From dak at sarai.net Tue Nov 2 14:39:55 2004 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 14:39:55 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] URBAN ENVIRONMENTS WORKSHOP Message-ID: <200411021439.55255.dak@sarai.net> URBAN ENVIRONMENTS WORKSHOP NOVEMBER 3 - 4, 2004 SARAI/ CSDS, DELHI In the recent past, environment has emerged as a major issue in urban politics in the cities of South Asia that has elicited a fair bit of response in the media, and a more limited one within the academia. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together ideas and engagements regarding the issue of environment in the cities of South Asia. We expect to sharpen these debates through a more historically situated engagement with the notion of 'urban environment'. We hope to generate discussions regarding the conceptual tools through which to address urban environments and also concerns around specific issues such as water, waste and pollution. An exhibition of cartoons on the state of our urban environment by Rustam Vania will also be on display at the Sarai Interface Zone. ******************************************************************************* PROGRAMME SCHEDULE ******************************************************************************* DAY 1: November 3, 2004 10.00 am - Introduction to the Workshop 10.30 -11.00 am - Tea 11.00 am - URBANITY AND NATURE Himanshu Burte - On the Edge: Viewing the Waterside Edge of Mumbai Prasad Shetty - Beyond Mangroves and Leopards: Mumbai Chair and Discussant: Solomon Benjamin 1.30 pm - THE POLITICS OF WATER Rutul Joshi and Vishal - Story of a Vanished Lake: Gopi Talao of Surat Shailaja Menon - The Politics of Water in Ahmedabad, 1856-1919 Chair and Discussant: Awadhendra Sharan 3.30 pm - CIRCULATING WASTE Bharti Chaturvedi - In the Public Interest: Reclaiming Community Aspirations for Recycling Chair and Discussant: Prasad Shetty *************************************************************************************** DAY 2: November 4, 2004 10.00 am - LANDSCAPES OF POPULAR IMAGINATION Solomon Benjamin - Localising Urban Environments Manisha Garg - Turkman Gate DDA Colony: Lessons for the Built to Accommodate the Unbuilt Chair and Discussant: Himanshu Burte 12.00 noon - LOCATING THE (UN)DESIRABLE Ravi Agarwal - Rethinking Environmental Standards Ritika Shrimali - Quo Vadis: The Slaughterhouse in Delhi Chair and Discussant: Prasad Shetty 2.30 pm - ENVIRONMENT AND THE 'PUBLIC' Sunalini - In this Greedy Roughhouse of Politics: Issue, Class and the Public Sphere in the CNG Controversy in Delhi Awadhendra Sharan - The City in Science and Law: Industrial Pollution, CNG Crisis and the Uncertain Futures of Delhi Chair and Discussant: Ravi Agarwal 4.30 pm - Concluding Session *************************************************************************************** URBAN TANGENT An Exhibition of Cartoons by Rustam Vania, CSE November 3 - 17, 2004 Sarai Interface Zone Globally threatened, locally ignored, with dirty air and even dirtier water, a government reduced to shooting in the dark and a population more concerned with consuming than sustaining: sounds familiar? Welcome to Rustam Vania's darkly comic take on the state of our urban environment... *************************************************************************************** *************************************************************************************** The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net From dak at sarai.net Fri Nov 5 19:03:32 2004 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 19:03:32 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] NOVEMBER 2004 Message-ID: <200411051903.32924.dak@sarai.net> CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2004 Urban Tangent: Exhibition of Cartoons by Rustam Vania Film @ Sarai: Sense Perception and Knowledge in the Modern City 5th Sweet Smell of Success, Dir. Alexander Mackendrick 19th High and Low, Dir. Akira Kurosawa Workshop Report: Emerging Urbanism Cybermohalla Residency @ Bootle ******************************************************************************** URBAN TANGENT An Exhibition of Cartoons by Rustam Vania, CSE November 3 - 17, 2004 Sarai Interface Zone Globally threatened, locally ignored, with dirty air and even dirtier water, a government reduced to shooting in the dark and a population more concerned with consuming than sustaining: sounds familiar? Welcome to Rustam Vania's darkly comic take on the state of our urban environment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FILM @ SARAI: A Cinema of Anxiety: Sense Perception and Knowledge in the Modern City Curated by Ravi S. Vasudevan Friday, November 5, 2004, 4:30 pm SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957), 98 minutes Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, USA Friday, November 19, 2004, 4:30 pm HIGH AND LOW (1962), 143 minutes Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Japan Sarai returns to a curatorial focus on "A Cinema of Anxiety". In the current series, we look at how feelings of uncertainty and anxiety emerge from the way sensory perception and information are organized in the modern city. Do we know what it is that we see and hear? Does it conceal something or someone else? Are there spaces underlying visible spaces? Is someone else listening or looking at us as part of a design we aren't aware of? Here, we explore how sense perception is intimately, and sometimes duplicitously, related to the conditions of knowing the world. The city provides us with a particularly charged space for the drama of the senses and knowledge. Its networks in law enforcement, professional expertise and the criminal underground (in turn 'departmentalised' into a division of skills) provide the circuit through which information is converted into knowledge. Telegraph and telephones, fax machines and Internet, motorcars, buses and subway relay messages and messengers into a web of meaning. Cutting from space to space, criss-crossing narrative tracks, calibrating knowledge for the spectator through its manipulation of sound and image, the cinema overlaps with these circuits and technologies, condensing in its stories crucial dimensions of modern experience. Fritz Lang, the celebrated German filmmaker whose career straddled five decades of cinema in Germany, France and the USA, is a key figure in the exploration of these issues. His early work in Germany - the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 'Metropolis' and 'M - The City Hunts for a Murderer', are amongst the great essays on the modern city. Both witness to the contemporary and, with 'Metropolis', a dystopian vision of the future, Lang unleashed an extraordinarily detailed sense of modern technologies of perception and communication. His famed opening sequence from 'Dr. Mabuse, the Great Gambler' (1922) constructs a rigorously edited theft involving a chase, train travel, telegraph transmission, all synchronised by the criminal mastermind Mabuse who sits in his sepulchral chambers. Lang's industrial magnate Freder who rules Metropolis from his lofty perch, foreshadows the technocrat Tyrell, whose Tyrell Corporation looms over the futurist Los Angeles of 'Blade Runner' (Ridley Scott, 1983). But Mabuse is more complicated, capturing in his persona a demonic power, but also, strangely, the power of anonymity. Thus he is a disguise artist who often plays the ordinary street character, but also moves in high society. Again, he is an expert in modern hypnosis, but also a practitioner of the mystical arts. There are suggestions here of an intricate scenario for the imagination of a transcendent evil in post-war Gemany, a society mired in inflation, unemployment and excess. The world of Mabuse is one of rigorous hierarchy and task delegation, in which subordinates tremble at the very voice of the diabolical master. We enter a different universe of power in 'Sweet Smell of Success', (Alexander Mackendrick, USA, 1957), where the malevolent newspaper columnist JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) commands fearful allegiance through a virulent pen that can wreck public lives and aspiring careers. Here again, voice and presence command attention, as Hunsecker lords over the incandescent New York of James Wong Howe's glittering camera work. Modern media forms are accessed here through the complicated ties of master and toady. The manipulative publicist Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) will do anything for his master and to get a line in his column. He weaves his way through jazz bars and high society spots, scouring for scurrilous material. Words function to rip and cut, as a sensorium of stylized dialogue delivery and musical atmospherics capture the tenor of the night city, its brute hierarchies and amoral manoeuvres. Akira Kurosawa's work, on the other hand, is animated by a purposeful moral and social vision. It is this orientation which organizes the architecture, literal and metaphorical, of Tokyo in 'High and Low' (1962). We get a view on the city from the high-rise apartment of a well-to-do businessman (Toshiro Mifune). Business partners and police descend on his home to work out the logistics of dealing with a kidnapper. The likelihood of mistaken identity in a city of strangers provides a twist. Instead of the industrialist's son, it is the chauffeur's child who has been spirited away. The hero chooses the ethical route and will pay ransom for his employee's son, courting financial disaster in the process. From the statically conceived, carefully framed upper reaches of the city, we are plunged into a different sensory world, capturing high speed trains and the underbelly of the city as the police go in search of the criminal. Out of an Ed Mcbain crime novel, Kurosawa remains true to the genre of the police procedural, mapping zones of likely habitation, house searches, and the investigation of criminal networks. At the climax, however, the procedural pursuit of knowledge is supplanted. The morally calibrated protagonist encounters the imponderable psychology of the assailant, a figure whose alienation and resentment achieves an angry aria of denunciation that lifts us into a different level of perception about the city of darkness. The curation is supported by the EU-India Economic Cross Cultural Programme. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WORKSHOP REPORT: Emerging Urbanism October 27-28, 2004 School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi A two-day workshop, 'Emerging Urbanism', was jointly organised by Sarai-CSDS and the Department of Urban Design, School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Delhi, on 27-28 October, 2004. Covering a wide range of issues and disciplines on urban experiences, the workshop provided a cross-disciplinary platform for urban designers, planners, social scientists and film makers to share their research and experience. The workshop included scholars and practitioners from Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Cochin, Kolkata and Delhi. Altogether fourteen papers were presented spread over six sessions focusing on 'Cybercity', 'Mumbai', 'Delhi', 'Neighbourhood', 'Media and City', and 'Identity Politics in the City'. A film, 'Ladies Special', directed by Nidhi Tuli, was also screened during the workshop. 'Emerging Urbanism' was an attempt to critically engage with the past decade of urban transformations in India commonly summarised under the term, 'globalisation.' The workshop discussions explored the complicated nature of locality, legal regimes, the politics of urban planning, dynamics of market and questions of publics and public spaces. During the workshop, various speakers stressed a strong need to set up collaborative partnerships in the area of urban research. Hence, a need for more similar platforms to share cross-disciplinary thinking on urban experiences was realised. Students of Urban Design at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, ran the workshop at the SPA premises. The students will soon make a detailed report on the workshop available on the Sarai website. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES FROM THE BOOTLE RESIDENCY October 10 - 14, 2004 For two weeks in October Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Neelofar and Shveta Sarda from the Cybermohalla Labs spent time with a group of eight young women and one young man in Bootle (Liverpool) to participate in the processes of their lab and to share some of the practices from the Cybermohalla Labs in Delhi. Bootle is a large part of the city of Liverpool, a locality of the dock workers of the city, which has a history of being a port central to global trade and transactions for over 300 years. The Bootle Lab is a room in the locality, situated in the Venus office. Venus is a non-government organisation that has worked with young women - single mothers, with unpredictable sources of income - in Bootle for the last twelve years. In the two weeks spent at the lab, stories of the everyday, soft evocations of relations with strangers, and precise observations about specificities of daily living emerged. A blog was set up to create a publicness around the narratives. Responses to the texts, on the blog, generated a warmth and excitement in the lab of being in conversation, and building a relationship of reciprocity with a world outside of the immediate context. A booklet, hear at bootle, was also created towards the end of the residency. You can access the blog at http://cm-bootle-diary.var.cc **************************************************************************************** Ranita Chatterjee The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net