CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Cook, Ian Michael |
|---|---|
| Title | Expectant Urbanism: Rhythms of a Smaller Indian City |
| Summary | Possibly even more intense than India's ongoing urbanisation is the expectancy of it. Based on 18 months anthropological research amongst auto rickshaw drivers, moving vendors and housing brokers, this dissertation analyses the expectant urbanism which characterises the rhythmic patterns of everyday life in Mangaluru, a smaller city in coastal south India. Mangaluru (previously Mangalore) has long been a vibrant trading centre, with a natural harbour, international airport, all weather port and well connected bus and rail stations. It is also known as an education hub, with domestic and international students studying at the slew of private and state colleges that stretch up the coast; has a reputation for active and occasionally violent vigilante moral policemen; and has a uncertain future, as the west flowing river that serves its growing population may soon be partially diverted eastwards at source. Employing a rhythmic analytical lens, the research explores how the ongoing process of urbanisation structures and de-structures urban inhabitants' lives. Starting from a movement and experience centred understanding of the city, a Lefebvrian triadic dialectal model is utilised as a base analytical frame, allowing for a simultaneous analysis of the material, abstract and creative aspects of everyday urbanism. Cross-cutting this – and with the help of Karnatic (south Indian classical) music – a distinction is made between rhythm (laya) and rhythmic modes (tala), which it is argued have a relationship akin to urbanisation and the city. Urbanisation produces the times and spaces into which the different rhythmic modes of the city unfold. There is a rhythmic mode whenever gestures are repeated in a sequence. However, because rhythmic patterns are socially produced (they do not exist in abstract isolation, but unfold through relations), rhythmic modes are also variously synchronised, coherent and in motion in relation to other rhythmic modes. However, the city's historically and contextually contingent heterogeneity destabilises the relational rhythmic categories of coherence, synchrony and motion. The flowing together of powerful, weak, fast, slow, confused, angry, dominated, domestic, religious, labour-based, human, non-human and climatic rhythmic modes, imbues the city's rhythmic relations with tension – thus the city is also a place of (in)coherent motion(less) (a)synchrony. In Indian cities, which are concentrating, expanding and differentiating under capitalistic urbanisation, the cumulative and aggregative affect of these modes is a rhythmic presence of irregular regularity. In Mangaluru, this irregular regularity moulds itself into an expectant urbanism; an urban culture that moves with a prospective gait, drawing on the promises, hopes and aspirations of urban futures that wind themselves into the everyday life of the city. Inhabiting such a city is a skill – an urban navigation that relies on a combination of attention (in relation to the moving environment), intention (in relation to social structures) and cultivation (in relation to ethical exemplars), as urbanites move through the city and through their lives. Three particular skilled practices are analysed in-depth – the linking work of housing and land brokers, the learning of the city by moving vendors, and the various types of waiting undertaken by auto rickshaw drivers. |
| Supervisor | Monterescu, Daniel & Naumescu, Vlad |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/cook_ian.pdf |
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