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Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 06:00pm
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Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 07:30pm
Economic corridors — ambitious infrastructural development projects throughout Asia and Africa — are dramatically redefining the shape of urbanization. As these corridors cut across croplands, the conversion of agricultural lands into new urban uses has erupted in volatile land conflicts. This talk will focus on urbanization along the first economic corridor built in India, the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.
Speakers:
Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Bish Sanyal, Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning, Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies/Humphrey Fellows Program, MIT
Patrick Heller, Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs, Brown University
Susan Fainstein, Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow in Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Moderator:
Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design
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Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 06:00pm
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Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 07:30pm
Urban conservation is often a pressing challenge in historic Indian cities experiencing the pressures of development. Many cities, often lacking any viable local-level policy and enforcement, have resorted to alternative tools, often citizen-led, to accomplish the goal of conservation. This seminar will explore the tools of advocacy, politics, and civic engagement through recent examples from the city of Lucknow in northern India.
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Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:00pm
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Thu, May 30, 2019 at 08:00pm
In the past decade, over 1.3 million people have been killed in road crashes in India. Ten times more have been left seriously injured or permanently disabled. The issue has emerged as the single biggest killer of young people in India (15-45 age group). Given the multiplicity of agencies and overlapping responsibilities, where should the accountability lie and who should own the issue to resolve it? Are there learnings from dealing with other epidemics that can be applied to road crashes?
This and more in our next India Seminar Series event with Piyush Tewari, Founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and Former Mason Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Priyank Narayan, Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship at Ashoka University will moderate the discussion.
The lecture will begin at 6.30 pm (High tea will be served at 6.00 pm).
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Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 06:00pm
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Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 07:30pm
Sripad Motiram, Associate Professor of Economics and Affiliated Faculty, Asian Studies Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Co-Director, Asian Political Economy Program (Political Economy Research Institute) and Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Sripad Motiram and Vamsi Vakulabharanam will discuss how space is structured in two Indian cities, Hyderabad and Mumbai, along the axes of class and caste. By grouping individuals into classes, castes, and spatial units, they will show that these factors are all independently important in making sense of inequality. Together, they document high (relative to US cities) spatial co-existence — which they call “Grayness” — of groups, and will demonstrate its positive role in achieving development outcomes, arguing that the neoliberal restructuring of cities is eroding it.
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Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 06:00pm
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Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 07:30pm
In her building and writing, architect Minnette de Silva sought to recreate a “felicitous community spirit” across social and cultural differences, as stated in her memoir — a text on the significant multi-family housing project her office undertook. In this event, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Assistant Professor of the Department of Architecture at Columbia University, will perform a critical examination of de Silva’s work. Siddiqi will discuss the claims de Silva sought to incorporate into modern architecture for Ceylon, and her labors as a cultural narrator imagining a heritage at the end of a half-century career.
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Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 06:00pm
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Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 07:30pm
India’s National Capital Region now includes parts of four states and about 30 million people. It is in the vanguard of global urban change of a particular type—the rise of the colossal metropolis. What do we know and can say about its spatial structure (and change) and social structure (and change)? How well does existing “urban theory” prepare us for Delhi? To what extent does Delhi prepare us for a new “urban theory”? How much of it is global, how much Indian, and how much just Delhi itself?
START
Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 04:00pm
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Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 05:30pm
Drawing on fieldwork in a range of communities in Delhi, Heller documents inequity and exclusion within basic service distribution across the city.
START
Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 06:00pm
END
Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 07:30pm
The film opens the discipline of architecture and filmmaking to self-critique and looks at the way that they imagine and construct a nation and its citizen.
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Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 06:00pm
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Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 07:30pm
A South Asia Institute Urbanization Seminar Series:
“Understanding India’s New Approach to Spatial Planning and Development”
Sanjeev Vidyarthi
Author; Associate Professor, Urban Planning and Policy, The University of Illinois at Chicago
Moderated by
Rahul Mehrotra
Professor of Urban Planning and Design and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning
and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design
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Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 06:30pm
END
Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 08:00pm
Urbanization Seminar
Lisa Bjorkman, Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Louisville
Chair: Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor in Urban Planning, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
In the Indian city of Mumbai, two dazzling decades of urban development and roaring economic growth have presided over the steady deterioration – and sometimes spectacular breakdown – of the city’s water infrastructures. Water troubles plague not only the more-than 60% of city residents now reported to live in ‘slums,’ but city elites as well have seen their taps grow increasingly erratic and prone to drying up. The everyday risks of water shortage that infuse the city’s water infrastructures– risks that flow across class lines – are managed and mitigated through the forging and maintenance of elaborate knowledge-exchange networks. Getting water to come out of Mumbai’s pipes is an activity that requires continuous attention to and intimate knowledge of a complex and dynamic social and political hydraulic landscape. Ethnographic attention reveals how water is made to flow by means of intimate forms of knowledge and ongoing intervention in the city’s complex and dynamic social, political, and hydraulic landscape. The everyday work of getting water animates and inhabits a penumbra of infrastructural activity – of business, brokerage, secondary markets and socio-political networks – whose workings are transforming lives as well as reconfiguring and rescaling political authority in the city. Mumbai’s illegible and volatile hydrologies are lending infrastructures increasing political salience just as actual control over pipes and flows becomes contingent upon dispersed and intimate assemblages of knowledge, power, and material authority.
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Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 06:30pm
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Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 08:00pm
Urbanization Seminar
Dr. A Ravindra, Chairman, Institute for Social & Economic Change, Bangalore
Adnan Morshed, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, the Catholic University of America
Mubbashir Rizvi, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Georgetown University
Chair: Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor in Urban Planning, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
This panel brings together three urban scholars and practitioners from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and it deals with the contemporary challenges facing rapid urbanization in South Asia. This panel presents a unique opportunity to have a cross-cutting conversation across South Asian countries to both situate their planning experiences in their specific contexts, but to also ask if there are any commonalities about the South Asian urban experience. It is also a chance to learn about design and planning practices from across neighboring boundaries.
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Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 06:30pm
END
Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 08:00pm
Urbanization Seminar
Narendar Pani, Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India
Chair: Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor in Urban Planning, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
The challenge of combating caste discrimination in India has generated two quite different approaches. There has been a radical view that the caste system can be made to disappear through, to use Ambedkar’s terminology, its annihilation. In contrast, there were approaches such as that of Gandhi as well as the first attempts at affirmative action in the princely state of Mysore in 1921, which allowed for the possible resilience of the institution and hence focused on ensuring greater equality between castes. This talk will begin by arguing that political reality has lent its weight, for better or for worse, to the idea of the resilience of caste. If we look at three important dimensions of caste – identity, power and discrimination – there is evidence of change but not necessarily a decline in importance. It will then explore the nature of this resilience in the face of global influences, using evidence from one of the Indian cities most impacted by globalization, Bangalore.
