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Buy amoxicillin, I presented these arguments in a discussion paper to the workshop on “Citizenship, Civility, and Environmental Sustainability Across Urban Asia” at the Yale University Department of Anthropology in January 2009.

The Urban Turn in South Asia

Scholarly interest in Indian cities is still quite recent. Unlike with Western cities, where there is a well-developed critical and scholarly literature on contemporary urban transformations, there are very few historical or ethnographic studies of social and technological change in modern Indian cities. In the wake of Subaltern Studies, the reasons for these are increasingly clear to young social scientists and researchers attempting to understand urban politics, society and culture in India. On the one hand, the nationalist biases of postwar and postcolonial social science and area studies deemed the rural countryside a more authentic form of society, following the well-known Gandhian dictum about “the real India”. On the other hand, the universalist biases of urban policy and technical studies in postcolonial India rendered the city into an ahistorical object of state intervention and control, buy amoxicillin. While a social science of the city retained an ancillary role in development work sponsored by the state, now demoted to more instrumental forms of research, “fact-finding” and data collection tied to the objectives of social work programmes, development plans, and state-sponsored policy research.


The contemporary interest in the city in South Asia can be located a period coextensive with two distinct historical moments: the liberalisation of the national economy, and the economic and cultural globalisation of the city in the past twenty years; and more recently, the aftermath of the communal violence and rioting which rocked the country in the early nineties, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the communal riots in Mumbai in 1992-3. Across India and the global academic network of South Asian academics and intellectuals, Arizona AZ Ariz. , much scholarship and commentary at the time was addressed to the religious violence and communal nationalism of the Hindu Right, and was dominated by concerns over the decline of liberal secularism in India, and specifically to the urban cultures of civic cosmpolitan in places such as Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, and other towns and cities where mass communal violence had repeatedly shattered the earlier confidence of liberal elites in India's official secularism. In Mumbai, the new scholarly and activist literature on the city, coming in the wake of the riots in 1992-1993 and the rise of the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party to state power from 1995-1999, was concerned with the decline of the city's cosmpolitanism. The official name of the city was changed from “Bombay” to “Mumbai” in 1995 when the BJP and Sena formed the first non-Congress ministry in the history of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is both state capital and commercial-industrial centre. Buy amoxicillin, The change of name, agonised over by the popular media and scholars of Mumbai and Maharashtra, became the basic trope of the new urban studies in Mumbai in the nineties. The celebrated cosmopolitan city of migrants and merchants had transformed into a violent and divided metropolis. How did Bombay become Mumbai?1


The answers to these questions were sought in the deindustrialisation of the urban economy, and communalisation of urban politics which were the most powerful forces shaping the city in eighties and early nineties.2 The horror over the communal violence and criminalisation of local politics in the city, tinged with the elite anxieties over the loss of the city's “cosmopolitanism”, combined with other specific practices of writing and reading the city, forming a powerful conjuncture from the late nineties to the present in which a vibrant milieu of city activists and intellectuals, Purchase amoxicillin online, urban designers and architects, cultural and media practitioners are debating the imagined and built environments of the city.


This “urban turn” has evolved differently in specific disciplines, genres, and discursive practices. Quite apart from the flurry of new publications by social scientists, journalists and activists on post-riot Mumbai, two other genres of work defined a new ways of seeing and understanding in the city in the context of globalisation. The invention of the urban heritage of Classic Bombay by architects, heritage and civic activists and urban elites3; and the production of the idea of Bollywood both in cinema as well as television, advertising, and as a generalised media culture4 signified complementary movements in the direction of understanding the history, culture, and environment of the city in the cosmopolitan terms of global history.


The invention of “Classic Bombay” has occured in the context of the globalisation of Indian cities in the past fifteen years, and the question of their increasing bourgeoisification5. Over the past decade in Mumbai, a debate on the changing industrial landscapes of the city has been articulated by trade unionists and activists, journalists and scholars, architects, urban planners and designers, and the business and policy-making community, buy amoxicillin. This emerging discourse on the city has many been voiced around many inter-connected concerns — the shrinkage and closure of manufacturing industries in the city and suburbs; the “informalisation” of manufacturing production, and the increasing exploitation of migrant labourers, women and children in this new work regime of casual and contract labour, undermining the employment base and solidarity of the old working classes; the notorious instances of high-income gentrification in former working-class neighbourhoods and industrial districts like the Mill Lands6; as well as the fears of the “death” of the city with the flight of its industries, its declining quality of life, environmental degradation and overburdened infrastructure, cheap amoxicillin, and its questionable prospects for future economic growth7.

The Theory of the “Global City”

All of these desires and anxieties about the city’s employment base and its changing economy, its spatial and social transformations in the two decades since the Bombay Textile Strike in 1981–2, have condensed into an ambiguous local discourse which accounts many of these complex changes to an overarching process of “globalisation”. To take a position on any of these issues means to also take a position on globalisation, understood as the sign of the Mumbai’s present and its future. However, no specific understanding of “globalisation” has been sought, and often ideology and rhetoric have filled the gap left by the lack of rigorous analysis of the various processes listed above. Where public criticism has emerged, it has tended to narrowly focus on symbols of a much larger process which is poorly understood. Buy amoxicillin, Hence the fixation on consumerist symbols like shopping malls, five-star hotels, multiplex cinemas, gentirifed and converted factories and mills, and gated elite enclaves and ticketed zones of leisure. This narrow empirical focus on the outward features of changes seen in every city in the world which ignores a wider urban context where the basic means of work and livelihood have been specifically transformed over time and across space. In a way, this anti-globalisation rhetoric lends support to the elite fantasy of turning Mumbai into a global node for high-end services and finance, an Indian Singapore or Hong Kong8 which it targets by participating in its monumental and superficial vision.


In the academic industry, the number of theoretical arguments, disciplinary perspectives, and discourses on globalisation and the city have feverishly multiplied in the past decade. However, Köpa amoxicillin online, neither the recent literature on global cities, nor the earlier research on the post-industrial society, has taken seriously the particular location of cities like Mumbai in the process of the production of space of global capital. In her well-known study, Saskia Sassen has posited as a point of departure the combination of spatial dispersal of manufacturing and the global integration of services and finance which “has created a new strategic role for major cities”. Her study of the parallel changes in the economic base, spatial organisation and social structure of London, New York and Tokyo asks how cities with such different histories and cultures could experience such a similar transformation in a relatively short period of time, buy amoxicillin. “To understand the puzzle of parallel change in diverse cities requires not simply a point-by-point comparison of New York, London, and Tokyo, but a situating of these cities in a set of global processes”, examining how different cities have responded to the same dynamic. She however warns that “the term global city may be reductive and misleading if it suggests that cities are mere outcomes of a global economic machine. They are specific places whose spaces, internal dynamics, and social structure matter; indeed, we may be able to understand the global order only by analyzing why key structures of the world economy are necessarily situated in cities”.9


Most of the debate on global cities neglects the importance of locality: how the abstract space of global capital is made into living places by real people, through their search for livelihood and their struggles for survival. The process of restructuring is both social as well as spatial, and the social forms of Mumbai as a global city cannot be understood without reference to its spatial forms, where to buy cheap amoxicillin. Buy amoxicillin, In this essay I explore how the complex spatial and social dynamics of Bombay’s industrial landscapes in the eighties and nineties are the backdrop against which global economic processes are restructuring the city’s economic geography. These local transformations were largely set in motion in the era before the structural adjustment and liberalisation policies in the nineties.


The classic theory of the global city, conceptualised by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her study of London, Tokyo and New York in the eighties, based itself on the integration of financial markets and producer services which occurred in these key world centres. While subsequent studies have emphasised the global natures of these flows and concentrations in other cities in an emerging global economy, recent attempts at describing Mumbai as a global city have assimilated the city's specific social and market forms, spatial and cultural practices, and political formations into another instance in the inevitable march of the economy. Thus the analysis of global politics and culture in Mumbai often misses the forest for the trees – focussing on the transformation of elite producer services such as call centres, business process outsourcing (BPOs) and high-end finance and information industries which employ less than 5% of the city's population and constitute tiny (but growing) global enclaves within most Indian metropolises. The effort at describing Mumbai as a global city in terms of expanding elite consumption and employment opportunities ultimately founders in an ahistorical and flat understanding of contemporary politics and culture in the city.

Urban Housing as Material Culture

How can we orient ourselves towards a comparative historical anthropology of housing in modern Mumbai. It is useful to state what we should not do, buy amoxicillin. A comparative study of world cities should not neglect the specific spatial, social and economic conditions in which globalisation as a process is embedded and directed in a city like Mumbai. Nor should it treat “globalisation” in the same manner as an earlier generation of theorists and policy-makers regarded “modernisation”.


Rather than an inevitable process of “transition” from one stage of “development” to another, higher stage, we must see globalisation a contingent set of processes which articulate within determinate historical conditions. While global cities of the North in the seventies and eighties experienced an economic restructuring in which finance capital and producer services entirely displaced manufacturing industries, global cities in the South experienced a similar deindustrialisation, Mississippi MS Miss. , without an accompanying concentration of finance and producer services industries in the contemporary period. While India developed in a classical colonial dependent condition, by the eighties, India was an autarkic economy, existing outside of global financial markets for at least another twenty years, until the liberalisation in the mid-nineties (though India remained largely isolated from the 1997 Asian financial crisis). Buy amoxicillin, In mega-cities like Mumbai, the dissolution of large manufacturing industries in the eighties, and growth of new elite-oriented service economies in the nineties, instead elevated the construction industry and land speculation into the primary circuits of cash and capital accumulation in the city. It is to property, land and housing markets that we must turn for a theory of global cities in the South.


The generic forms of housing design and construction, finance and ownership, and domestic culture by which millions of people in Indian cities live their everyday lives has still not been treated as a serious subject of social or cultural history in India. Classical urban planning practice was historically premised on the segregation of the functions of modern urban life into residential, commercial/industrial, and public spheres, and their centralised location governed by state directives. However, Asian cities have constantly demonstrate the falsity of this separation of functions — with their vast districts of dense, mixed-use settlements governed by porous legalities, popular politics, and tactical negotiations over space and survival. This vast and complex economy has been inadequately imagined as the Third World 'slum' or theorised as the ‘informal economy’, acheter amoxicillin bon marché. With the retreat of the state, centralised planning practice and its technocratic spatial imagination has been appropriated into a new spatial regime in which a predatory class of private builders dominates the production of formal housing for a minority of the rich, amidst rising inequality in access to housing and basic services for the majority of the urban poor in Mumbai.


Western and modernist approaches to architecture, urban design and planning treated urban housing as a place of residence, domesticity, and leisure — as a privileged site of social relations, and a prized object of consumption, buy amoxicillin. However, a greater understanding of the cultural history of Asian cities must situate urban housing as a key unit of production in the urban economy, the material grid and medium through which everyday politics and culture are experienced. While a functional and economic separation of home and workplace is a central tenet of modern urban spatial practice, in Asian cities like Mumbai this false spatial division poses severe obstacles to situating the production of housing as part of the larger 'informal' economy of small scale manufacturing, casual labour, and flexible employment which defines the urban landscape for the majority of the urban poor. While the Asian city is famous for its rich local geographies and exotic cultural mixes, we need more detailed studies and analyses of the cultural history of housing in Asian cities — both as a material technology and as a social practice. The tactics and negotiations of urban poor communities in the context of Mumbai's contemporary housing crisis indicate a new form of urban politics whose future directions will be articulated by a historical understanding of the production of urban housing as material culture in the Asia Pacific.


Simultaneous to the informalisation of labour and housing markets in the eighties and nineties, the past twenty years have witnessed the decisive end of attempts at state-centred urban planning in Mumbai. Buy amoxicillin, The post-Independence Development Plan, which had guided land, housing, and economic growth since the sixties, has been displaced in favour of piecemeal investments in infrastructure and transport, and housing and slum rehabilitation by the state, with increased participation from private builders and agencies. With the retreat of the state from its ambitious agendas of rational land-use, equitable distribution of services, and protection of the environment, the instruments of abstract spatial planning used by the state have withered and mutated into new urban forms marked by severe exclusions and enclosures.


Modern discourses on space and the city have problematised and represented the informal, casual, or slum housing in primarily moral terms. In Jacob Riis’s classic works, Tennessee TN Tenn. , the production of housing and the blight of slum conditions is situated in a wider critique of the endemic urban corruption produced by the Tammany Hall political machine in antebellum New York City. How did this late nineteenth century imagination of the slum as both moral panic and reformist impulse become transformed into the late twentieth century symbol of the slum as a sign of underdevelopment, both in Third World mega-cities and Western inner-cities. The presence of the urban poor and working classs in large numbers has always been regarded as repugnant and dangerous to urban elites in all modern industrial cities, and it is little wonder that their forms of housing, hygiene and communal living were treated as the most visible symbol of a wider social or political crisis. But the image of the Third World slum, while borrowing from the century-old polemic of Riis, and the generation of civic reformers, urban sociologists, and community activists who followed him, has a special resonance in the era of globalised markets and media, buy amoxicillin. In the paranoid nightmare of urban warfare projected by defence planners prior to the invasion of Iraq, or in the abortive Mogadishu landing by U.S. Marines ten years earlier portrayed the film “Black Hawk Down”, or even in the dystopic vision of urban theorists for whom the future urban world is the planet of slums, the dark alleys of the overcrowded Third World city – with their even darker inhabitants – condenses the negative fantasy of poverty, crime, violence and delinquency.


While this imagery are mobilised within the global media towards particular ends often not directly connected with the urban poor, within India their articulation is continuous with an elite minority's attempts to direct the commerce, labour and mobility of the majority of the urban poor into circuits of capital accumulation often outside prevailing legal and financial regimes. What we have called “predatory urbanism” is this new regime of speculative accumulation, legal exclusion, and the mass violence against the urban poor. The valorisation of the middle-class home and over-consumption in the urban media has its parallel in the marginalisation of the majority of the urban poor from land and housing — some 60% of the urban population of around 14 million citizens. Buy amoxicillin, Secure housing is now the most desired object of consumption by all classes, from land-less squatters and working slum-dwellers to established tenants and the middle classes.

Historical Ecology of Ideas and Institutions in Mumbai

The new social and spatial relations of global Mumbai have given rise to various movements for housing and tenancy rights, which are now becoming the main arena for public politics. Borrowed from the natural sciences, ordering amoxicillin overnight delivery, the concept “ecology” is used in the social sciences to analyse and explain the link between communities and their local environments. The concept can be used to describe the intellectual history of social movements and the non-state or non-governmental sector in Mumbai, their organisational forms, their use of different forms of knowledge, and the changing institutional, material, social and cultural environments in which these practices have evolved over the past twenty five years since the Emergency in India.



  1. Gandhian or nationalist “social work” organisations with an emphasis on a philosophy of national self-reliance and self-sufficiency, cottage industries and small-scale village and rural production models, whose strategies are non-violent protest and negotiation, and non-coercive dialogue; examples include Sarvodaya Mandal, and a host of cottage industries and small-scale cooperative industries;




  2. classical “social work” organisations working primarily with the health and education sectors, often with public sector, religious, Church and charitable funding; examples are many, they include the Nagpada Neighbourhood House, Nirmala Niketan School of Social Work, mobile creches, Billig amoxicillin apotek, organisations for the care of the marginalised, and so on;




  3. trade unions, and organisations associated with Left and radical social movements, whose focus is on the systemic inequalities and contradictions of capitalist society, whose strategies are ideological and political mobilisation and agitation for rights, resources, and power, mostly addressed to the state; examples include some affiliated and non-affiliated trade unions on the Left, especially those connected to the CPI and CPI (M), the Trade Union Solidarity Committee (TUSC), agitational groups and campaign networks, interest-based collectives such as Forum Against Oppression of Women, Left and Naxalite non-party and party formations;




  4. organisations associated with the post-Emergency civil liberties and democratic rights movements, now merging into newer global discourses on human rights, whose focus is on the violations of civil, political, economic and cultural rights of the “people”, and whose strategies are issue-based mobilisation, public interest litigation, and documentation or objective/scientific fact-finding around issues of rights violations; examples are Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR), discount amoxicillin, Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti, Socio-Legal Information Centre (SLIC)/ India Centre for Human Rights and Law (ICHRL), YUVA, Majlis, and post-1992 mohalla committees;




  5. organisations involved in research activities, resource centres, or interest-based collectives, whose strategies are discussion, documentation and research work; examples are Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), SPARROW, Majlis, and documentation centres focussed on gender issues, such as Akshara and Vacha;




  6. organisations associated with international and global developmental practices, whose focus is on the assets and capital of the urban poor, where the discourse is of resources and not rights, and whose strategies are negotiation with state and non-state authorities, “empowerment” of the poor through provision of services and increased participation in governance; examples are Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA), Buy amoxicillin cod, Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), many other mainstream NGOs;




  7. organisations which have sprung from civic grievances of the middle-classes and elites conceived exclusively as “citizens”, emphasising such issues as quality of life, noise and air pollution, provision of civic services and the perceived inefficiency and politicisation of these services, global competitiveness of the city as an corporate investment destination, whose strategies are negotiation and campaigning with the state authorities through the bureaucracy, elite media, private sector, and often collusion in state violence against the poor; examples are Association for Good Governance and Networking in India (AGNI), Bombay First, Citizens Forum for Protection of Public Spaces (Citispace), Colaba-Cuffe Parade, Pedder Road and other “middle-class” residents' associations.




REFERENCES

1Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, eds., Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1995 and Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture. Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1995; and Sujata Patel and Jim Masselos, eds., Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition, buy amoxicillin. Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2003


2Darryl D'Monte, cheap amoxicillin no rx, Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills. New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2002


3Rahul Mehrotra and Sharda Dwivedi, Bombay: The Cities Within. Bombay: India Book House Limited, 1995 and Pauline Rohtagi, Pheroza Godrej and Rahul Mehrotra, eds., Bombay to Mumbai: Changing Perspectives. Mumbai: MARG Publications, 1997.


4Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The 'Bollywoodisation' of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena” in Preben Kaarsholm, ed. City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience Buy amoxicillin, , Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004, pp.113-139.


5Partha Chatterjee, “Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois At Last. (or, if you prefer, we could exclaim, Comprar en línea amoxicillin, 'Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois, Alas?') in Indira Chandrashekhar and Peter Seel, eds. body.city: Siting Contemporary Culture in India, Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Delhi: Tulika Books, 2003, pp.171-185.


6Shekhar Krishnan, Murder of the Mills: A Case Study of Phoenix Mills. Mumbai: Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana and Girangaon Bachao Andolan, April 2000; Naresh Fernandes and Rochelle Pinto, Murder of the Mills: An Enquiry into Bombay’s Cotton Textile Industry and its Workers. Mumbai: Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, 1996


7Darryl D’Monte and Priyanka Kakodkar, “Bombay: The Death of Great City”, Cover Story, Outlook, Volume XLII, amoxicillin pharmacy, No.4, 4 February 2002.


8 For instance, see the lecture by V. Ranganathan, Chief Secretary to the Government of Maharashtra, on “Prospects for Development of Mumbai as a Leading Services Centre”, delivered to the Maharashtra Economic Development Council, 5 February 2002, http://www.medcindia.org


9Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London and Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp.3-4

.

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Order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription, Anique Hommels, Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Socio-Technical Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005.

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, order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription. 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?”, Rabatt kaufen zithromax(Azithromycin), 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. Order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription, 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, Um zithromax(Azithromycin) online, 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, order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription. 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, New Mexico NM N.Mex. , 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. Order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription, 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, Comprare zithromax(Azithromycin) sconto, 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, buy zithromax(Azithromycin) without prescription. “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), order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription. “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. Order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription, David Harvey’s historical geography explains the obduracy of urban structures as the legacy of “sunken capital” in the built environment. Maine ME Me. , 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, North Carolina NC N.C. , 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, order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription.

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, Buy zithromax(Azithromycin) cheap, business, environment and the state, which these structures persistently incite. Order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription, 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, Missouri MO Mo. . 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, order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription. 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. Kopen goedkope zithromax(Azithromycin), 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. Order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription, 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, order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription. However it is unclear how Hommels seeks to adopt this argument as regards urban structures and the built environment, Kaufen zithromax(Azithromycin), 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. Order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription, 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”), Order zithromax(Azithromycin) online legally, 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, zithromax(Azithromycin) online kopen, Mass: MIT Press, 1995.




  • Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription. 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, Köpa zithromax(Azithromycin), 1985.




  • Anique Hommels, “STS and the City”, book review in Social Studies of Science Vol. Order zithromax(Azithromycin) no prescription, 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, buy zithromax(Azithromycin) online legally, 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)



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The conference was as much about networks as ideas, and it was an interesting chance to observe academics who felt they were close to power, as well as politicians who felt they were close to ideas. The architects and planners, including us students, were all somewhere in-between. Our group will re-convene in MIT next week to take stock of the summitry. Rumours are thick that the conference network will move to Brazil and India next year, and I look forward to helping with Urban Age if it happens in Mumbai, as some have suggested.

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http://www.heptanesia.net/documents/urban_pedagogy.pdf Buy cheap zithromax(Azithromycin) online, This journal article, ‘The City as Extracurricular Space: Re-Instituting Urban Pedagogy in South Asia’ (co-authored with Anirudh Paul and Prasad Shetty) was published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, London), Vol.6, No.3, 2005, in a special issue on South Asia edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha. This extended essay originated in presentations given by myself and Anirudh Paul at the 2004 Annual Conference of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (IACS) in Bangalore, order zithromax(Azithromycin) overnight delivery. Zithromax(Azithromycin) cheap. Buy generic zithromax(Azithromycin). Kentucky KY Ky. . Alabama AL Ala. . Rhode Island RI R.I. . Zithromax(Azithromycin) online cheap. Kjøp Discount zithromax(Azithromycin). Order zithromax(Azithromycin) online without prescription. Zithromax(Azithromycin) prices. Vermont VT Vt. . Acquistare online zithromax(Azithromycin). Zithromax(Azithromycin) pedido en línea. Buy zithromax(Azithromycin) online. Jotta zithromax(Azithromycin) verkossa.

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Stromectol buy online, In Mumbai, public awareness of urban arts and heritage has experienced a significant revival in the past ten years — in the same historical moment when manufacturing industries have closed and factories emptied throughout Greater Mumbai. Heritage discourse and conservation practice have only implicitly acknowledged this economic context. Since the Bombay Textile Strike of 1982–3, entire working-class communities across the city have been retrenched and dispersed — in the Mill and Dock Lands of central Mumbai, the chemical and engineering factories and industrial estates in suburban Mumbai, and across the Metropolitan Region, generic stromectol. With job losses going into tens of lakhs, and uncertain growth prospects for Mumbai, several years ago the media and civic elite began speaking of the “death of the city” they once knew, whereas planners and academics eagerly awaited the birth of a new “global city”. Stromectol uk, However one described this restructuring of the city’s economy, it is clear that manufacturing has declined in value compared to the new service industries, not just in Mumbai but in big cities throughout the world. The post-industrial landscapes of London’s Docklands and New York’s Lower Manhattan are oft-cited symbols of this change — monstrous, gleaming high-rise districts dominated by banking, finance, and white-collar services, stromectol buy online. In today’s urban economy, the making and marketing of immaterial signs has replaced the production of durable goods as the primary circuit of wealth creation.


The concepts and practices of cultural heritage, architectural conservation, stromectol order online, and public arts, (whether they realise it or not) are enmeshed in this new economy of image production. While buildings are still very much made of brick and mortar (or steel and RCC), the production of images of the urban built environment is one of the intangible, Buy praziquantel, high-value commodities of the global city. Whether in the space-age absurdity of Hafeez Contractor’s garden city in Powai, or the sepia-tinted romanticism of the South Bombay heritage enthusiasts, the value of a building has less to do with its physical qualities than its iconic presence as an object of consumption. So it is not difficult to explain the phenomenal growth of concepts and practices of heritage conservation in Mumbai. Stromectol buy online, The scarcity of fresh land and exhaustion of new sites to build in Mumbai has forced many architects to refashion their practice around conservation of existing buildings, rather than construction of new ones. Today the city skyline is commanded by towering skyscrapers, buy ivomec, not by smoking chimneys — the closure of factories in the eighties and nineties was paralleled by the rise of the construction industry, and allied sectors in finance, banking, real estate and retail. Ivermectin for sale, Builders, and not mill-owners or industrialists, are the kingpins of today’s global city — and architecture, arts, and cultural practice must reflect this new order. Heritage is, stromectol cheap, quite plainly, a smart way of boosting real estate values for high-end consumption, and of turning downmarket areas into upmarket ones.


Cultural practices such as the arts and architecture should seek to illuminate social and historical change, rather than mystify it, Uk stromectol cheap, providing an imagery and language for us to discuss and reflect on our fast-changing society. But as heritage has increased in public consciousness and visibility — through legislation and protection of listed buildings, the organisation of new city arts festivals, and an outpouring of romantic cultural representations from coffee table books to films and other media — workers and manufacturing have been obscured from public view and memory. Until now, urban heritage has been almost exclusively about the colonial city — protecting its built fabric and rendering visible its monumental signs — reinvigorating civic pride through historical nostalgia, stromectol buy online. Heritage has primarily been addressed to the colonial city, and not about the industrial city, uk stromectol. We now need to chart a shift in the focus of urban conservationists, arts and heritage enthusiasts, and the public, from the monuments and signs of the colonial period to illuminating this hidden Other of the picture postcards and coffee-table representations — the people, Where to buy stromectol, machines and places that produced the twentieth-century industrial metropolis of Mumbai. The task of historically informed conservation practice is in rendering visible the history of the industrial city which has been extinguished by factory closures and the flight of manufacturing, as well as the new “global city” which is developing around economies of services, information and culture.


Over the past ten years, different groups of architects, historians, ivermectin liquid, activists and media practitioners have been documenting the city’s post-industrial landscapes in the Mill Lands of Central Mumbai. Public debates on the Mill Lands have for many years been polarised between the trade unions and workers’ groups raising issues of livelihood and workers’ rights to employment and housing on the one hand — and architects, urban designers and civic activists raising issues of public space and city planning policy on the other hand. Stromectol buy online, Recently these groups have aligned themselves to pursue a public interest litigation on land use in the Mill Lands, in which the primary objective is to create more “public spaces” in the more than 600 acres of derelict and idle land in the inner-city textile mill compounds.


But the mills and other industrial spaces have never been “public spaces” in the sense that any citizen could enter them — they were entirely closed to anyone but workers or staff, both while they were operational and even after the strikes and closures. It is difficult to imagine the post-industrial landscapes of Mumbai except as crumbling factories and idle chimneys, Ivermectin for budgies, because most people have never been inside of the mills, and the working-class communities that sustained them have lost their jobs and housing. When Girangaon (“the village of the mills”, as it was locally known) was still the throbbing heart of the city’s economy, each textile mill was a miniature city of several thousand people working in three to four shifts, day and night, purchase generic stromectol. A complex network of chawls, markets, maidans, and social institutions spread out from the mill gates, Buy stromectol usa, integrating the neighbourhood outside with the factory inside. Mid-century Marathi literature, poetry, and oral traditions contains rich reflections on the life of the mills and chawls, but there is today little public imagery and imagination of these spaces. The social fabric of Girangaon has collapsed, buy generic stromectol, and the physical artefacts and lands of the industrial city are being dismantled as we speak.


It is almost impossible to visualise what is at stake for the city in the conversion of the mills from factories producing yarns and cloth to campuses producing information and services — one form of private accumulation giving way to another. Making these mills into public spaces and “giving them back to the city” is more than just a abstract dilemma of land-use or planning policy. Creating new public spaces from the city’s industrial heritage means also creating a public imagination for the city which recovers the active presence of work and technology in our everyday lives, and challenges the commonly-accepted vision of manufacturing inevitably giving way to services. We need to seek out new cultural forms by which to narrate these histories, and invite the urban public to tell its own stories of work, aspiration and movement that produced the Mumbai we know today.


Originally published as Mills as Public Spaces: Mumbai's Industrial Heritagein Art India, April 2005

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