sr2ai2018 ‘Sammlung Planertnnen ‘Themen Kalender ‘Suche Myroom Newsletter hitps:lwwn.nextroom.atarticle. php? nexroom at Is there A Culture ofthe Inian Street? Is there A Culture of the Indian = Street? Ae 709 - Je gt oa In spring of 2006, I stood on a bustling street adjacent toa central Mumbai train station while a group of architects presented a public space mapping project toan official from the Brihanmumbai Municipel Corporation (BMC), The architects pointed out the tens of thousands of pedestrians effortlessly weaving their way through a small space, the dozens of hawkers who strategically sit between. concrete planters, the clusters of mobile vendors who work in the middle of the road but out of pedestrians’ pathways, the shopkeepers whose extensions blur the boundaries between the formal and informal, the flower vendors stationed on the path toa nearby temple, and the men on bicycles parked under an overpass offering cold drinks to thirsty passers-by. All these people constitute the anonymous cast of characters in what Jane Jacobs (1992/1961: p. 50) famously called the wintriate sidewalk ballet« of congested, but healthy ané vibrant, public spaces "The architects tried to disabuse the official ofthe commonsense view that street commerce and foot traffic are at odds. Hawking and walking are interlinked, they argued. They are part ofa single transportation modality that consists of a variety of uses and populations, something that produces visual confusion, but a functioning urban environment. Asa result, automotive trafic is far more disruptive than hawker and shopkeepers’ encroachments. The density of the crowd and the commerce on the street's edge discouraged all but the occasional taxi or truck, so these disruptions, fortunately, were infrequent. The street: sidewalk boundary had been blurred by people walking on the roadway - so the streetscape had become, ina way, a shared space os, as itis called in Holland, woonerf, A logic of urban fantasy and globally-scaled aspiration However, what counts as urban design innovation in northern Europe is considered infrastructural failure when located in Mumbai. These streets are too congested, explained the BMC official, they are too narrow, used by too many people and for far too many different purposes. He confidently offered a solution: massive elevated pedestrian walkway. With a sweeping gesture of his arm, he visualized the walkway's arc, soaring above the swirl of street activity from the cexitofthe station tothe nearby arterial oad. As we watched him ia stunned silence, we saw that no amount of spatial analyses would disabuse the idea that Mumbai's streets are too crowded, too dense and too messy. This encounter took place two years before the first of thisty-two (and counting) pedestrian skywalks ‘were constructed in Mumbai.(i] At that time the idea ofa pedestrian bridge sounded preposterous, thoroughly out of touch with how the city'sstreets function. Why was the solution to congestion sought inthe sky, when there was cone so clearly on the grouné, we wondered? Was the skywalk meant to benefit pedestrians, or discipline them? It wast't quite lear But these questions missed the point. Literally and figuratively soaring above the ety, projects like this operate ona logic of urban fantasy and globally-scaled aspiration; the dream to rise above the mess ofthe street, as an official is quoted saying (Siddhaye 201), needs no technical justification. twas 2006, no skywall had been built, and yet, skywalks were shaping the reality of the city. Their imminent areival shaped how people interpreted streets, thelr use, and the potential design interventions that can transform them, This 37020 atosr2ai2018 hitps:lwwn.nextroom.atatcl. php? nexroom at Is there A Culture ofthe Inian Street? encounter can teach us much about how the city works - about, for instance, the ‘way local authorities shape the built environment, the nature of bureaucratic rule and transportation-related decision making processes - but more importantly, it demonstrates how urban fantasies continue to animate the reality ofthe street. It shows the presence of unactualized structures in the tactile environment ofthe city. This presence isa constitutive element of what might be called the culture of the Indian street the experience, function and aesthetic form of the street are inseparable from the spectre of dreams for what a modern, global o: world-class urban landscape should look like. Writings on thes India can be grouped Into two categories. The first sees the street asa space of difference. These are ‘writings by non-Indians and Indians alike that - whether as emblematic of the exotic Oriente (Kidambi 2007: p. 35), »premature« (Bose 196s), or underdeveloped ~ see steeets seething with miscellaneous humanity (Low 1967: p. 23), as deviations from modern ideals. The second group sees streets and urban space as manifestations of power, arenas on which forces of global capital and ideologies of ‘neo-liberalism unfold (Rajagopal 2001, Whitehead and More 2007 and Arabindoo 2010) And finally the third perspective, what might be called a culturalist approach, frames Indian streetscapes in terms of their unique rhythms and logie ofppractice (Appadurai 1987, Ahuja 1997, Edensor 998 and Mehta 2005). ‘The specificity of urban experience ‘This essay focuses on the third perspective hecause, despite the problems, i continues tobe compelling. tals isthe approach that resonates with contemporary debates on global urbanism and the need for new vocabularies of urban analysis derived from historical experiences outside the Wes (cf. Robinson 2008). The ultuclist perspective is important because it highlights the specificity of urban experience; however, at times, its effectisto rigify difference. I this inherent othe project of locating urban particularity? Iemight be, but only when we focus on different street practices, as opposed to difference asa mode of experience that shapes the street argue that the specificity ofthe Indian street lies in the problematic of difference — the peresived disjancture between lived experience and universalizing norms of urban modernity - that animates ordinary lifeand governmental efforts to transform the city alike Representations ofthe street: The Indian street has not fared well over the past two centuries, From VS. Naipaul's] street scenes consisting of depressed- looking, dark people cating, indifferent to everything but their food (Naipaul, quoted in Chaksabarty 2002: p. 65-6) to Gandhi's observation that Bombay sooks asif it were the scum of London... with] all the shortcomings of Landon bat.. none ofits amenities (quoted in Hazareesingh 2007: p. 124), descriptions of Indian streetscapes have been framed in dystopic terms. Travellers’ and journalists’ accounts describe streets that are dense, dirty and chaotic. They describe terrifying experiences of navigating crumbling surfaces, dodging garbage, shit and hawkers on long-ago vanished sidewalks, all the while avoiding the dangerous anarchy of India's infamous exhaust-spewing traffic. ‘In much travel writing on Indi, the street offers glimpse into another world >When we reached the native town how changed was the scene (..) Europe was left behind and the East was realized - the narrow, winding streets, the open shops, small but highly characteristic, where the owner, Hindoo, Mahomedan, or Jew squatted among his waresc (quoted in Kidambi 2007: p. 3s}. Tis chronicler of late 2oth century Bombay observed not just a broken world ~ a world of poverty, dirt and despair - but an inverted one: a worl, as an observer put itat the turn of the century, n which people do all sorts of things in public which to our thinking should be transacted in privacyc (Low 1907: p. 23-24) Here, difference is indexed by sensory experience -»0n entering its huge bazaars forthe first time, one is immediately deafened by the din that prevails, and half suffocated by the smells. that impregnate the atmosphere: (Rousselet, quoted in Dwivedi and Mehrotra .994:. 50) ~ as wells by the organization of everyday life.*The shops are simply 37020 210sr2ai2018 hitps:lwwn.nextroom.atatcl. php? nexroom at Is there A Culture ofthe Inian Street? boxes, set on end, with the lids of... where one can] stand and watch the baker rolling his lat loaves, the tailor stitching and cutting, [and] the coppersmith hammering at his howls and dishes« (Low 1907: p. 24) while all around people can be seen véressing, shaving, washing, and sleeping, and, in spite ofthe caste rules and religious restrictions, even a good deal of eating« (Low 1907: p. 23}. Indeed, on most streets in urban India people are walking, but they are also working, cooking, talking, eating, sleeping, reading or simply hanging out. People brush their teeth, wash their face, chop vegetables and clean dishes. On the quiet residential street in front ofthe apartment where I stay in northwest Mumbai, the day begins with a woman selling tea next to her husband, an occasional banana vendor. Their grandchild plays on a scooter while his father washes his aautorickshaw. By the late aternoon, a cigarette and paan vendor appears accross the road. Around the corner, a vendor toasts sandwiches opposite a man selling nimbus and leafy green vegetables from a small pusheart. A raddiwala cycles by, collecting old newspapers, An itinezant barber, his equipment stored in a small briefcase, sits in the shade ofa shoe repairman's roadside stall. A block away, a cluster of women sell vegetables perched against a fence, a man fries pakodas from ‘a small metal stand, others prepare chaat and vada pao. Beneath an old tree, ‘magazines are displayed next to two young men repairing tires, stacks of which are used to support a table for their neighbours’ food preparation. How are we to interpret these street scenes? Is this mix of activities a sign of infrastructural and governance falure- a view shared by the local residents! associations and much ofthe Mumbai media? Or, do they index a sensibility, >refusal to hecome citizens of an ideal, bourgeois order« (Chakrabarty 2002: p. 77. 0 as Arjun Appadurai (987: p.13) writes, are the streets and assoclated practices >eultural resourcesc which ie atthe heart of public life in contemporary India’? Indian steeetscapes Considering the way monumental architecture continues to stand in for heritage in urban India, Appadurai’s call for an appreciation of street life is remarkably prescient. For Appadurai, streetscapes exhibit a »public cultures, a place where notions of place and affiliation are forged. >With the possible exception of the railroad, streets capture more about India than any other setting. On ts streets, India eats, works, sleeps, moves, celebrates and worships« (Appadurai 1987: p. 14) ‘Streets are also ideal sites from which to explore connections among popular ‘media, politics and society in a context of intensifying transnational image circulation, the subject of his more well-known later work (cf. Appadurai 1996). However, imbuing ordinary landscapes with cultural value is different from interpreting streetscapes as sites of distinct cultural sensbilitesa view that {informs other writings on the street. We see this view, for instance, in Soraya ‘Ahuje’s Where the Strets Lead (1997)an account of the aesthetics and experience ofthe street in half dozen Indian cities. This text interweaves fictional narrative with architectural analyses to reflect on the configurations of ordinary lfe and built environments: »lTooked down a the patterns formed by the cars the people, the signs, the crossings, buildings and lights, Here lay the boundless conurbation of streets operating in perfectly controlled chaos. This was the Indian street for sec (Ahuja 1997.47) ‘To Ahuja, Indian streets are defined by a profusion of personal encounters sThe food carts and people around them and the simple act of eating made the place appear intimatec (Abuja 997: p. 50). The transformation of public spaces into private spaces occur everywhere, from the quiet residential streets to the imposing, monumental architecture of South Mumbai continuous arcede that connected all the buildings... was crowded with hawkers of ll sorts, and indicated a characteristic inherent in the culture ofthe Orient, to personalize a public domain, so thatthe demarcation between the private and the public was loose and 37020 annosr2ai2018 hitps:lwwn.nextroom.atatcl. php? nexroom at Is there A Culture ofthe Inian Street? nebulous, unlike in the West (Ahuja 1997: p. so) ‘A mix of the intimate and the anonymous is central to other writings on the Indian, street, Consider, for instance, Kaiwan Mehta's Alice in Bhuleshwas, a memoir of ‘the author's wanderings through the old Mumbai neighbourhood of Bhuleshwar ‘that mixes postmodern pastiche with ethnographic musings: The crowd of people and cycles, cars and handearts does not allow one to look around for long. The negotiations that one employs to navigate these streets dominates one's experience of the areac (Mehta 2008: p. 2) ‘Mixed functions and activities ‘This sa deliberately fragmented approach that, in the spisit of de Certeau (1984), isan effort to dwell in the mental maps ofthe city. Every gali belongs to a sweeper, and he proudly owns the burden, as much as he curses the stench in his lifec (Meta 2009: p.13). Emerging from the crush ofthe commuter trains, Mehta, ‘writes, We step into new neighbourhoods, making them new again. We move ‘through main lanes and streets every day, sometimes negotiating the traffic, at other times, garbage, and often even the marriage procession of a man we do net now but recognize: (Mehta 2009: p 4) ‘This imaginative potential of the public spectacle, sensory experience and social mix also animates Tim Edensor’s essay, The Culture ofthe Indian Street (:998). To Edensor, mixed use streetscapes pose a conceptual challenge to urban analysis that normalizes the highly monitored, strictly demarcated streetscape of the West. In contrast to western strets, which are constructed out ofan aesthetics and rationale which fears mixing of function and the disintegration of boundaries« (Géensor 1998: 213), streets in India are characterized by an overwhelming sensory experience, public spectacle, a jostie of bodies, objects and practices, in which >passage Is marked by disruption and distraction... offered by these heterogencous activities and sights« (Edensor 1998: p. 210)-Indian streetscapes contain a vhaptic geography wherein there is continuous touching of others and weaving between and against bodies« (Edensor 1998: p. 12) This isa geography that challenges the pedestrian, drawing him into the urban realm. *The body passing through the Indian street is continually imposed upon and challenged by diverse activities, sensations and sights which render state at variance to the restrained and distanced distraction of the western street (Edensor 1998: p. 213) Eschewing earlier interpretations of dense streetscapes as signs of civilizational inferiority (eg. Low:907) or infeastructural failure, Edensor sees them as models for what hasbeen lost inthe West. To him, mixed use, the blurring of boundaries between public and private, and the rich sensory experience are signs of streets that are vless circumscribed and framed by the power of capital and bureaucracy« (Edensor 1998: p. 219). reinterprets messy streetscapes as redemptive spaces. jarring streetscapes invigorate, they heighten the senses and invigorate social ‘engagement. Indeed, this isa street spectacle that challenges sthe passivec ideal that, since the late 18th century, has dominated the European urban experience (Sennett 1994: p. 16-25; ef Edensor 1998: p. 214) Iegoes without saying that the exuberance of India's streets has potential to heighten engagement ofthe external world in a way that suburban US. streetscapes - obsessed, as Richard Sennett (i994: p.18) argues, with effortless navigation and a kind of freedom from resistance: ~ do nat potential oo - India contains streetscapes that allow a wide diversity of urban practices, as wel asthe potential to generate greater awareness ofthe harsh realities and inequalities of urban life (what do clean sidewalks hide better than poverty?) But, as with all culeuralist analyses, there isa danger of imputing stasis, harmony and boundedness on what is, in fact, much more contested and fluid realm, Edensor’s analyses of street life suggestes a unified and clzeumseribed cultural worl; the streetlife he describes are presumed tobe ontologicaly distinct from streetlife elsewhere when, in fact, they are produced out of centuries of sre is democratic 37020 anosr2ai2018 hitps:lwwn.nextroom.atatcl. php? nexroom at Is there A Culture ofthe Inian Street? exchange and interaction, including with those in the West (cf. Mcfarlane 2008). ‘The anxiety of not being full participants in world modernity Edensor provides a much needed fine-grained account of Indian streetscapes, and in doing so, he achieves what all good urban ethnography should do. But in its invocation of difference, the essay raises a larger question about the possibilities of ‘transnational urban analyses: is it possible to describe particularities of urban, experience - to decentre urban environments in Europe and North America ~ ‘without relfying culture? Or, is reifying culture inherent to the project of| identifying specificity? I suggest that, as long as we reconceptualize the notion of street culture, this does not have to be the case. Rather than a distinct realm of nce and practice and sensibility, we might instead refer toa zealm of expe interpretation in which difference is nota stable, external sociological category, but a frame of reference that produces the street and its associated worlds in the first place. In India, difference lies inthe haunting spectre of what s perceived asthe incomplete project of modernity inthe city. Questions such as the one framing Partha Chatterjee’ (Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last? 2004) essay on middleclass urban polities (and from whom I draw the ttle of this essay) speak to this predicament. Indian cities are modern in an obvious sense, and yet the constant public discussion about lack of civic sense, misuse of public space and the appearance of street is partly a reflection of anxiety over whether they are full participants in world modernity; for many ofits users, the streetscapes that Edensor celebrates representa problem because they deviate from a supposedly universal urban aesthetic idea. Thus, while writings on the culture of the Indian street are concemed with understanding... difference and votherness« « (Edensor 1998: p. 220), the politics of contemporary urban India suggests that what is needed isto understand how otherness operates on the street. What s needed, therefore, isnot just ethnography of different street practices, but how street practices in India are produced through awareness of difference from the West by those using, working loitering, managing, writing, and governing it. Without denying the intimacy, mix of activities, proximity of bodies and blurred boundaries in urban India described by Edensor and others, we cannot celebrate the vibrancy of streets in India without losing sight ofthe fact that they are animated by a continual contest over how a modern streetscape should function, As with the BMC skywalk, dreams of urban landscapes elsewhere and notions of ‘what a modern city should look like continue to animate ordinary life. These are not cultural attributes in the anthropological sense, but are spawned from an imagination of cultural difference. Indeed, even what these writers identify as culture isin facta set of contested street practices in which, for instance, daily needs conflict with modern ideals; thus the stotal confusion ofthe private and the public« (Chakrabarty 2002: p. 66) is not static empitical reality a sign of cultural specificity but, to many in urban India, including civic groups, NGOs, pedestrian rights activists, residents associations, municipal officials, police, journalists and celebrities, something that needs fixing. Likewise, the constant stream ofletters tothe editor complaining of ‘Mumbaikars’ lack of civic sense, the citizen-led campaigns against littering, spitting and patronizing street vendors, do not representa static cultural tradition, but aze highly chaeged politics in which are wrapped up larger questions of democracy, citizenship rights, and conflicts over the right to the city (Lefebvre 996) Streets and modernity In outlining the conceptual stakes ina study of the Indian street, itis necessary to explain that by street, Inefer to an element ofthe built environment that, 37020 5110sr2ai2018 hitps:lwwn.nextroom.atatcl. php? nextroomat- Is there A Culture ofthe Indian Street? simultaneously operates as an abstract entity and a lived experience. This isthe concept of the street, to follow de Certeau (2984), that sees the street consisting of an assemblage of technical expertise, law and things, as well asthe experiences, practices and imaginaries ofits inhabitants, These are, ofcourse, merely analytic categories that highlight how urban landscapes are produced. At any particular ‘moment, the meaning ofa streets informed by the official practices that make it aan abstract entity, just as the street geometeicaly defined by urban planning is, ‘transformed into a space by walkers« (de Certeau 1984: 127). ‘The street isan object of spatio-legal regimes and a technocratic gaze - of policy ‘makers, planners’ and engineers’ visions ~ but it also operates asa powerful metaphor, The street connotes the mundane, the gritty, and the real. Itis a space of everyday interaction (eg. Whyte 1943), urban savvy, morality (street justice) and popular political sentiment (as in the journalistic cliché the Arab street). Curbs, parks and sidewalks seem to lack this poetic potential, although the public square comes close. The stretis also where the political categories of iberal democracy manifest themselves. As Marshall Berman (i986) writes in Take I tothe Streets, political and spatial categories co-produce each other: The ideals of modern subjectivity - {ndividuated personhood unencumbered by history social tie, or obligation, for instance ~ are spatialized. We see this, fr instance, in the removal of embodied practices (eating, washing and cooking) from the street (Valentine 1998), in the ith century European vety... [which] has deastically and irreparably devalued it [the street] asa place of social experience: (Moretti 983: p.127), and in the valorization of strolling, aimless wandering and flanerie in art and literature. In the modernist imagination, walking gets transformed from a mundane act toa normative spatial practice, while the pedestrian becomes the normative urban ‘inhabitant; individuated and unencumbered, stripped of the past, someone who ‘embraces contradiction and the challenges of the new. In this way, the street occupies a privileged place in accounts of urban modernity. ‘To Walter Benjamin (2006), the experience ofthe street stands in for the contradictions of capitalist modernity - the simultaneous experience ofthe attractive and the repulsive, t ‘mundane, the transformative and degrading (Kaviraj 2004).In Baudelaire’s poetry, for instance, t]he archetypal ‘modern man... isa pedestrian thrown into the maelstrom of modern city traffic, a ‘man alone contending against an agglomeration of mass and energy that is heavy, fast and lethal« (Berman 1983: p. 159). The street is where one encounters the technology, socility and politics of the modern world. e sacred and th ‘This is where the street in India poses a challenge, Analyses of urban modernity rest ona literary tradition which normalizes the »modern city as crowd of strangers (Williams 1992: p. 85) anda gaze of the alienated manc (Benjamin 1986: p40) that does not quite characterize streets in India (or, perhaps, any street other than those geographically and chronologically locete in 1sth century Paris). Ifthe experience of the modern city is defined by alienation, then how do we interpset streets in places like Bombay, which are represented as part village community, part cosmopolitan city street (Mazumdar 2007: p. 20). Similarly, what do we make of streets that do not produce a veil through which the familiar city beckons... phantasmagoria (Benjamin 1986:p. 40) but, as we seein Hindi film, cones that evoke...a whole range of experiences related to loss, nostalgia, pain, community, and anger¢? (Mazumdar 2007: p.4-5.{3] ‘The great novelty of urban life... does not consist in having thrown the people into the street, but in having raked them up and shut them into offices and houses« (Moretti 1983: p. 127); and yet, it is precisely the vast mix of people and activities in public that writers {identify as characteristic feature ofthe Indian street. Is the answer to these questions simply to say that the category of the modern is irrelevant? Or, that the Eurocentricism of mainstream urban theory can only be overcome by expanding the category to include radically different urban forms and practices? 37020 anosr2ai2018 hitps:lwwn.nextroom.atatcl. php? nextoom ats there A Culture ofthe Indian Stas? Alternatively, suggest that we might see difference from the category ofthe modern (however much ofa myth that category i) as constituting a predicament thatisan extricable pat ofthe experience ofthe urban Indian streetscape. ‘The efforts to transform Indian streets ‘Any discussion ofthe culture ofthe Indian street has to take into account the fact that today’s Indian streetscapes are an accumulation ofa century and a half of ‘municipal, police and elite residents’ efforts to transform them. This does not ‘mean the street has been subsumed into logic of architectural modernism; but ‘equally, nor does the street represent a complete inversion oft. From the introduction of motorized transport at the turn of the century, which authorities hoped would have the effect of teaching the native to look ahead and to perceive that the middle ofthe road is not the place for an aimless saunter (guoted in Hazareesingh 2007: p. 66); mid-century bureaucrats’ discussions of the necessary sidewalk maintenance ifthe pedestrian isto be kept off the road (The Greater Bomibay Scheme 1945: p. 25); nd to more recent efforts to discipline street users such as the erection of fences meant to keep pedestrians separate from automotive traffic, efforts to reshape the street practices in India have largely failed (ef. ‘Chakrabarty 2002). On the streetin northwest Mumbai discussed above, the new fence meant to discipline street users ~to produce rightful pedestrians - was immediately appropriated by washermen and hawkers, so that it now serves asthe physical infrastructure for the street's informal economy (e.g. Koolhaas eta. 2000). In part, this can be read asa sign of modernity’s obsession to impose a thoroughly ratjonalized order on to the world« (Clarke 1997: p.3); the fence ultimately had an ‘opposite effect, as more people chose to walk amidst trafic than be heramed in by this unforgiving architecture (cf. Ranade et al 2005) If there isa culture of the Indian stret, itis in its relationship to the project of ‘modernity. This is not so much a shared sensibility, but a contested terrain that consists of conflicts over how streets can be used (can the side ofthe road be used for hawking, ors it solely for walking), efforts to discipline the public (eg., Don't Spit! Don't Litter Rao 2012) and infrastructural intesventions (such as skywalks and pedestrian fences) that ebb and flow, that remake streets as much as streets remake them. These are not conflicts over whether or not the streets are modern or Indian, but over the yconfiguration of the modernc (Kaviraj997:p.9a) in the first place, ‘Streets in India are shaped through this constantly shifting negotiation over the form and content of the city; they neither mimic modernist urbanism nor do they invert it. In this way, urbanist modernism as an architectural form, and urban ‘modernity as a consciousness, zepresent both problems and possibilities. Practices such as flinerie are premised on a landscape of urban alienation; of being in the crowd but never being part oft. ‘Streets in urban india offer a spectacle that captures wanderers’ imaginations (cf, Edensor 1998), but this spectacle is premised on pulling the spectator into other ‘worlds. To some, for example Naipaul (Ezekial 1974), the impossibility of distanced observation, autonomy and anonymity signals an unsettling lack of modern consciousness; but more compellingly, itcan challenge the universalizing concepts of urban space and analysis. Thus concepts such as flineric as urban methodology (ct. Featherstone 1998), problematic outside the idealized modernist landscape of| 19th century Pazis, can be helpful in other ways - in, for instance, allowing us to see how streets are inhabited by the »phantasmagoriac (Benjamin 1986: p. 40) of urban lifeworlds elsewhere, ‘What sets the street in Mumbai or New Delhi apart from streets in North America and Europe is thus not a different culture or street practice (we can see its of the 37020 70sr2ai2018 hitps:lwwn.nextroom.atatcl. php? nextoom ats there A Culture ofthe Indian Stas? Jane Jacobs’ street ballet, as wells the drudgery of architectural modernism in New York City as much as in Mumbai), but in the way fantasies of other cities haunt everyday life. Read the New York Times and the countless urbanist blogs on "New York City, and you get the sense thatthe future ofthat city emanates from within itselé By contrast, the model for the future Indian street is in Singapore, Dubai and Shanghai its potential to become a modern city is presumed to bein its ability to emulate urban landscapes elsewhere. ‘Anmerkungen: [or] Mumbai's skywalks were built by the MMRDA, a statewide agency responsible for infrastructural development that is independent from the BMC. "Nevertheless it is clear from this encounter that BMC officials were aware ofthe ‘MMRDA’ future plans. [oa] V.S. Naipaul visa Trinidadian-British writer (..) known for focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism. He has also written ‘works of non-fiction, such as travel writing and essays. In 001, Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.« Source: Wikipedia: http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/V.S. Naipaul (612.2012) {03] That is not to say that representations of the street in India as spaces of social isolation and alienation are impossible. See, for instance, Karin Zitzewitz’ (2008) readings of Sudhir Patwardhan's Bombay paintings. is novels Literaturverzeichnis: ‘Ahuja, Sarayu (1997): Where the Streets Lead, New Delhi: Penguin. ‘Appadurai, Arjun (1987): Street Culture, In: The India Magazine 8(), December 2987, pp. 1222. Appadurai, Arjun (1996): Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ‘Arabindoo, Pushpa (2010): City of Sand: Stately Re-Imagination of Marina Beach in ‘Chennai. 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Gambetta (Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning) und Ritajyott Bandyopadhyay (Georg-August-Universitit Gittingen)] ur don Beitrag vorantwortich: dérive ‘een aur Ansprechpartnerta fr diese Selte:hvistogh aimee t0n10