GLAS Colloquium Presents: “Looking past Overarching State Plans and Myriad Subversions: Lessons from intermediate-scale planning efforts in contemporary India”
October 21, 2019
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Location
1050 University Hall
Address
601 S Morgan St. , Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileGlobal Asian Studies Program Colloquium Series
Looking Past Overarching State Plans and Myriad Subversions: Lessons from Intermediate-scale Planning Efforts in Contemporary India
A talk by Dr. Sanjeev Vidyarthi
Associate Professor, Director of Master of City Design Program and the Senior Fellow Great Cities Institute Urban Planning and Policy
Trained as an architect, urban designer and spatial planner, Sanjeev studies how to make better plans for places. Exploring city planning and designing efforts across policy and spatial scales in a variety of settings like neighborhoods, new towns, historic places and mega-regions, his research explores who does (and should do) the city design and planning work. Sanjeev has lived, worked and studied in the Middle East, Western Europe, and the United States while examining the case of independent India using a comparative lens, insider/outsider perspective and an integrative framework. He works with progressive scholars and professional practitioners worldwide.
The story of planning in India, and indeed most of the global south, typically suffers from a misleading dualism. Either plans exploit the colonized or plans liberate them. Colonists aimed to further the imperial enterprise by introducing the modern idea of large-scale, 'top down' planning that the postcolonial elites subsequently reinforced. Poor and marginalized communities subverted, and even sabotaged, many of these plans from 'bottom up' employing whatever means available. Sanjeev's empirical work embraces a pragmatist approach to understanding how plans actually shape places. Detailed fieldwork studying a variety of settlements reveals how planning work involves many actors (homeowners, squatters, developers, politicians, etc.) making different kinds of plans (tacit, spontaneous, incremental, formal, and more) that collectively shape urban and suburban places. This presentation will showcase recent research exploring intermediate-scale planning efforts drawing out lessons and possible future directions for studying rapidly-growing urban regions across Asia.
Date posted
Oct 17, 2019
Date updated
Oct 17, 2019