of the research on urban formations in India to highlight how the category of the ‘small town’ has been the discursive casualty of the epic modern separations between the urban and the rural. Further, following recent trends of research, the paper tries to establish the ‘small town’ as a critical entry-point into the larger discipline of urban studies and not simply as an absence within its rubric. To this effect, it takes up the studies grouped under the ‘subaltern urbanisation’ thesis that has sought to reflect upon the rise on non-metropolitan urbanisation in India, to explore its problems and possibilities. The paper argues that a reincorporation of historically produced regional-spatial variability, an attention to human migration and a critical take on the criteria of built-up area with a designated population density as a measure of the urban, might allow a more nuanced posing of the concerned thesis. This posing, it is further argued, could help in two further ways to move away from a notion of the ‘small town’ simply as an unit of economic dynamism: to more directly incorporate the question of power/politics within an understanding of ‘small town’ formations, and to think of a trajectory of capital accumulation as a total process that does not necessarily support the continuance of an arena of ‘need-economy’ as presumably functioning in ‘small town’ economies and other urban margins.

Data Centres (DCs) have emerged as the key infrastructure for amassing and processing the lifeblood of the globalised digital economy—data. So far, the digital economy has been studied in terms of information technology labour, regimes of privacy or data protection, and the implications of living in an increasingly connected world.

Data Centres as Infrastructure goes beyond technical/business-oriented accounts of DCs and views them as both an object and a principle of governance in India, one of the world's most prominent rising markets for DCs. The authors understand DCs not just as technical infrastructure, but as political institutions that make and exercise new forms of power while negotiating state and capital in the postcolonial nation.

Taking a historical and sociological approach to DCs, this volume explores actual social contexts of policy-making and practice in relation to problems of digitalisation that inflect the way in which lives, commerce, and governance are shaped in India. Through case studies, the authors examine a ‘captive’ Data Centre deployed by the state-owned electricity discom— WBSEDCL, to highlight a specific techno-political issue—the theft of power and the ‘(un)management’ of its loss. The volume also examines the production of a new form of territoriality, economy, and polity in the Navi Mumbai area, known for being home to several large DCs. The Introduction highlights some of these concerns through a discussion of how the Indian state yields space to norms of corporatised governance while also enrolling  new kinds of data-fied subjects through the Aadhaar project, demonetisation, and ‘data localisation’.

https://orientblackswan.com/details?id=9789354422652

Intro: discusses state power in India as implicated in the peculiar control regimes characteristic of digital infrastructures of governance while also retaining conventional executive functions in enrolling Indian citizens within mandates of digital governance.

This work owes much to many people over two countries and myriad academic disciplines without whose support it would have not been possible. Foremost are the four outstanding members of my doctoral committee: Mary Woods, Dominic Boyer, Salah Hassan and Terence Turner. They permitted me considerable latitude to not only explore my ideas but also offered sound counsel when it came time to bring those ideas together. To Mary Woods, my committee chair, I am immensely grateful for her nurturing attitude, her unflinching faith in my work, and our many lively and intense discussions about our common area of interest, the histories of architecture and architects all over the world, especially India. To Dominic Boyer, who was my cochair while he was at Cornell, I owe especial thanks for cultivating my anthropological inclinations, for our conversations on expertise and identity, and suggesting that I undertake a dual major in anthropology and architecture. Salah Hassan's timely comments and insights regarding questions of postcoloniality and modernity within African and Asian nations have always spurred me on towards refining the arguments and questions that this work tackles. I thank Terence Turner for introducing me to the subtleties of anthropological and social theory, especially the Marxian corpus. I must also thank Sudipta Sen at the Department of History, Syracuse University, for the wonderful guidance that I received in an independent study course on Modern Indian history. Indeed, this is true for all my teachers at Cornell in varied departments of English, Government Studies, German Studies, and History in whose classes various aspects of this work gained degrees of concretion. I also cannot forget Elleh Nnamdi, at the Department of Architecture, University of Cincinnati for his great support and help in the final stages of writing of this dissertation. vi This dissertation was written with the financial support of a Sage Graduate Fellowship, as well as teaching assistantships in the Department of History of Architecture and Urbanism, and Department of Anthropology. Additional support in form of conference, travel and research grants came from the Cornell Graduate School and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. I was particularly honored to receive the A. Henry Detweiler Fund Traveling Fellowship in 2004 which allowed me to undertake significant preliminary research in India. I am also immensely thankful for the Research Associateship at the TVB School of Habitat Studies during 2005-6 which permitted me to spend fifteen months conducting interviews and researching their archives. I am also thankful to the Department of Architecture, University of Cincinnati for presenting me with an opportunity to teach while I finished writing the dissertation. The personnel at many libraries in the US and India were a tremendous resource for my research. I am especially thankful to the staff at the Fine Arts, Olin and Kroch libraries at Cornell. I was assisted by the archivists at the Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, the National Archives, India and the Parliament Library and Reference, Research, Documentation and Information Service (LARRDIS), India who helped me navigate through the immense labyrinth of official document of the Indian Government. I am grateful to Mr. Bholanath Bannerjee for providing me with the access to the Parliamentary Library. I am also thankful to the staff at the Sohrab F. Bharoocha Architectural Library at the Indian Institute of Architects, Mumbai for providing me with such gracious access to the archives of the institute. This research would not have been possible, of course, without the unfailing cooperation of my colleagues/informants/friends: the wonderful architects of India. Not only did they bear all my incessant questionings with good humor but also graciously put me in contact with so many individuals who in turn expanded my social vii Table of Contents xi List of Figures xiii List of Abbreviations xv

In 2006, the Delhi Urban Arts Commission (DUAC) along with the Lt. Governor of Delhi and the Government of Delhi instituted a "task-force" comprising "experts" (architects, urban designers, and municipal bodies) and "lay-folk" (local resident welfare associations and residents) to present a proposal for redeveloping Khirki "Urban Village." For all actors involved, the stakes in this project were rather high-the State, the Residents of Khirki and the experts. Using ethnographic vignettes this paper unpacks this politics of the designs, to elaborate a "praxical present" within which expertise, experts, the State and the citizens all get (dis)entangled with each other through idioms that far exceed those of the Modern State, citizenship, individual and communitarian rights.