1138 | City Making: Negotiating Our Built Environments

This seminar course offers a broad overview of the multiple processes that facilitate the making of cities. Taking South Asia as its field of intervention, this course tries to understand how concepts of spatial organization have helped determine the formation of cities, both historically as well as in the present. As such, it argues that ‘city-making’ is an ongoing project, thereby implying that our understanding of urbanity has to be constantly revised. The course challenges any preconceived notion we may have of cities and villages being mutually exclusive spatial categories by highlighting the flows of capital and labour that vitalize city life and inform its different modes of living.

Each week, we will be exploring a particular theme to understand how urban spaces are imagined by different actors – urban planners, municipal administrators, migrant workers, and “native” residents, to name a few – and the ways in which our respective positions in society shape how we inhabit and indeed, how we navigate these urban complexities.