The Web as Urban Archives: Nashik's history in the mobile phone

PI Ayona Datta argues that our access to urban history is now determined by algorithms programmed to recognise the past as a repository of maps and images on the web. This has transformed the way that the urban poor ‘see’ the city, see themselves in the city and thus imagine possible futures for themselves.

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Simla 'below Cart Road': Biographies of houses in the margins of an Imperial urban age

Read post by PI Ayona Datta which traces the planning applications for houses built by working classes since the late 19th century. These house biographies remind us that Shimla’s current tourist spectacle above is made possible because of the continued house building by the poor and working classes since the dawn of the Empire.

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Shimla: The slow contoured life of an imagined Smart City

Project PI Ayona Datta introduces Shimla, through the paradoxes of speed, time and slowness in the future smart city. While Shimla dreams of a smart urban future, the everyday life in its informal settlements along the shifting sliding hill slopes reminds us that this dream needs to adjust to the slow contoured life of the hills.

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Jalandhar: Emigration, transnationalism and the future of a 'Smart Chowk' development

Project PI Ayona Datta introduces Sudama Bazaar in Jalandhar through the transnational connections that make smart city proposals irrelevant for both older and younger generation of traders. While the ‘Smart Chowk’ proposals create a disillusionment of the future, smart citizens are seen as those who are able to emigrate to the West to access better opportunities and hope for the future.

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