One of the most pathetic examples of the neglect of the city’s history is the Kala Ghoda area of South Mumbai. This sounds like a contradiction - in recent years Kala Ghoda has become synonymous with the heritage movement, with its museums and galleries, arts festivals and concerts, and recently restored colonial architecture. But if the conservationists had bothered to look behind their charming building facades and fancy street furniture, they would note that one of India’s most venerable and best-stocked repositories of historical documents occupies the back of the Elphinstone College building, in the Maharashtra State Archives (MSA). The MSA is a treasure-trove of government records, correspondence, maps, and all manner of big and small publications stretching back nearly four hundred years, from the Marathas, Portugese, British and postcolonial Indian governments.

The staff of the MSA are the real keepers of the city’s heritage, the Common Man who cannot afford the glossy coffee table books or steep entrance fees to the festivals and concerts celebrating Mumbai’s heritage. More knowledgeable than their better-paid counterparts in such places as London’s British Library or Delhi’s National Archives, these clerks and peons eagerly serve up the papers and files which are the historian’s raw material for narrating stories about the still mostly untold history of the city and its region. Everything from sewerage reports from Victorian Bombay, to the diaries and letters of Maratha ministers and chiefs, to early town planning schemes and maps for Bandra and Juhu may be found in the MSA. The tragedy is that once in your hands, many of these records crumble to pieces before they can be read, or have already been eroded over time by the elements.

In spite of the flourishing interest in researching and understanding the history, culture and politics of Bombay/Mumbai amongst various groups of academics and urban professionals - from anthropologists and activists to film-makers and architects - the career of the urban researcher in Mumbai is a precarious adventure.

The existing institutions charged with this task are, for the urban researcher, a veritable black hole, nowhere more so than the sprawling campus of the University of Mumbai. While Bombay University was in many ways the birthplace of the social science research in India - the old Bombay School of Economics and Sociology counted amongst its graduates the venerable G.S. Ghurye and M.N. Srinivas - it is nowhere on the map of the new urban research being conducted by NGOs setup in recent years to study and report on urban culture, design, governance and planning. And these NGOs themselves often function in dubious ways, setup by foreign academics for offshore influence peddling, or by the city’s elites to entrench their agendas with the BMC and MMRDA.

The unfortunate result of this situation is that coffee table heritage has replaced serious historical and social research. For example, a well-known work about the “cities within” glorifies the progressive role of the colonial era Bombay Improvement Trust in urban development. To the historian, this is something akin to calling the land-grabbing and corruption of the present-day Slum Rehabilitation Authority an enlightened civic governance. With the vacuum left behind by the collapse of genuine research institutions, critical and independent research in and on Mumbai must play second-fiddle to the whims and agendas of local socialities, foreign academics, and the racketeering of consultants and bureaucrats, all seeking to turn Mumbai into a “global city” through patronage of “urban research”.

Unfortunately, most of the best recent research on Mumbai is done by writers and academics based in wealthy private universities in the U.S. and U.K. One consequence of this is that these scholars are neither responsible to local institutions such as the MSA, nor does their work circulate back to those for whom it is an essential element in discussions about the past and future of Mumbai.

(Published in TimeOut Mumbai special issue on Bombayology Vol.3, Issue 24, 27 June to 9 August 2007)

The past two weeks have been busy in writing, reflecting, and meeting new peers who work on cities within an academic culture where sociology and geography — rather than history and anthropology — approaches are preponderant.

I’ve also met with Matthew Gandy at UCL, who is finishing a film on Mumbai called Liquid Cities, and Keith Hart, who is in his last year at Goldsmith’s College and still in fine form. From Mumbai, Rahul Srivastava has accompanied me on many long walks and conversations in the streets of London about our days together in PUKAR.

Tomorrow is the final presentation, debate and reception for the Urban Age Mumbai seminar. If you happen to be in London, please come to the New London Architecture galleries at 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT to listen and respond to the three themes chosen by the contributors to the project volume on Learning from Mumbai: justice, prosperity, and belonging.

While sharing a common intellectual genealogy, the contemporary disciplines of science and technology studies (STS) and urban studies have followed divergent paths of development, and flourished in largely separated academic compartments. Anique Hommels’s Unbuilding the City argues for the complementarity of the approaches of STS and urban studies in explaining the phenomenon of urban “obduracy” and strategies for “unbuilding” the city. Linking together the concepts drawn from actor-network theory and constructivist studies of socio-technical change, the book contains three case studies of postwar urban development in the Dutch cities of Utrecht, Maastricht and Amsterdam.

How can we understand urban structures as more than simple technical or physical artifacts? How can we explain the history of cities and their power relations as socio-technical ensembles? Does the urban built environment embed the tacit knowledge of its original planners and builders, such that their norms and values continue to shape the relations of city-dwellers in subsequent generations? In a well-known essay on the question “do artifacts have politics?”, Langdon Winner has cited the example of the low-lying bridges designed by planner Robert Moses in New York, whose passages were too low to permit movement by public buses between the freeways and beaches of Long Island. Moses’ bridges prevented access to these elite white spaces of recreation by inner-city black populations, thus inscribing a permanent spatial discrimination into the design of seemingly apolitical technical artifact.

Urban structures are quite literally path-dependent, in that once they are built, they become a deep structure both underlying and directing the activities of subsequent generations. The built environment of cities both constrains and enables the activities and lives of its inhabitants and users, channeling and directing people into abstract patterns of residence, exchange and transport on the one hand, while the social spaces of the neighbourhood, market and transit hubs provide resources for social organisation and reproduction on the other hand. However, the urban fabric is itself subject to negotiation and contestation through business-entrepreneurial projects of profit-making and asset-stripping through spatial restructuring, social movements of citizens to protect and expand the rights to collective consumption and social reproduction, and state initiatives aimed at environmental protection and social engineering through the planning and design of public spaces and infrastructure. It is in this context that the urban built environment as socio-technical ensemble exercises its peculiar structuring effects on technological development, politics and everyday life in the city. Artifacts become instruments of power while power relations are materialised in artifacts (Winner; cf. Bijker, 4).

The phenomenon of “obduracy” therefore opens a fascinating set of reflections on how we can use the city both as a symbolic metaphor and material site for understanding the social relations of technology. Breaking down the functionalist sociology of urban planning practice, Hommels attempts to bring the theoretical toolbox of STS to bear on explaining the stubborn persistence of postwar urban structures after the fact of their emergence as stable, non-malleable structures in complex networks of social and technical actors in Dutch cities. The book is neatly divided into five chapters – introductory and concluding sections introduce and assess theoretical approaches from STS and urban studies, and three case studies in-between these chapters explain the phenomenon of urban obduracy in the postwar history of a shopping mall and transit hub in downtown Utrecht, an urban highway which divides the city of Maastricht, and a large housing estate in the suburbs of Amsterdam. These three artifacts are stabilised through postwar modernist reconstruction of Dutch cities, obstructing subsequent efforts at their “unbuilding” or appropriation into efforts by business elites, state planners, and coalitions of users and citizens at their flexible redesign and redevelopment. Each of Hommels’ studies relates the crisis posed by the obduracy of these structures whose history of occupation and use belied the lofty intentions of their postwar planners. The designs of the Hoog Catherine mall in Utrecht and the Bijlermeer estate in Amsterdam – based on the modernist ideal of separation of functions – harboured criminals, drug-users and homeless populations, and quickly decayed both physically and socially. The highway built through the centre of Maastricht posed innumerable problems of traffic, air and noise pollution, and circulation, prompting various efforts to divert it around the city, or push it into an underground tunnel. In each of these three cases, efforts at “unbuilding” these sites remained the subject of drawn-out, piecemeal and often unsuccessful efforts by various actors to confront their obduracy decades after their insertion into the urban socio-technical ensemble. Hommels offers the ideas of “embeddedness”, “technological frames”, and “persistent traditions” from social constructivism to explain the obduracy of the shopping mall, highway, and housing estate respectively.

While these explanations summarise the case studies, the concepts of “obduracy” and “unbuilding” theoretically unify the work, and are both drawn from the STS tradition – though the former plays a much larger role in the argument than the latter (see below) for Hommels. “Obduracy” is how Wiebe Bijker characterises the closure which results in the stabilization of artifacts in a social context, when dominant groups’ particular frame of meaning and operation of a technology achieves closure and “hardness”, subsequently resisting interpretive flexibility and social-political change (Bijker 283). “The obduracy of technology offers one way to gain understanding of the role of power in the mutual shaping of technology and science” and the shift from an understanding of artifacts to ensembles signifies for Bijker the shift from an understanding of “society” and “technology” as separate objects of inquiry towards the “seamless web” of socio-technical ensembles as the proper object of STS research (ibid., 4-12). To answer Winner’s questions, artifacts as ensembles do indeed have a politics, and their obduracy “constitutes the semiotics of power, and it is within this semiotic structure that the micropolitics of power are staged” (ibid., 286). Hommels’ study of urban structures largely concerned with this micro-politics of urban technological development in the postwar Netherlands.

Strangely for a book which so clearly advertises its intention to draw on both STS and urban studies, the author fails to consider (or rejects) alternative explanations for “obduracy” in the influential literature on urban restructuring. David Harvey’s historical geography explains the obduracy of urban structures as the legacy of “sunken capital” in the built environment. In this approach, urban infrastructure and housing production are a “sink” for speculative capital accumulation during lean times, and once “sunken” they set the stage for further accumulation in periods of expansion, constraining future physical developments and capitalist strategies along well-worn paths. Manuel Castells pioneered an approach to social movements for the rights to housing, education, and environment, the mechanisms of social reproduction. Hommels’s studies of a shopping complex, city highway and public housing estate are classic sites of collective consumption by urban social groups. In Castells’ understanding of social movements and the city, the obduracy of urban structures is explained not with reference to the strategies of elites to unbuild these sites, but as seeing them as spaces for the everyday struggles of people to reproduce their social spaces. Castells’ later work on network society would situate the obduracy of urban structures and the character of socio-technical change as the antagonism between the space of flows and the space of places.

The neglect of these approaches from neo- and post-Marxist urbanism in explaining the obduracy of urban structures is a major lacuna in the book both analytically, as well as in terms of the plea for an alliance between STS and urban studies. While Hommels acknowledges these familiar tools of the urbanist in her theoretical discussions of obduracy and unbuilding (Hommels 18, 179), they do not feature in the analysis. The unfortunate result of her over-reliance on actor-network theory and social-constructivism in is a reification of the city as subject, where “the city” is meant to stand in as the subject of various efforts by social groups at rebuilding obdurate structures. While acknowledging the plurality of contending interests and political alliances both inside and outside the state, Hommels’ rush to formalise these claims into a discourse on obduracy reduces the richness and complexity of the questions around politics, business, environment and the state, which these structures persistently incite. The categorical rejection of structural theories which relate urban change to structural theories of capitalism as “monocausal” (Hommels, 18) at the outset hobbles any attempt to locate “obduracy” and “unbuilding” beyond the local or regional contexts in the Netherlands, limiting the comparative value of these studies in the postwar transformation of urban political economies globally.

While the work eschews the urban studies tools of historical geography, sociology and political economy, a similar criticism may be levelled at the work in its treatment of urban history. While the origins of the shopping complex, highway and public housing estates in the case studies are briefly recounted, one wonders whether what requires explaining is not just the contemporary phenomenon of obduracy, but the malleability and interpretive flexibility of these structures. This history is only partially accounted for in the book, which explicitly focusses on strategies of “unbuilding” these artifacts once they have stabilised as elements in an urban socio-technical ensembles. In each of the sites, the structures were designed and constructed along modernist principles of functional separation and egalitarian design, through large-scale state-sponsored postwar engineering projects. Hommels’s use of “persistent traditions” to explain the obduracy of the Beljmermeer housing estate and various efforts to redevelop it after the perceived failure of its original plan, locates its obduracy in the design principles of modernist planning, which structured the various responses to Beljmermeer’s social problems. In contrast, unbuilding strategies attempted to modify these structures accorded to postmodern principles of mixing of functions and differentiation of forms, with limited success. A greater effort to situate the case studies in the history of planning and the state in the Netherlands would have widened the scope of the argument and enhanced the idea of obduracy as one of the primary dilemmas of postmodern urbanism.

While Hommels’ work fails the test a critical-historical urbanism, what is perhaps more surprising is its similarly slipshod treatment of concepts from the STS tradition, to which the author is more directly affiliated. Indeed the self-consciousness with which Hommels “applies” concepts to her empirical case studies in the effort to explain the changing urban environment undermines her effort at mining her sites to demonstrate the validity of her concepts. The limitations of this kind of applied theory approach are frankly acknowledged by Hommels in the concluding chapter, which labours to link together the three case studies, assess the explanatory value of their concepts, and tie them together in a wider theory of urban obduracy and unbuilding strategies. Hommels describes urban sites and structures subject to “unbuilding” as “locations or elements of cities that are disputed or contested, or [...] included in redesign plans. The ‘obduracy’ of urban structures is ‘tested’ in efforts to ‘unbuild’ them.” (Hommels 11, cf. 186-187) Hommels says that the concept of “unbuilding” is inspired by MacKenzie and Spinardi’s notion of the “uninvention” of nuclear weapons (MacKenzie and Spinardi, 199). Arguing that the conventional idea that such technologies cannot be “uninvented” is based on a cumulative and linear notion of technological development, MacKenzie and Spinardi claimed that if design ceases, through a loss of the tacit knowledge implicit in continuing production, nuclear weapons will have been uninvented. An important consequence of this argument is that technologies are constantly being reinvented. However it is unclear how Hommels seeks to adopt this argument as regards urban structures and the built environment, which are also constantly subject to uninvention and reinvention by planners, developers and citizens. Sadly for the concept which gives the book its title Unbuilding Cities, this idea is picked out of the STS toolbox without much reflection on how it elucidates the main argument about obduracy or urban socio-technical change.

The book begins and concludes with the plea for a complementary of approaches in STS and urban studies, situating the study of cities and “urban sociotechnology” in both research traditions, and arguing for their shared understanding of the city as a socio-technical ensemble. Hommels’ debt to her teacher Wiebe Bijker in providing both the analytical model as well as key explanatory concepts in her study is obvious. However, the neologisms with which the book is studded are nearly incomprehensible without reference to Bijker’s work on bicycles, bakelight, and fluorescent lighting. Indeed Unbuilding Cities closely follows the structure that work, down to its sequence of five chapters (two “theoretical” and three “empirical”), as well as faithfully reproducing its concepts and conclusions – though on the basis of very different material histories of technology and semiotics of the artifact. What is new and original about the work is the promise of an interdisciplinary approach to cities from which both STS and urban studies may gain, and which is shown in the work of Harvey, Castells, Lewis Mumford, William Cronon, and others whose concerns and insights inform the work of contemporary scholars in both STS and urban studies.

References

• Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995.

• Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

• ––– and Ida Susser, ed., The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. London: Blackwell, 2002.

• David Harvey. The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

• Anique Hommels, “STS and the City”, book review in Social Studies of Science Vol. 33, No. 6, pp. 945-950.

• –––, Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Socio-Technical Change. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005.

• –––, “Studying Obduracy in the City: Toward a Productive Fusion between Technology Studies and Urban Studies”, Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2005), pp.323-351

• Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi, “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the ‘Uninvention’ of Nuclear Weapons”, American Journal of Sociology 101 (1995), pp.44-99.

• Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in Daedalus, vol. 109, no.1 (Winter 1980), pp.121-136 (reprinted in Donald McKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999)

I met Keith in early 2001 in Mumbai, and organised the first ever PUKAR public lecture at the David Sassoon Library (whose dusty Victorian fittings reminded Keith of the Manchester Philosophical Society). Keith and I ran together from then on, maintaining an intense correspondence and occasionally meeting in different cities. I also came to know those amongst his far-flung network of his friends, including Anna Grimshaw, William Mazarella, Jim Murray, Sunil Khilnani, Marshall Sahlins, Jonathan Parry, Marilyn Strathern, John Hutnyk, Craig Calhoun and many others. His teacher was Jack Goody. The year after I met him, he married the anthropologist Sophie Chevalier, with whom he has lived in Paris for many years now.

The site was first setup by his publishers in the U.K. to promote his book, The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World, published in 2000 at the height of the dotcom boom. In 2002 Keith and I took over http://www.thememorybank.co.uk, and ran a basic html and frames site containing the entire text of the book, which I argued to him needed to reach new audiences. In 2004 we moved the Memory Bank 2.0 and 2.1 to the Plone content management system, and migrated all the html into a dynamic publishing environment. I wanted to allow Keith to learn to self-publish his work online, and he slowly but steadily mastered the web tools, as he had earlier turned e-mail into a new discursive form. Over the past two years he has published much of his recent work. We have now moved this archive into a weblog running on WordPress in the new version.

Keith has been my persisent correspondent, critic, and was a great moral support to me at a crucial time in my mid-twenties in Mumbai. I remain in his debt intellectually, and am pleased to have Keith become that truly rare example of a senior academic (he is 63) who combines a rhetorical proficiency and vision of history with a mastery of the tools of networked communication and online publishing. Over the past six years, the Memory Bank has come to contain the entire text of the book from the earlier site, as well as Keith’s prolific output as a pamphleteer, lecturer, ethnographer, and critic including all his published work, unpublished papers, as well as talks, reviews, and other materials.

The Memory Bank 3.0 now marks Keith’s entry into the blogosphere. Please join us in creating a new Commonwealth.

Why should scholars seek anything other than entry visas to come to do research in India? Indian law actually permits for much more academic freedom and right to access if you go through other channels such as the university system and approaching officials directly. Perhaps I am painting too rosy a picture. But I believe funding should not be connected to your nationality, whether Indian or not, and apart from these few bilateral programmes under the old visa regime, it isn’t.

One needs to remember that most of these are public documents in state institutions which are, in principle, open to all. Of course access is always negotiated. One can do much through the recommendations of high-level bureaucrats, and the good-will of your average clerk, and I know many American scholars who have learned the ways of the system and taught me very much when I met them in the field in India or on campus here in America. One the other hand, I have had severe arguments with American scholars of South Asia who have seriously contended with me that one cannot access archives and other materials without a research visa. This is wrong, and the perception this generates must be condemned. These same elite institutions in the U.S. play a role in mediating access to state collections in India, and setting standards for research practice globally. Some of the most important collections for doing research on Indian history are located in the U.S. and the U.K. In most cases the fruits of our research work, while sponsored and supported by public institutions in India and the U.S., is privately published, stored and circulated in closed archives and university libraries to which the wider public in India or America has only limited access.

The scholars themselves are trapped inside this system, and gain very little from subjecting themselves to it. I have seen many dear friends and colleagues humiliated by the registrations, inspections, and process of seeking approvals to which research visa holders must undergo. It is degrading once you are in India. But these Fulbrighters were kept waiting for all this time and finally rejected! How many liberals amongst us would seriously submit such sensitive project ideas if they knew that the police intelligence is opening a file on them, which is tied to their conditions of stay in the country, and which will haunt them for the rest of their careers as scholars of South Asia, whether their nationality is Indian or American? The whole idea of dragging oneself through this bureaucratic-police state in India is absurd if it can be avoided.

The workshop was beautifully and almost single-handedly organised by Prasad Shetty and signified for CRIT our first public engagement on our own platform. You can read the problem statement of the workshop here, which was co-written by several of us (and in which it later emerged that I slyly inserted several normative, rather than purely descriptive, terms). The web-site contains further write-ups about each of the panels and thematic foci of the workshop: Emerging Morphologies, the Politics of Occupancy, New Civil Society Organisations, Urban Peripheries, New Entrepreneurship, and Publishing Archiving and Mapping. The workshop grows out of work done by members of CRIT under the SARAI Independent Fellowships, especially Rupali Gupte’s Tactical City and Prasad’s Stories of Entrepreneurship.

As the Anarchytect has elegantly stated in one of his daily reports on the conference, there was little dialogue between the innocently empirical and technical presentations on new urban environments, and the all-knowing discourse analysis which is preoccupied with the city as a field of representations. There was a perverse juxtaposition of an enthusiastic sense of improvement and development, with a pessimistic post-modernism which is sceptical of all such impulses. The arrogance of this posture is almost impossible to convey, but it was felt by many of the independent researchers and activists from Mumbai. As a social scientist, I was disappointed in my fellow academics in the room, who gave away little, and kept themselves safe and dry on the high-ground of cultual theory. Have a look at Anarchytect’s reports on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and his other scrawlings.

If large technological systems are the object of historical inquiry, it will be evident to the historian that their scale and complexity escapes the efforts of individuals and social groups to master them. Hughes’ systems approach to the history of technology is a narrative of the displacement of individual inventors and technologists in their workshops, by scientific researchers and experts in corporate and state-sponsored laboratories. The locus of socio-technical change is now with these large bureaucratic and military structures, and not with entreprising and heroic individuals making new discoveries. The systems themselves structure social relations, until such time as the system is superseded or rendered obsolescent by a new technology. These moments become the real ruptures in the systems narrative, the technical “breakthroughs” in inventions such as the silicon chip, the integrated circuit, and the microprocessor. This form of history has a peculiar way of describing the development of technology, focussing its efforts on documenting the technical problems of storage and transmission, processing and speed to which these inventions were a response, and giving a privileged place in the narrative to those individuals and institutions who could overcome these systemic problems. Ceruzzi states it clearly that this approach “describe[s] computing’s history as a series of technical problems met by engineering solutions that in hindsight seem natural and obvious”. Individual and collective agency is assimilated to the needs of the system, and only given significance by the extent to which the system advances through these diffuse efforts. It is in this sense that large systems constitute “structures” which effect the relations of the parts to the whole, of fragments to the totality.

As opposed to the systems approach, what Ceruzzi calls the “social constructionist” approach emphasises the social context of and political negotiations over the development of computing, in that technological development takes place within social relations and is subject to the struggles and contradictions dominant in any social formation. The best example of this approach in an academic genre is in Donald MacKenzie’s work on missile guidance and targetting systems. Ceruzzi suggests that most academic histories of computing, however, ignore this approach in favour of the systems approach. Popular histories, on the other hand, inexplicitly adopt a social constructionist approach in their focus on the social and political values underlying the rise of personal computing. These heroic narratives, which begin the garages and workshops of Silicon Valley teenage entrepreneurs and hackers, and culminate in the rise of personal computer companies such as Apple Computer and Microsoft, became common-sense household myths in the nineties, propelled by the speculative mania of the first dot-com boom and sustained by magazines such as Wired.

The problem with this popular social constructionist approach is not only, as Ceruzzi points out, that it ignores the advances in solid-state electronics and the presence of large defence contractors in Silicon Valley, which formed the backdrop for the activities of groups of California hobbyists and entrepreneurs in the seventies, when the personal computer was born. The problem is also that hackers were not hippies. The sixties counterculture was unambiguous in its rejection of the “system” and the “machine”, a totalising metaphor for the domination of social life by the dead labour and mechanical routines of mass production. Technological innovation often takes place in the competition and antagonism of social groups, and the story of the mass computing “revolution” in the eighties and nineties must account for these contraductions. The combination of the countercultural idealism of the sixties with the marketing of personal computers in the eighties and nineties has produced a powerful myth that sees a direct line from the streets of Haight-Ashbury and fields of Woodstock in the sixtis, to the garages and start-up shops of Silicon Valley in the seventies, to millions of computer desktops across the world in the eighties and nineties. This is a powerful and seductive mythology that defeats efforts to understand the social antagonisms and struggles that defined the form of contemporary computing.

Situating the development of computing technologies in the social struggles of our time attempts to separate the social and technical aspects of technological change, and assign a primacy to the social, arguing that the technical is an expression of the social. Some of the most critical relationships in the history of computing, as Ceruzzi suggests, are relations between entrepreneurs and inventors, and the popular mythology obscures the contingent outcomes of the negotiation between these groups in the development of actually existing computing. It is in this sense that we can refer to socio-technical formations as the object of inquiry of the “social constructionist approach” to the history of computing, whereas the “systems approach” emphasises the complex interdependencies and relations of diverse “parts” and to the “whole” of computing as a technological system.

So far it seems as if the challenges in history of computing follow the well-worn debates between the relative primacy of structure and agency in historical representation. What are the implications of these two approaches for writing this history, and what aspects of the history of computing depart from the familar questions of structure and agency, determinism and autonomy? Computers are both fungible commodities as well as self-contained factories. Software is both a set of instructions (code) and a mode of social organisation. These peculiar characteristics of the modern computer assume significance in both the systems approach and the social constructionist approaches, with consequences for our understanding of structure and agency in historiography.

A good history of computing needs to both see computing as a technological system as well as a social formation, and must borrow from both historical traditions of writing about the origins and growth of technology. Fortunately, we have a broadly accepted periodisation of the early history of computing, organised around distinct shifts in the nature of computing as both technical object and social practice. These would be, firstly, the early era of mainframe computing originating in the second world war and until the early sixties; secondly the era of networked minicomputers from the early sixties to the mid-seventies; thirdly the era of personal computing, from the late-seventies to the early nineties. I want to posit that within this sequence of stages, that we identify our contemporary moment as one of “social computing”. By social computing I wish to draw attention to the combination of aspects of the second and third stages identified above, the eras of networked and personal computing, with the advent of the public internet in the early nineties. This led to a rapid dissemination of networked computing amongst the earlier generation of personal computer users, mostly in North America, East Asia, and Western Europe, as well as a even larger number of completely new users who had never set hands on a computer before the commercialisation of the internet in the mid-nineties. It is with the advent of social computing that the public inquiry into the origins of computing – another way of describing the “history of computing” – assumes importance as an intellectual problem.

This screenshot shows the 1969 Bombay City Guide Map loaded into the rectifier, tagged with a few common markers between the source image on the left and the new layer on the right, now warped according to the surface of the earth. Chris Schmidt helped squash a small bug to get this rendering to work, and I’m hoping that the team can implement the projection system for Mumbai (WGS Datum 84 and UTM Zone 43N) so we can begin serving layers live to the Mumbai Free Map. In anticipation, I uploaded high-resolution maps of Bombay, Salsette, and parts of Thana and Colaba from 1926, 1930, 1933, and 1969. Go to to one of these maps and zoom in on a neighbourhood you know, and load up the satellite imagery in the reference map, and click away.