Streets in motion : the making of infrastructure, property, and political culture in twentieth-century Calcutta / Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bandyopadhyay, Ritajyoti, author.

Series:

Metamorphoses of the political : multidisciplinary approaches

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

City planning--India--Kolkata.

City planning.

Streets--India--Kolkata.

Streets.

Pedestrian traffic flow--India--Kolkata.

Pedestrian traffic flow.

Squatters--India--Kolkata.

Squatters.

Kolkata (India)--Social conditions--20th century.

Kolkata (India).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 305 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Summary:

The book studies the social production of motion in a capitalist urban context. In the city of capital, motion refers to a fetish. The bourgeois order posits motion as a metaphor for energy, positivity, and progress - a norm - and obstruction (motion's dialectical opposite) as delinquency. The book uncovers the social tectonics of spatial mobilization and thus demystifies motion. Who and what set spaces on the move? How did various classes of city dwellers activate, experience, and negotiate it? Streets in Motion develops an approach to urban history by theorizing and historicizing the 'street' as an apparatus of city-making and subject formation. It works at two registers - a local history of Calcutta in colonial and post-colonial periods, and a theorizing of the logistical and political-cultural centrality of the street within this rubric. It is argued that the street is politics in as much as politics is the production of space.

Contents:

Introduction

The Making of the Modern Street:

Engineers, Commoners, Agitators

The Regime of the Streets: Renewal and Riots, 1910-1926

City as Territory: Institutionalizing Majoritarianism

Frontier Urbanization

Durable Obstructions, Spatializing Motion: The History of Footpath

Hawking in Calcutta

Epilogue.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 30 Jun 2022).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781009109208 (ebook)

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.