[Urbanstudy] to continue...

[rutul -- joshi]

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Dear All,


I thank Shree for his concerns and comments


The posted write up was one 'abrupt' version of research which I am doing. This is in continuity with my line of thought dealing with ‘Chharanagar’ as a social and spatial construct within the city of Ahmedabad. Let’s get into a bit more of discussion. It would not be right to assume that it is naivety about the social construct that is in making it UNFAMILIAR space. 

In Architecture, we deconstruct ‘real’ with the help of ‘beyond the real’. Whether you call ‘beyond the real’, unreal or not is up to you. Secondly, I don’t know whether Chharanagar is leading towards its own extinction process or not, but Socialism and all other ‘-isms’ have been extinct because of mere sloganeering and rigid ideas about the world. The life of any culture is always both collapsing and being restructured. Since capitalism requires social groupings in order to function, it must allow for‘re-territorializations’, new social groupings, new forms of the state. These events happen at the same time
 So Chharanagar has already restructured itself for Ahmedabad and it is going to stay for long


“It is a matter of eliminating all symbolic structures: the super-structures; from the origin. It is a matter of technology reducing our understanding of the world to the level of the bushman or the nuclear physicist. It is the matter of structures already embedded into our brains: a realising or a quickening. It is the matter of the molecular.”
-   Anand Bhatt (www.ab-a.net) in ‘and benaras is a revelation!’

My concerns are also about our understanding and perception of cities and perception of history at larger level. The study of history is sort of important not only for mere knowledge but also for searching identities and inculcating self-respect in these communities. It would also shed light on the processes of dislocation of disadvantaged communities. This is one area, which is extremely neglected, even in subaltern studies. 

This kind of search can not be confined to history alone but would necessarily be a multi-disciplinary activity, involving economic history, geography and anthropology. This also means that the branch of urban anthropology has to extend its scope to study some of these pockets in explaining the diversities within our cities. If the cities are melting pot of culture then it is sometimes necessary to extract the melted and un-melted components within to understand the composition of urban structure. 


And yes,
I do write poetry and also understand the poetics of space; I don’t exploit it ‘just to deal with my imagination’. It is the politics of space that concerns me. 


Rutul.