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Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life

Editors : Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink, Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Design: Pradip Saha @ Sarai Media Lab
376 pages, 14.5cm X 21cm

Published by
Sarai, CSDS+ The Society for Old & New Media
2002

For orders,
email: dak@sarai.net
or write to Sarai, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India
Hardback: Rs. 395, US$25, €29
Paperback: Rs.250, US$15, €17
ISBN 81-901429-0-9

Introduction

The Cities of Everyday Life takes off where the Sarai Reader 01 broke off. In Reader 01 (Febuary 2001) we had argued that the Public Domain was a key optic to engage with the contemporary. Here Reader 01 operated in a thematic dialectic; the crisis of the nineteenth-century public, with its imaginative motifs being those of the town square and the rational citizen, was being challenged by new practices of public-ness and collaboration in the free software movement and the possibility of new worlds of knowledge. To be sure, the conflictual nature of this space was acknowledged – the proprietary claims to knowledge, the cruelties of the new globalisation and the crisis of the dotcom utopia. However, Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain indicated a new willingness to take on the contemporary. In doing so it mapped the foundational coordinates of our engagements at Sarai. This is a tradition that Reader 02 continues to carry in its pages.
The Cities of Everyday Life carries within it an argument to take the urban seriously. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world. The reasons for this are complex and answers may be found in many of the essays in this volume, but the remarkable absence of both public and scholarly writing on the city (with some notable exceptions), needs to be addressed with some urgency.
The rise of the urban in ‘our time’ was given a certain urgency by globalisation. Globalisation, with its mixture of enforced commodification, spatial transformations and urban ruin, excavated the city from margins of academic and literary writing to a new public discourse that suddenly assumed the given-ness of urban space. As elites quarrelled over pollution and decay of public order, new fusions were taking place between the media and the fabric of urban life. ‘Newness’, the old battle cry of modernity, (which often had a noumenal existence for most ordinary citizens in post-Independence India) was now fused into the sensorium of urban life. The emerging urban constellation in the 1990s was marked by a rapid tempo of sensations transformed by a plethora of signs indicating the arrival
of new forms of mechanical and digital reproduction. One cannot overemphasise the experience of shock, compressed temporally, which marked urban space in the past decade. The cultures of distraction, of exhilaration and mobility, of loss and displacement were by no means new – they had been narrated by 1920s European modernism. What
was different was that (as if) in this new modern we were deprived of the ability to think, our ‘social body’ emptied out, prised open, “bodies without organs” as Deleuze and Guattari have argued, no time to reflect as in the old modernisms. It was as if we were forced kicking and screaming into a new space of flows with the rhetoric of smoothness and non-linearity.
However the “place of spaces” was not, as some have argued, superseded by the space of flows. Along with the “smoothness” and the placelessness of the shopping mall, the airport and multiplex, new localities were produced both as sites for work and imagination. The urban became the site for new disruptions and ruses by those rendered placeless in the Smooth City. New struggles and solidarities emerged, once again lacking the mythic quality of the old movements, but adapting, innovating and gaining knowledge through the practice of urban life. Within the new constellation of ruin and danger of the contemporary city, strategies of living, as one of the essays in this volume suggest, often tend to be physiognomic, where detective-like strategies of masking and unmasking help negotiate the urban crowd.

contd...

saraiREADER02
The Cities of Everyday Life

Introduction

Urban Morphologies
The Urban Turn - Gyan Prakash
Urban Physiognomies - Radhika Subramaniam
The Death Of An Empire - Ashis Nandy
Theatre Of The Urban: The strange case of the Monkeyman - Aditya Nigam
Claims On Cleanliness: Environment and justice in contemporary Delhi - Awadhendra Sharan

The city as spectacle and performance
Parsi Theatre And The City: Locations, patrons, audiences - Kathryn Hansen
Citybeats: Urban folk music in late-modern Calcutta - Avishek Ganguly
The Exhilaration Of Dread: Genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary urban action films - Ravi S. Vasudevan
Ruin And The Uncanny City: Memory, despair and death in Parinda- Ranjani Mazumdar
The Metropolis And Mental Strife: The city in science fiction cinema - Nitin Govil
ScreeningInjustice:Race, violence and media flows - Bhrigupati Singh

The Street is the Carrier and the sign
Raqs Media Collective

For Those who Live in Cities
Seeing + Believing - Lisa Haskel
Shops on the Move (Extract) - Uday Prakash
Spaced Out: A personal geography to México City - Fran Ilich
Past Places/Future Spaces: Reconstructing post-war Beirut - Yasmeen Arif
Imagining Srinagar-Sarajevo - Abir Bazaz
Sleepless in Delhi (Extract) - Gagan Gill
Slow Shutter/Full Open - Monica Narula
Lagos: Love It or LoveIt - Niji Akanni
Do's and Don'ts
Walls - Monica Narula
World Made Flesh - Matthew Fuller
Mechanicalcutta: Industrialisation, new media in the 19th century - Debjani Sengupta
decoded+delhi+denuded=Google+Search - Parvati Sharma
Office Days (Extract) - Shrinath
Long Bus Rides - Joy Chatterjee
Cancer Wards - Sopan Joshi