ICSSR Sponsored Three-Day International Conference

Urban Metamorphoses: Understanding the Dynamics and Diversity of South Asian Cities

Organised by - The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal

Date: - 27 February-01 March 2025

Venue: IISER Bhopal

Deadline for Abstract Submission: 5th December, 2024

The spatial fabric of the city has been re-conceptualised, built, rebuilt and in myriad ways responding to the necessities of time. Ascribing a single premise to the concept of a city is never possible as the nature, structure, and functioning of cities are diverse and dissimilar. Likewise, defining the city has a scope that is widely spread across a cluster of disciplines like planning and architecture, history, anthropology, heritage studies, sociology, visual arts, literature and cultural studies, innovation and policy research, and others under the rubric of “urban”. With the exponential growth of population in South Asian cities, academic inquiries focus on new settlement agglomerations, migration, precarity and climate crisis, community-based provisions, sustainability, equitable distribution of public and private resources and other economic and cultural trajectories as windows to explore the multilayered reality of the metropolitan landscape, encompassing heterogeneous communities, neighbourhoods and practices. A key intervention in the neoliberal transformation of cities with Smart technologies in the age of climate action also urges for an ecologically sensitive mode of urban dwelling and an acknowledgement of the environmental histories and memories, embedded in spatio-cultural practices, communities and their quotidian lifeworlds. In this context, the question of urban heritage becomes crucial in envisioning sustainable goals that braid the past, present and future in meaningful ways.

In this conference, we aim to gather the multifaceted perspectives on the city-space, which is rapidly growing and reflecting the changing impulse of the region loosely termed South Asia, in relation to the Global South and the world. Simultaneously, the conference also seeks to push the boundaries of traditional scholarship to re-imagine the evolving urban space and the stories they tell by invoking diverse conceptual and artistic apparatuses. It explores the urban heritage and its representation not merely through a collection of “built edifices” but through people and their vernacular traditions, religion, eclectic cultural exchanges, the evolution of foodways, literary conventions, political movements, folk and demotic forms of art and entertainment that define a city’s identity across time. Here, the “urban phenomenon” equally engages with chequered histories of movement and displacement, desires and aspirations of social mobility, as well as the variegated conversations, food and friendship that foster new synergies across the cities in the global South and North.