From: Sangeeta Mediratta <smedirat@stanford.edu>
Date: Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 10:30 PM
Subject: January 24 and 25: VERNACULAR URBANISM AND THE PROVINCIAL CITY IN SOUTH ASIA
To:
Dear All, Please help publicize this event widely by forwarding the attached program and flier. Thanks!
VERNACULAR URBANISM AND THE PROVINCIAL CITY IN SOUTH ASIA
4th Urban South Asia Seminar
January 24, 10:00 AM – 4:30 PM (From 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM on this day the seminar will convene in Encina Hall West, Room 208.)
January 25, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Stanford Humanities Center, Board Room
The four major metropolitan cities in India, Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai, have a paradigmatic place in the literature on urban life in the entire region. Large cities like Bangalore and Ahmedabad are scantily studied as urban spaces, and so are Lahore, Karachi and Kathmandu. Other major urban spaces, such as Dhaka or Colombo, or Lucknow and Kanpur, are hardly studied in their contemporary form. However, the biggest absence in the scholarly understanding of urban South Asia is the massive landscape of hundreds of provincial cities, many of them exceeding 500,000 people. Most of these cities have emerged in the past few decades from being minor towns, local railway hubs and minor industrial centers.
This conference will explore two larger questions: (1) what spatial, political and cultural imaginings and designs define the public life of provincial cities? Do the metropolitan areas in the region provide hegemonic models or do we see attempts to define aesthetics, symbols and urban institutions that reflect specific regional histories? (2) As urban centers grow and diversify in terms of communities of caste, language and religion what are the relations between ‘community’ as an ethical and practical structure, and the commercialization of public life.
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