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CITIES UNBOUND
Cities Unbound: At the Edge of the City: the Peri-Urban in South Asia
Wednesday January 23, 2013 | 04:30 -06:30 PM | Boardroom

At the Edge of the City: the Peri-Urban in South Asia
Cities Unbound Workshop

January 23, 4:30-6:30
Stanford Humanities Center, Boardroom

Durba Chattaraj, Senior Fellow at the Critical Writing Program of the University of Pennsylvania
Little-Box Retail: Illegality and Improvised Documents in Small-Town West Bengal

Abstract: As small towns in India experience rapid growth, local municipalities face difficulties in planning for changes in population size and composition. In this paper I examine “little-box retailers”– small, one-story shops which line the main streets of many towns in India. Functional and minimalist in their physical form, these shops depend on and draw their customers from the mobility engendered by the highway along which the town is located. Focusing specifically on the small town of Diamond Harbour in West Bengal, I describe the informal nature and tenuous legal status of many of these “little-box retailers” and uncover a complex, extra-legal system of leases which are granted by a local municipality to these shopkeepers. These extra-legal leases are not simply an example of corruption, but are rather the policy response of a cash-strapped municipality to a situation where over half of the shops within the town are unauthorized. I argue that these leases are a form of “Improvised Regulation” – they are pragmatic, pieced-together and politically-mediated practices used by the local state to regulate growing elements of the town's built environment which are not authorized.

Solomon Benjamin, Professor at the School of Architecture at Manipal University
Rethinking the Urban Narrative: Some Discordants from the Peri-Urban
We are at a time, when narratives from contrasting ideological positions seem not just predictable but also strangely resembling each other when it comes to issues of land, housing, economy and economic marginality, and progress. Reflecting on ethnographic field work, conversations, and observing practices in small towns large villages outside Pondicherry and Coastal Karnataka's Small town South Canara, helps us to rethink the problematic in the new found euphoria among progressive activists: In Bangalore, court driven implementation of the 74th Constitutional Amendment mandated ward committees, and on the national level, pressures to implement the 'right to housing and land'.