The Social Life of Streets in India

Histories, Contestations and Subjectivities

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• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9789354353970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Streets are places that stimulate activities, interactions, behaviours and, by extension, controls. Yet, within the built environment discourse, the street is first and foremost conceptualised as a mute backdrop to movement-vehicular or pedestrian. The Covid-19 pandemic brought renewed focus on the street as the space of networks, flows and mobilities as the 'lockdown' was the preferred mode of controlling the spread of the disease.
The Social Life of Streets in India: Histories, Contestations and Subjectivities endeavours to understand the complexities of social dynamics of streets in relation to spatiality and materiality in the Indian milieu. It draws from a diverse body of scholarship and varied disciplinary leanings and engages with three broad strands: historical aspects of streets, the physicality of street as a built environment and social science discourse mediated through anthropology, urban geography, social theory and urban studies.
Further the volume deliberates on questions such as: How do we look at streets and, in particular, how do we document and conceptualise streets in the Indian context that highlights the particularities of South Asian milieus? Is the street public? Is it merely a physical space? How does the street in its physicality and in its built form enter or respond to the metaphorical, the literary, the methodological and the social?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Table, Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Streets Have Social Lives —Sadan Jha and Gauri Bharat
• 2 Becoming Streets: Rhythms and Geographies of Urban Practice in Bhuj —Himanshu Burte, Aditya Singh and Bhawna Jaimini
• 3 Street and Its Subalterns: Conversations on the Go —Sadan Jha
• 4 Sarani to Dharani: Street Life and the Remaking of Kolkata’s Pasts—Aparajita De
• 5 Mobilising a Folk Art: Madhubani Paintings and the Aesthetic Transformation of a Patna Streetscape —Sprya Sharma
• 6 Class, Consumption and Culture: High Streets and the Neoliberal Imagination of the Indian Cities —Debapriya Ganguly and Rakesh M. Krishnan
• 7 Memories and Possibilities of Un/Equal Street: Linking Road, Mumbai—Kamalika Banerjee
• 8 Street-Space or Road-Space? Contested Mobility in Ahmedabad—Rutul Joshi
• 9 Theorising Contestations over Decongesting Street Economies: Beyond Narratives of Inevitable Dispossessions and Shared Commons—Varun Patil
• 10 The Messy Lives of Chokepoints: Infrastructure and Streets in the Hilly Town of Kalimpong—Anisa Bhutia
• 11 Taps, Walls, Seats: The Contested Street Commons in Veli, Kerala—Eva Thomas and Aishwarya Padmanabhan
• 12 Festivals on the Street—Aishwarya Morwal
• 13 Roadside Shrines in Ahmedabad: Subalternity, Religious Politics and the Shaping of the Street as a Public Realm—Gauri Bharat
• 14 Thinking through the Residual Shrines on the Roads of SEZ Hyderabad—Baishali Ghosh
• 15 Four Gullies and a Fortnight—Richa Jha
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors