Organized by CSH Delhi, with Sunalini Kumar ( Associate Professor, School of Global Affairs, Ambedkar University Delhi)
?Tuesday, 25 January 2022, 3:45 PM IST onwards.
? Online
À propos de l’événement
Master plans for modern cities have a way of consolidating their own authority by the use of ‘masterful’ terminology. In doing so they seek, quite directly, to render irrelevant the nuisances of the local, the historical and the specific. Each plan, however, is a fragile intervention in the dense fabric of actually existing cities. How may we trace these dynamics in the case of Delhi and its first master plan? The talk attempts to fashion a prehistory for the MPD’62 by thumb-tacking three significant dates separated by a decade each – 1939, 1949 and 1959. Each of these dates is imbricated in the material and symbolic production of Delhi before the MPD’62 published the city’s authoritative birthdate and biography. Not all of these dates pertain to the urban, however, as the talk hopes to show, firmly tying the prehistory of the MPD’62 to the simultaneous production of the rural, the regional and the national in the contested construction of urban Delhi.
