Urban South Asia: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the City

This course takes the category of the city as a starting point of inquiry into the dynamics of social, cultural and political life in South Asia. One-fifth of the world’s population lives in urban centres in South Asia, from small towns to mega-cities. The course approaches the city, first, as a symbolic space where discourses of belonging, past and future are negotiated. This includes envisioning of the modern nation-state through statist projects of infrastructure and mass transit, heritage conservation or ‘beautification’ of the city. At the same time, cities have been the subject of cultural expressions and narratives of belonging, hope and loss that are found in the realms of literature, poetry, street art, and other forms.

Second, the city is also a space of inclusion and exclusion. The course asks how urbanism has been negotiated by citizen-subjects along intersectional lines of class, gender, ethnicity, age etc. Henri Lefebvre, the sociologist-philosopher, writes in his Right to the City of the modern Western city being a space where the promise of equal citizenship was confronted with fault lines of difference and existing privilege versus new claims to the city. In how far is Lefebvre’s conceptualization of urban space useful and contestations of these useful for understanding the postcolonial urban context? How has the modernist discourse on urbanism translated into governance technologies that make invisible but also actively silence parts of the city? How are gender, ethnicity and class manifested as well as generated through urban space.

The course adopts a inter- and multidisciplinary lens, drawing on research from urban studies, anthropology, architecture, political science, history, literature and film. It explores the complex webs of social, political and economic relationships that shape the cities of South Asia through two thematic blocs: Imaginations of the city and inclusion/exclusion in the city. Case studies will represent different parts of South Asia as well as engage with comparative examples across the Global South and transregional connections between cities.