Raina GHOSH, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
The discursive hegemony of citationary practices across policy domains have so far talked about the designs, schematics and experiences of the Global North to be sincerely emulated in the making of world-class cities of the Global South. Under the neoliberal urban restructuring paradigm, cities and their riverbanks have been glorified as ideal spaces for speculative capital with attempts to use culture as an appropriating tool in deciding the ‘look and feel of cities’, establishing its integrity to post-modern urban spatiality.
The history of riverfront in Kolkata and particularly ‘ghats’ (locally, flight of steps leading down to the river) has been quintessentially a montage of histories of a riparian village’s transition to a megacity, its labour, livelihoods and political ecologies around a long, muddy, aqueous terrain. This study aims to unravel the nuances of production of urban spaces along the River Hooghly in Kolkata, through various historically rooted, placemaking processes – and their transitions over time, as argued - through a logic of capitalistic ‘embellishment fixes’. Visionary urban redevelopment projects have reduced these spaces into sanitised strands of spectacle and beauty, replacing the vernacular rhythms of corporeal engagements with the city’s rivers, evident along ghats. These characteristic hydrosocial relations help in the everyday city making exercise and forge urban flows between the local and the region. Therefore, ghats here serve as the new optic to look into the making and remaking of certain everyday waterscapes in the margins of cities of Global South using a Lefebvrian triad of production of space working in a milieu of perceived, conceived and lived spaces. The optics of Southern urbanism promises not only to unravel the situatedness of experiences of the cities in South Asia or Global South at large but to underscore the ordinariness of these cities in contributing to the extraordinary symphonies of ‘urban’ in the making.
Mots clés : Production of space|Hydrosocial Relations|Neoliberal Placemaking|Embellishments|City-margins
A105056RG