Unlearning the city
Subtitle: infrastructure in a new optical field
By: Swati Chattopadhyay
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2012
Language: eng
Number of pages: 297
ISBN-13: 9780816679317; 9780816679324
Subjects: Public spaces; ARCHITECTURE / General; City and town life; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban
Description: "Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of cities and towns. Swati Chattopadhyay has written a nuanced argument for a new vocabulary of the city in Unlearning the City, proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that captures the ever-changing element of human experience.Urban life is intrinsically messy and usually refuses to conform to the rigid views laid down in much of urban studies theory. Chattopadhyay looks at urban life in India with a fresh perspective that incorporates the everyday and the unstructured. As the first to apply the theories of subalternity for an understanding of urban history, Chattopadhyay provides an in-depth study of vehicular art, street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities that link the visual and spatial attributes of these popular cultural forms with the imagination and practices of urban life. She contends that these practices have a direct impact on the configuration and knowledge of public space, and the political potential of the people inhabiting cities.Unlearning the City uses the popular culture of Indian cities to question the dominant conception of urban infrastructure and encourage a conceptual realignment in how the city is seen, discussed, and even experienced.  "--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: Contents; title: Preface: Unlearning the City; title: Analytic Index; title: 1. Flows and Bumpy Roads; title: 2. The Optical Field; title: 3. Provincial Cosmopolitanism; title: 4. Armature and Experience; title: 5. Writing on the Walls; title: 6. Auto-mobility; title: 7. Fungible Geographies; title: Conclusion: Infra-Structure; title: Acknowledgments; title: Notes; title: Index.