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ICSSR Sponsored Three-Day International Conference
What is a city? What constitutes its structure and who belongs to its system? Questions like these have permeated human thought and action through the ages. The social and spatial fabric of the city has been re-conceptualised, built, and rebuilt in myriad ways responding to the necessities of time. The urban form exhibits contradictory traits of cohesiveness and radical openness to incommensurable, fragmentary, chaotic and contingent cultural exchanges as charged “contact zones” where identities are repeatedly forged and dismantled. Ascribing a single premise to the concept of a city is, thus, never possible as the nature, structure, and functioning of South Asian cities are diverse and dissimilar. Thus, 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 growing population in South Asian cities, academic inquiries focus on new settlement agglomerations, migration, precarity and climate crisis, community-based provisions and equitable distribution of public and private resources. The dynamics of political democracy and other economic and cultural trajectories serve as windows to explore the “polysensorial” and multilayered reality of the metropolitan landscape. The conference invokes heterogeneous communities, neighbourhoods and practices that stretch across as well as transition through multiple thresholds and rapidly shifting contours which define the urban experience.
Urban affairs mirror the intrinsic complexities of the global South in terms of the evolving ethos and emergent challenges that reciprocally inform the dominant modes of representation and planning in writing the city. The conference, thus, seeks to ask: How are cities both real and imagined understood to be zones of heterotopias? How has the city sustained its cultural past notwithstanding the influence of neoliberal capitalism? What unique characteristics differentiate modern cities from each other amidst the prevailing tendency of homogenisation? How can the contemporary global dialogues in social sciences and humanities address the socio-spatial transformations and enable policies that break down rigid hierarchies? How does the city produce and reproduce disproportionate affects ensuing from entrenched social inequalities and exclusionary urban management practices that divide the city?
A key intervention in the neoliberal urban transformation of Indian cities in the age of climate action, for instance, urges for an ecologically sensitive mode of urban dwelling. Human-non-human interactions become crucial in understanding inherent sustainability issues if the goal of equity and mutual development is to be met. Formal and informal ways of grasping the evolving nature of cities engage with new conceptual, economic and infrastructural realignments initiated by projects such as the Smart City Mission (SCM). Bringing these dialogues together, the conference seeks to push the boundaries of traditional scholarship to re-imagine evolving urban spaces and the stories they tell by invoking diverse conceptual and artistic apparatuses. It explores urban heritage and its representations not merely through a collection of “built structures” but through people, their perceptions, lived experiences and everyday sensory encounters in their intersecting worlds chequered with histories of movement, as well as the variegated cultural practices, conversations, food and friendship that foster new identities and mobilities across the world. Thus, by engaging with international perspectives and scholarships across the board, we aim to gather multifaceted visions of contemporary South Asian cities which reflect the changing impulse of the region and its “local” contexts in relation to the Global South and North.
Interested participants should submit an abstract of approximately 300 words to cityconference2025@gmail.com by November 28, 2024. Each submission must include a title and a brief biographical statement of no more than 100 words. Selected presenters will be notified by December 6, 2024.
Those chosen to present are required to submit a preliminary draft of their paper (1,000-1,200 words) by January 15, 2025, for inclusion in the conference proceedings.
Participants are also encouraged to provide a one-minute video presentation summarising the crux of their paper by January 15, 2025. Selected presenters will be invited to contribute to a curated volume of essays from the conference, which will be submitted to a reputable international journal or publisher.
A guided immersive city walk of Bhopal will be conducted on the final day of the conference.
Venue: Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh
