A Datta
Biographic Data
| ID | 41035 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Datta |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Datta |
| SIGNATURE | DATTA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0360-5406 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 919 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Socially smart Bhubaneswar: Making space for urban informality within postcolonial smart urbanisms
This paper examines the social dimension of smart urbanism that underpins urban developmental politics in the Indian Smart City Mission and ensuing urban forms. Using affordance as an analytical lens, the paper unpacks the social dimension of the Smart City Mission known as “Socially Smart Bhubaneswar,” which has led to a reformatted relationship between marginalized communities, civil society and the state, producing a provincialized form of sma…
A topology of digitalising territories
This paper develops a topological analysis of digitalising territories which examines the dynamic relationship between territory, land, and the digital technologies of measurement and control. We propose a conceptualisation of digitalising territories through a topological lens and across three key pathways: boundaries, relational presence, and invariants. Where boundaries and presence conceptualise territories not as bounded entities, but as dyn…
Urbanizing commons lands: Ambiguous tenure regimes and the challenges of land regularization in Guadalajara Metropolitan Region, Mexico
This paper examines why the informal subdivision and sale of socially owned lands remains the dominant means of accessing land and shelter in Mexico, despite decades of federal land regularization policies. Focusing on the Guadalajara Metropolitan Region, Mexico’s third-largest urban agglomeration, we research this in the context of rapid housing development on socially owned lands, otherwise known as ejidos and comunidades . Drawing on qualitati…
The information infrastructure of urbanisation: Mobilising ‘New generation’ allotment letters in Nairobi's metropolitan peripheries
In Kenya, a key strategy to address the challenges of urbanisation has been the state's push to modernise its land records by creating digital Land Information Management Systems (LIMS). In this paper, we use the lens of ‘information infrastructures’ to understand how allotment letters are entangled with the digitalising state's desire for formalising land tenure and managing Kenyan urbanisation. By examining the political-technological-material …
Embodied statecraft: The endurance of zhǐ jiè (pointing at the boundary) in Taiwan's land digitalisation
This paper examines the practice of "embodied statecraft" as fundamental to Taiwanese government’s ‘One Nation, One Map’ (ONOM) land digitalisation initiative. We frame zhǐ jiè as a form of relational and embodied statecraft in which boundaries are negotiated and formally demarcated by state officials through consensus building with local stakeholders operating in parallel with the ONOM geospatial platform. Embodied statecraft foregrounds the oft…
Distant time: A response
This response appreciates the commentators for engaging so generously with the concept of distant time. Each of these commentaries addresses different aspects of the paper and also raise very important questions about the wider applicability of distant time across spaces, technologies, territories, and people. I will first start with addressing the critique of ‘distant time’ as an authorial gesture and therefore suggest a more expansive idea of t…
Distant time: The future of urbanisation from ‘there’ and ‘then’
Recent geographical scholarship has mainly focussed on the disjunctures between linear and cyclical time in urban development. This paper proposes a notion of distant time as a metaphor of temporal power that keeps marginal citizens at a governable distance from the state. Taking the case of Shimla, an erstwhile Summer Capital of colonial India and a popular tourist town in the Himalayas, it argues that distant time emerges from the temporal reor…
The geographies of housing assetization (2023) Plenary Commentary
Raquel Rolnik’s plenary lecture on housing financialization acrodass Latin America gives us fascinating insights into how housing assetization, rental platformization and global landlordism are inextricably tied to each other. For Rolnik, housing now is the new frontier of accumulation and precarity which is made possible through the support of the state. In this commentary I will engage with Rolnik’s argument on three specific aspects and how th…
Sorting paper: The archival labour of digitising land records in Kenya
Nairobi's land digitisation programme presents continuous challenges to the Kenyan state's aspirations of reforming land administration. By drawing upon insights from archival sciences and digital geographies, this paper argues that digitisation of Kenya's land administration records presents us with an opportunity to pay attention to how information flows from paper to digital systems, and the nature of human condition that makes it possible. Ba…
The informational periphery: Territory, logistics and people in the margins of a digital age
This paper examines new configurations of the urban periphery in a digital age. It moves beyond current scholarship in urban and regional studies which points to the emergence of suburbia and informal settlements as the new urban periphery. The paper argues that while suburban growth has been a key force in the production of the urban periphery so far, the coming of a digital age breaks down the conventional conflation of urban edge with the urba…
The digitalising state: Governing digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south
This paper will investigate the emergence of a digitalising state in the global south through a focus on new techniques of governance initiated by the information age. It will discuss the mechanisms of the digitalising state across two realms – the governance of information infrastructures evident in the transition from paper to digital data, and the governance of informational peripheries emerging across digital and territorial exclusions. The p…
Thick time’: Experiments with feminist urban futures in community podcasts
This paper develops the concept of ‘thick time’ through podcast experiments that foreground feminist voice, speech and aurality. Drawing upon William Kentridge’s notion of ‘thick time’, this paper draws upon gendered experiences of struggles that are accumulated over generations, reinforced through technologies of timekeeping and time-management, leading to a state of permanent crisis. In particular, it focusses on gendered time through thick des…
Curating #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing]: Gendered authorship in the 'contact zone' of Delhi's digital and urban margins
This paper examines the curation of a month-long public exhibition titled #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] in one of New Delhi's busiest metro stations, as a form of self-authorship by young women from its digital and urban margins. #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] is a metaphor for journeys, communications, connections, associations, interceptions, social networks and individual/collective behaviours, that is curated as women 'see' and 'speak' with/through th…
Regions in Covid-19 recovery
Covid-19 is undoubtedly a regional crisis, spatially uneven in its impacts. While it is too soon to talk about a transition ‘from pandemic to recovery’, with attention switching to regional development priorities and the implications of Covid-19 on regional policy, planning and development, increasingly we will need to focus on regions in their recovery phase. In this article we ask four leading researchers what this recovery phase will mean for …
Self(ie)-governance: Technologies of intimate surveillance in India under Covid-19
This commentary examines the role of the ‘selfie’ as central to the teleological management of the COVID-19 crisis in India. It suggests that the incorporation of the self(ie) within the technologies of quarantine apps is a simulacrum of intimate surveillance that seeks to experiment in the present in order to extend its reach into the visual governance of intimate domesticity in the future
Intimate infrastructures: The rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence in Kerala, India
Apps, maps and war rooms: On the modes of existence of “COVtech” in India
This paper on the SARS-CoV-2 crisis in India examines the emergence of ”COVtech” as a range of public sector-led technologies of surveillance, management and containment of the virus. COVtech lends itself to examination of what Simondon calls ”concretisation” of technical objects. We argue that COVtech initiatives have different modes of existence in India – first as the redeployment of existing technologies assembled across urban, regional and f…
"The "Smart Safe City: Gendered Time, Speed, and Violence in the Margins of India's Urban Age
Speed is fundamental to shaping visions of the modern city and of contemporary urban life. Notions of speed and acceleration have produced distinct conceptualizations of rapid urbanization as a rush toward progress and opportunity. In this article, I examine what speed looks like from the margins, when seen through the struggles of young women in the urban peripheries who are coping with the precarity of working in the city, while negotiating dee…
Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India's smart urban age
This paper examines the 'future' as a blueprint for social power relations in postcolonial urbanism. It addresses a crucial gap in the rich scholarship on postcolonial urbanism that has largely ignored the 'centrality of time' (Chakrabarty, 2000 ) in the politics and speed of urban transformations. This paper takes postcolonial urbanism as a 'colonisation of/with time' (Adam, 2004 ) that reaches across spaces, scales and times of the past, presen…
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Medals and Awards celebration 2019
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in researching, communicating, and teaching a wide range of geographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of the 2019 celebration, with contributions from Professor Trevor J. Barnes, Professor Mark Birkin, Dr Ayona Datta, Dame Fiona Reynolds, and Professor David S. G. Thomas. The speeches include comments on: the continued relevance and imp…
Smart cities and the banality of power
Smart cities have begun to garner increasing global popularity and political legitimacy in recent years. Driven largely by corporate interests, smart cities provide highly normative solutions to future urban and economic crises and are now popular in the global north and south alike. Despite a growing critical scholarship on smart cities, the processes and politics through which they manifest in different locations are widely different. Yet, ther…
The uneven terrain of dialogical encounters and the spatial politics of listening
The contributions to this forum have highlighted how the limits to scholarly dialogue are multiple and have had serious consequences for the ways in which knowledges are produced and debated in the academy, the media, and wider society. In this rejoinder to the commentaries on our article, ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’, we embrace the stance of affirmative critique in order to constructively engage with the important issues that our …
The possibilities and limits to dialogue
In this article, we explore the nature, value, and challenges of dialogue both within and outside the academy. After considering the possibilities and limits to dialogue, we divide our analysis into three sections, first discussing dialogue as a form of embodied action, next examining dialogue as a means of enacting a critically affirmative politics, and finally exploring the challenges of engaging in dialogue as a way of practicing public geogra…
The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism: Smart citizenship in the making of India's 100 smart cities
The smart city as a "digital turn" in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a "smart citizen" in India's 100 smart cities challenge - a state-run inter-urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing c…
The New Urban Agenda: Key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice
The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito ‘New Urban Agenda’ that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reduction…
New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat
Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India, in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I exam…
The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism: Smart citizenship in the making of India's 100 smart cities
The smart city as a "digital turn" in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a "smart citizen" in India's 100 smart cities challenge - a state-run inter-urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing c…
Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India's smart urban age
This paper examines the 'future' as a blueprint for social power relations in postcolonial urbanism. It addresses a crucial gap in the rich scholarship on postcolonial urbanism that has largely ignored the 'centrality of time' (Chakrabarty, 2000 ) in the politics and speed of urban transformations. This paper takes postcolonial urbanism as a 'colonisation of/with time' (Adam, 2004 ) that reaches across spaces, scales and times of the past, presen…
Smart cities and the banality of power
Smart cities have begun to garner increasing global popularity and political legitimacy in recent years. Driven largely by corporate interests, smart cities provide highly normative solutions to future urban and economic crises and are now popular in the global north and south alike. Despite a growing critical scholarship on smart cities, the processes and politics through which they manifest in different locations are widely different. Yet, ther…
The intimate city: Violence, gender and ordinary life in Delhi slums
In this paper I argue for an expansion of the horizons of urban geography through a notion of the intimate city. I focus on the slum as a space where the violence of an exclusionary city is woven into its intimate material and social conditions, but where this violence is also domesticated and rendered as part of the everyday. I illustrate through three stories of intimate lives of slum women that everyday life in the slum requires the production…
Building differences: Material geographies of home(s) among Polish builders in London
This paper examines how embodied acts of building home(s) for others shape particular constructions of cultural difference and otherness. It presents a largely unexplored perspective of home – one that is uninhabited by its builders. This perspective becomes relevant through a study of Polish home‐builders who have legally entered the building sector in London since EU expansion in 2004, who put together homes for others, temporarily inhabiting t…
Intimate infrastructures: The rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence in Kerala, India
Places of Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: East European Construction Workers in London
I illustrate how cosmopolitanisms among East European construction workers in London are shaped by the localised spatial contexts in which encounters with difference take place. Their cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviours arise from both survival strategies and a taste for cultural goods, thus challenging the elite–working-class divide in current cosmopolitanism literature. Through semistructured interviews and participant photographs of twenty-f…
Mongrel City: Cosmopolitan Neighbourliness in a Delhi Squatter Settlement
This paper examines the construction of a "cosmopolitan neighbourliness" which emerges in a Delhi squatter settlement in the context of communal violence. Through interviews with over 80 inhabitants, I suggest that an openness to "others" in the settlement is produced in order to construct a home for oneself in an exclusionary city through a series of relational constructs-between the "cosmopolitan" city and the "parochial" village; between the "…
We have a little bit more finesse, as a nation”: Constructing the Polish Worker in London's Building Sites
This paper examines how male Polish builders in London construct themselves relationally to English builders as they negotiate their place within the labour hierarchies of the building site and in the London labour market. This is based on semi‐structured interviews and participant photographs taken by Polish migrants arriving in the aftermath of the European Union expansion in May 2004, and now working in building sites across London. These buil…
The digitalising state: Governing digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south
This paper will investigate the emergence of a digitalising state in the global south through a focus on new techniques of governance initiated by the information age. It will discuss the mechanisms of the digitalising state across two realms – the governance of information infrastructures evident in the transition from paper to digital data, and the governance of informational peripheries emerging across digital and territorial exclusions. The p…
A 100 smart cities, a 100 utopias
In my response to the commentaries on my anchor article, I have taken on board the key question of how and why India has become the site of production of 100 proposed smart cities. I forward a notion of ‘technocratic nationalism’ to suggest that it is the young urban population in India who have largely bought into the smart city dream. Whilst drawing encouragement from the largely positive commentaries on my article, I then take on three main cr…
Regions in Covid-19 recovery
Covid-19 is undoubtedly a regional crisis, spatially uneven in its impacts. While it is too soon to talk about a transition ‘from pandemic to recovery’, with attention switching to regional development priorities and the implications of Covid-19 on regional policy, planning and development, increasingly we will need to focus on regions in their recovery phase. In this article we ask four leading researchers what this recovery phase will mean for …
Self(ie)-governance: Technologies of intimate surveillance in India under Covid-19
This commentary examines the role of the ‘selfie’ as central to the teleological management of the COVID-19 crisis in India. It suggests that the incorporation of the self(ie) within the technologies of quarantine apps is a simulacrum of intimate surveillance that seeks to experiment in the present in order to extend its reach into the visual governance of intimate domesticity in the future
"The "Smart Safe City: Gendered Time, Speed, and Violence in the Margins of India's Urban Age
Speed is fundamental to shaping visions of the modern city and of contemporary urban life. Notions of speed and acceleration have produced distinct conceptualizations of rapid urbanization as a rush toward progress and opportunity. In this article, I examine what speed looks like from the margins, when seen through the struggles of young women in the urban peripheries who are coping with the precarity of working in the city, while negotiating dee…
The possibilities and limits to dialogue
In this article, we explore the nature, value, and challenges of dialogue both within and outside the academy. After considering the possibilities and limits to dialogue, we divide our analysis into three sections, first discussing dialogue as a form of embodied action, next examining dialogue as a means of enacting a critically affirmative politics, and finally exploring the challenges of engaging in dialogue as a way of practicing public geogra…
Curating #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing]: Gendered authorship in the 'contact zone' of Delhi's digital and urban margins
This paper examines the curation of a month-long public exhibition titled #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] in one of New Delhi's busiest metro stations, as a form of self-authorship by young women from its digital and urban margins. #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] is a metaphor for journeys, communications, connections, associations, interceptions, social networks and individual/collective behaviours, that is curated as women 'see' and 'speak' with/through th…
Samudayik Shakti: Working-class feminism and social organisation in Subhash Camp, New Delhi
This article illustrates the intersections between architecture and agency in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi, by ‘situating activism in place’. It highlights the significance of place in social action by examining the architecture of everyday places—the house, the street and the square—as the sites of both individual transformations and collective consciousness. Through observations of the activities of and interviews with membe…
"Homed" in Arizona: The Architecture of Emergency Shelters
Although much has been written about the abstract spaces of homelessness, relatively less has been documented on how the architecture of homeless shelters intersects with the homeless experience. Emergency shelters are the first places where homeless families begin their journey toward becoming "homed." Studies suggest that there is a middle-class bias in the design of emergency homeless shelters, but how do its spaces contribute to the route out…
Apps, maps and war rooms: On the modes of existence of “COVtech” in India
This paper on the SARS-CoV-2 crisis in India examines the emergence of ”COVtech” as a range of public sector-led technologies of surveillance, management and containment of the virus. COVtech lends itself to examination of what Simondon calls ”concretisation” of technical objects. We argue that COVtech initiatives have different modes of existence in India – first as the redeployment of existing technologies assembled across urban, regional and f…
Spatialising performance: Masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field
While there are many self-reflexive accounts of ‘field’ experience, few researchers have explicitly examined how different places within the field shape gender performances and subsequently the research process. This paper spatialises the notion of ‘performance’ by examining how male and female bodies in particular places of the field are perceived both by researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. The analysis is based on fieldw…
Thick time’: Experiments with feminist urban futures in community podcasts
This paper develops the concept of ‘thick time’ through podcast experiments that foreground feminist voice, speech and aurality. Drawing upon William Kentridge’s notion of ‘thick time’, this paper draws upon gendered experiences of struggles that are accumulated over generations, reinforced through technologies of timekeeping and time-management, leading to a state of permanent crisis. In particular, it focusses on gendered time through thick des…
The informational periphery: Territory, logistics and people in the margins of a digital age
This paper examines new configurations of the urban periphery in a digital age. It moves beyond current scholarship in urban and regional studies which points to the emergence of suburbia and informal settlements as the new urban periphery. The paper argues that while suburban growth has been a key force in the production of the urban periphery so far, the coming of a digital age breaks down the conventional conflation of urban edge with the urba…
Where Is the Global City?’ Visual Narratives of London among East European Migrants
Based on research conducted with men arriving from eastern Europe in London after the expansion of the EU in 2004, this article examines how migrants’ narratives of the city construct a counter-discourse to a ‘global’ London. It is argued that the use of ‘visual narratives’– a combination of participant-directed photography and semi-structured interviews as a methodology—allows for the exploration of embodied and material aspects of everyday live…
Gendered Nature and Urban Culture: The Dialectics of Gated Developments in Izmir, Turkey
This article adds to recent debates on the emergence of new forms of private gated developments in Turkey that specifically target the upper middle classes. In particular, it focuses on the rise of residential gated developments along the Izmir-Ceşme expressway to highlight how the dialectics between gender, nature and culture are reinforced in these places. The article, based on a case study of three gated developments in this region, suggests t…
"Homed" in Arizona: The Architecture of Emergency Shelters
Although much has been written about the abstract spaces of homelessness, relatively less has been documented on how the architecture of homeless shelters intersects with the homeless experience. Emergency shelters are the first places where homeless families begin their journey toward becoming "homed." Studies suggest that there is a middle-class bias in the design of emergency homeless shelters, but how do its spaces contribute to the route out…
From tenements to flats: Gender, class and 'modernization' in Bethnal Green Estate
This paper examines the relationship between domestic architecture, spatial memory and the construction of subjectivities through an in-depth study of the modernization of Bethnal Green Estate. It illustrates how the architecture of Bethnal Green Estate was the site of powerful discourses of gender, family and community, which shaped the nature of participants' relationship with its architecture. Situating architecture within the material culture…
Samudayik Shakti: Working-class feminism and social organisation in Subhash Camp, New Delhi
This article illustrates the intersections between architecture and agency in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi, by ‘situating activism in place’. It highlights the significance of place in social action by examining the architecture of everyday places—the house, the street and the square—as the sites of both individual transformations and collective consciousness. Through observations of the activities of and interviews with membe…
Spatialising performance: Masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field
While there are many self-reflexive accounts of ‘field’ experience, few researchers have explicitly examined how different places within the field shape gender performances and subsequently the research process. This paper spatialises the notion of ‘performance’ by examining how male and female bodies in particular places of the field are perceived both by researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. The analysis is based on fieldw…
Building differences: Material geographies of home(s) among Polish builders in London
This paper examines how embodied acts of building home(s) for others shape particular constructions of cultural difference and otherness. It presents a largely unexplored perspective of home – one that is uninhabited by its builders. This perspective becomes relevant through a study of Polish home‐builders who have legally entered the building sector in London since EU expansion in 2004, who put together homes for others, temporarily inhabiting t…
Architecture of low-income widow housing: Spatial opportunities' in Madipur, West Delhi
This article is based on a study of Madipur widow colony in west Delhi, built as part of the UN International Year of Shelter for the Homeless in 1987. Designed to accommodate widows from squatter settlements in Delhi, very few of the original houses now survive and very few of the original owners remain. The spatial stories of the participants suggest how and why and under what circumstances a State's visions of empowerment as translated into ut…
We have a little bit more finesse, as a nation”: Constructing the Polish Worker in London's Building Sites
This paper examines how male Polish builders in London construct themselves relationally to English builders as they negotiate their place within the labour hierarchies of the building site and in the London labour market. This is based on semi‐structured interviews and participant photographs taken by Polish migrants arriving in the aftermath of the European Union expansion in May 2004, and now working in building sites across London. These buil…
Places of Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: East European Construction Workers in London
I illustrate how cosmopolitanisms among East European construction workers in London are shaped by the localised spatial contexts in which encounters with difference take place. Their cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviours arise from both survival strategies and a taste for cultural goods, thus challenging the elite–working-class divide in current cosmopolitanism literature. Through semistructured interviews and participant photographs of twenty-f…
Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities - By Legg, Stephen
The translocal street: Shop signs and local multi-culture along the Walworth Road, south London
Mongrel City: Cosmopolitan Neighbourliness in a Delhi Squatter Settlement
This paper examines the construction of a "cosmopolitan neighbourliness" which emerges in a Delhi squatter settlement in the context of communal violence. Through interviews with over 80 inhabitants, I suggest that an openness to "others" in the settlement is produced in order to construct a home for oneself in an exclusionary city through a series of relational constructs-between the "cosmopolitan" city and the "parochial" village; between the "…
Where Is the Global City?’ Visual Narratives of London among East European Migrants
Based on research conducted with men arriving from eastern Europe in London after the expansion of the EU in 2004, this article examines how migrants’ narratives of the city construct a counter-discourse to a ‘global’ London. It is argued that the use of ‘visual narratives’– a combination of participant-directed photography and semi-structured interviews as a methodology—allows for the exploration of embodied and material aspects of everyday live…
Encounters with law and critical urban studies: Reflections on Amin's telescopic urbanism
Providing a critical reflection on Ash Amin's 'telescopic urbanism' this piece suggests that despite a burgeoning scholarship on governmentality, critical urban studies has not taken into account the role of law in obstructing or facilitating the struggles for right to the city and urban commons. It argues that rights cannot be realised through top-down political imperatives or gargantuan social engineering models. Neither can they simply be a ma…
Gendered Nature and Urban Culture: The Dialectics of Gated Developments in Izmir, Turkey
This article adds to recent debates on the emergence of new forms of private gated developments in Turkey that specifically target the upper middle classes. In particular, it focuses on the rise of residential gated developments along the Izmir-Ceşme expressway to highlight how the dialectics between gender, nature and culture are reinforced in these places. The article, based on a case study of three gated developments in this region, suggests t…
A 100 smart cities, a 100 utopias
In my response to the commentaries on my anchor article, I have taken on board the key question of how and why India has become the site of production of 100 proposed smart cities. I forward a notion of ‘technocratic nationalism’ to suggest that it is the young urban population in India who have largely bought into the smart city dream. Whilst drawing encouragement from the largely positive commentaries on my article, I then take on three main cr…
New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat
Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India, in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I exam…
Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections
‘Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places and Connections’ sets out a new agenda for mobility - one which emphasises the enduring connectedness between, and embeddedness within, places during the experience of mobility. While in recent years, a proliferation of debates has emerged around the links between mobility, movement and the formation of transnational or diasporic identities, our book breaks new ground by arguing for a spatial understanding …
Another rape? The persistence of public/private divides in sexual violence debates in India
In this intervention piece, I reflect upon the recent spate of highly publicized rapes in India to examine the persistence of public/private divisions in the debates and interventions around sexual violence. Using the example of the most recent case of the Badaun rapes, I suggest that it is the lack of critical reflection on the spatiality and intersectionality of this violence across the divides of public/private that is ultimately stifling pote…
The intimate city: Violence, gender and ordinary life in Delhi slums
In this paper I argue for an expansion of the horizons of urban geography through a notion of the intimate city. I focus on the slum as a space where the violence of an exclusionary city is woven into its intimate material and social conditions, but where this violence is also domesticated and rendered as part of the everyday. I illustrate through three stories of intimate lives of slum women that everyday life in the slum requires the production…
The New Urban Agenda: Key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice
The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito ‘New Urban Agenda’ that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reduction…
The uneven terrain of dialogical encounters and the spatial politics of listening
The contributions to this forum have highlighted how the limits to scholarly dialogue are multiple and have had serious consequences for the ways in which knowledges are produced and debated in the academy, the media, and wider society. In this rejoinder to the commentaries on our article, ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’, we embrace the stance of affirmative critique in order to constructively engage with the important issues that our …
The possibilities and limits to dialogue
In this article, we explore the nature, value, and challenges of dialogue both within and outside the academy. After considering the possibilities and limits to dialogue, we divide our analysis into three sections, first discussing dialogue as a form of embodied action, next examining dialogue as a means of enacting a critically affirmative politics, and finally exploring the challenges of engaging in dialogue as a way of practicing public geogra…
The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism: Smart citizenship in the making of India's 100 smart cities
The smart city as a "digital turn" in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a "smart citizen" in India's 100 smart cities challenge - a state-run inter-urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing c…
Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India's smart urban age
This paper examines the 'future' as a blueprint for social power relations in postcolonial urbanism. It addresses a crucial gap in the rich scholarship on postcolonial urbanism that has largely ignored the 'centrality of time' (Chakrabarty, 2000 ) in the politics and speed of urban transformations. This paper takes postcolonial urbanism as a 'colonisation of/with time' (Adam, 2004 ) that reaches across spaces, scales and times of the past, presen…
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Medals and Awards celebration 2019
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in researching, communicating, and teaching a wide range of geographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of the 2019 celebration, with contributions from Professor Trevor J. Barnes, Professor Mark Birkin, Dr Ayona Datta, Dame Fiona Reynolds, and Professor David S. G. Thomas. The speeches include comments on: the continued relevance and imp…
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (15 works) · Geography (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works)