Thursday, November 26th, 2015 Urban Theory goes South: On the historicity of space and urban imagination in South Asia

Description

Many urban scholars assume that global capital flows, commodification and capitalization of land universally affect urban areas all over the globe. However, not all spaces are equally amenable to commodification or gentrification and in many cases the specific historical character of a city, a neighborhood or an urban space tends to stick to it for many generations. What happened in a space, which community or class is associated with it, leave marks that do not easily disappear. This is particularly true in post-colonial cities marked by deep historical segmentation. Drawing on material from India (and South Africa) I will show how religious markers and boundaries of caste and community gets etched onto the urban imagination, profoundly and durably structuring the use and habitation of urban space. Rather than understanding urban history as the history of capital, such historical dynamics must be at the heart of a more global urban theory for the 21st century.

Thomas Blom Hansen is the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and director of the Center for South Asia at Stanford. He is the author of multiple books and articles on Hindu nationalism, Hindu-Muslim violence, urban life, religious identity politics, sovereignty and the modern state in South Asia and South Africa.