Professor Rahul Mehrotra, Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)
Sourav Biswas, Landscape Planner and Spatial Analyst; GSD graduate
Asia Center Seminar Series; co-sponsored with the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute
START
Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 12:15pm
END
Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 02:00pm
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?
Sanjoy Chakravorty, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University and Visiting Fellow, Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design
Possible through the generosity of the Asia Center
START
Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 06:00pm
END
Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 07:30pm
VENUE
CGIS South, S250
Harvard University
ADDRESS
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge MA
in Seminars, Urbanization, India
PATRICK HELLER
Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University
CHAIR: SAI BALAKRISHNAN
Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Harvard Graduate School Of Design
Drawing on fieldwork in a range of communities in Delhi, Patrick Heller documents inequity, and exclusion within basic service distribution across the city. These exclusionary practices have both a formal character built into policies that differentiate citizenship rights across settlement types and an informal character driven by political arrangements.
START
Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 04:00pm
END
Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 05:30pm
VENUE
CGIS South, S050
Harvard University
ADDRESS
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge MA
The collaboration between Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar emerges from the intersection of their respective disciplines – architecture and documentary film. The film opens these disciplines to self-critique and looks at the way that they imagine and construct a nation and its citizen.
Avijit Mukul, Filmmaker
Rohan Shivkumar, Architect
Chair: Rahul Mehrotra
Professor Of Urban Design And Planning,
Harvard Graduate School Of Design
START
Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 06:00pm
END
Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 07:30pm
VENUE
CGIS South, S020 Belfer
Harvard University
ADDRESS
1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge MA 02138
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
START
Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 06:00pm
END
Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 07:30pm
VENUE
CGIS South, S153
Harvard University
ADDRESS
1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
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.
START
Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 06:30pm
END
Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 08:00pm
VENUE
CGIS South, S250
Harvard University
ADDRESS
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge MA
in Urbanization
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.
START
Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 06:30pm
END
Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 08:00pm
VENUE
CGIS South, S050
Harvard University
ADDRESS
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge MA
in Seminars, Urbanization, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan
Urbanization Seminar
Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Chair: Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design
This paper looks at the role of media and communication technologies in the imagination of urban spaces in contemporary Bombay cinema. If surveillance practices and their resultant structuring becomes one part of this imagination (No Smoking 2007, LSD 2010, Ugly, 2013), we also see the role of the internet and social media in the framing of spatial encounters in small town India (Masaan 2015). A fascination for ‘obsolete’ technology frames another order of space linked to the recent past (Gangs of Wasseypur 2012, Miss Lovely 2012, Dum Lagake Haisha, 2015), while documentary films like John and Jayne (2005) invoke the call centre imagination within a fractured urban subjectivity. In these films, the themes of violence, love, tragedy and comedy are enacted within a spatial terrain triggered by new media technologies. Taken together these films offer a new geography of the experiential changes unraveling in contemporary India.
Ranjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) and co-author with Nitin Govil of the forthcoming The Indian Film Industry. She has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and her productions include Delhi Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (Co-Directed). Her current research focuses on globalization and film culture, the visual culture of film posters and the intersection of technology, travel, design and colour in 1960s Bombay Cinema.
START
Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 6:30 pm
END
Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 8:00 pm
VENUE
CGIS South, S354
ADDRESS
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge MA 02138
Urbanization Seminar
Henrik Valeur, Architect-Urbanist, Founder and Creative Director of UiD
Chair: Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Can India use urbanization as a driver of economic, human and social development like China has done? How can Indian cities be made more inclusive, productive and livable? Are there any simple solutions to the seemingly insurmountable problems of urban India – the life threatening levels of air pollution, the desperate lack of water, the precarious food situation, the squalid living conditions in the slums, the chaotic, choked and congested road traffic? This lecture will discuss some of these problems and propose some possible solutions, using the cities of Bangalore in South India and Chandigarh in North India as its primary cases. The concept of smart cities will briefly be discussed and co-evolution and development urbanism will be introduced as alternative strategies.
START
Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 6:30 pm
END
Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 8:00 pm
VENUE
CGIS South, S354
ADDRESS
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge MA 02138
