Thomas Oommen and I organized a paper session at the 52nd Annual Conference on South Asia. Below is the abstract and the list of participants for the session. Many thanks to Stephen Young for serving as a discussant for the session.

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Ordinary Places: Thinking about Space, Scale, and Region in South Indian Cities

Organizers: Siddharth Menon, PhD Candidate, Geography, UW-Madison; Thomas Oommen, PhD Candidate, Architecture, UC-Berkeley

Chair/Discussant: Dr. Stephen Young, Professor, Geography and International Studies, UW-Madison

Over the last few decades, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have increasingly attended to questions of scale. The discipline of Geography, for example, has been preoccupied with scalar analysis since the 1970-80s when “uneven development” (Smith 1984) emerged as an important lens to study how flows of capital in/out of places created regional differences in economic growth (Massey 1984). The global scale has been the concern of sociologists and urbanists at least since the 1990s with an analytical focus on globalization, transnational flows of capital, and global/world cities (Sassen 1991; Abu-Lughod 2000). Recent attempts at theorizing scale with urban studies have surfaced under the burgeoning literature on extended or planetary urbanization (Brenner 2019; Schmid and Topalovic 2023). In the study of architecture, especially modernism, artefacts are often structured in terms of specific scales – regional, national, international, global, and more recently “third world” (Frampton 1983, King 2004, Lu 2011). In parallel, within the subaltern genre of South Asian history, subjecting the scale of the “nation-state” and its production has been a foundational project (Guha 2009, Chatterjee 1993), with an emphasis on the specificity of the local, both as the focus and terms of investigation (Amin 1997, Confino & Skaria 2002, Mukhopadhyay 2012). Indian Ocean historians (Hofmeyr 2012, Menon 2020) have also called for alternate temporal and scalar attitudes to history writing.

Staying with focus on scalar analysis, recent endeavors in postcolonial urban and architectural theory has taken up the task of building theory from sites that lie beyond the Global North. Yet, the dominant sites of theory generation still largely remain globalized metropolitan centers, like New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata (Bunnell and Maringanthi 2012). This panel seeks to go one step further by examining processes of urban transformation in rapidly developing towns and regions that are not part of mainstream urbanization discourses, thus lying “outside the metropolitan shadow” (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2020: 582). As scholars have noted, such spaces have played an important role in mediating rural-urban migrations, creating economic growth, and displaying provincial cosmopolitan cultures (Chattopadhyay 2012; Scrace et al. 2015). This panel highlights the experience of ordinary places, artefacts, and everyday practices through case studies of lesser studied and theorized regions/cities/peripheries in South India, like Vijayawada, Hyderabad, Kochi, and Malappuram. The panel invites participants to engage with scalar concepts, theories, and methods within their own disciplines of Geography, Anthropology, Urban Planning/Studies, and Architecture, while reflecting on its implications for South Asian Studies.

Participants

1. Dr. Indivar Jonnalagadda, Miami University (Ohio)

“Fait Accompli Regulation: Bureaucratic epistemologies, property relations, and scales of everyday governance in Hyderabad”

2. Ooha Uppalapati, University of California, Berkeley

“Inquiring into the sovereignty of a multi-scalar urban”

3. Thomas Oommen, University of California, Berkeley

“The Labor of Belonging:  Gulf Dream Houses, Non-citizens and the Grey Spaces of the Post Colonial Nation-Form”

4. Siddharth Menon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Migrant Workers, Site Managers, and the Regional Politics of Infrastructural Labor in Kochi, India”

References

• Abu-Lughod, J. L. (2000). New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities. University of Minnesota Press.
• Amin, S. (1996). Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992. Oxford University Press.
• Brenner, N. (2019). New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question. Oxford University Press.
• Bunnell, T., & Maringanti, A. (2010). Practising Urban and Regional Research beyond Metrocentricity: Research beyond metrocentricity. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34(2), 415–420.
• Chattopadhyay, S. (2012). Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
• Confino, A. & Skaria, A. (2002). The Local Life of Nationhood. National Identities 4, no.1,7–24.
• Frampton, K. (1983). Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal. Foster. Bay Press.
• Hofmeyr, I. (2012). The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method. Comparative Studiesof South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3, 584–90.
• King, A. (2004). Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity. Routledge.
• Lu, D. (Ed.) (1984). Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity. Routledge.
• Massey, D. (1984). Spatial division of labour: Social structures and the geography of production. Macmillan.
• Menon, D. (2020). Walking on Water: Globalization and History. Global Perspectives, no. 1: 12176.
• Mukhopādhyāẏa, B. (2012). The Rumor of Globalization: Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Margins. Columbia University Press.
• Mukhopadhyay, P., Zérah, M., & Denis, E. (2020). Subaltern Urbanization: Indian Insights for Urban Theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(4), 582–598.
• Sassen, S. (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press.
• Schmid, C., & Topalovic, M. (Eds.). (2023). Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles. Birkhäuser.
• Scrase, T. J., Rutten, M., Ganguly-Scrase, R., & Brown, T. (2015). Beyond the Metropolis—Regional Globalisation and Town Development in India: An Introduction. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38(2), 216–229.
• Smith, N., & Harvey, D. (2008). Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. University of Georgia Press.