The Cities of Everyday Life
This year’s Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. 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.
With essays, images, analyses, and manifestoes The Cities of Everyday Life reflects on the contemporary urban condition, detours into the back alleys of the global city, takes on media representations of terror and war, examines the politics of information, anticipates the futures of digital urbanism, registers the details of media flows, explores representations of the city, and looks at globalisation from below.
Production
Editorial Collective: Ravi S Vasudevan, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink & Shuddhabrata Sengupta.
Design: Pradip Saha and Monica Narula.
Read
The entire book can be accessed and downloaded from the Sarai archive.
Contents
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
Screening Injustice: Race, Violence and Media Flows – Bhrigupati Singh
THE STREET IS THE CARRIER AND THE SIGN
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 Love It – Niji Akanni
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
CYBERMOHALLA DIARIES
Cybermohalla Diaries – Azra Tabassum, Shamsher Ali, Suraj Rai, Neelofer, Ayesha, Shahjehan, Bobby, Yashodha, and Mehrunissa
9/11 – MEDIA/CITY
A Day that Will Live In…? – Patrick Deer & Toby Miller
Responses to 9/11: Individual and Collective Dimensions – Rajeev Bhargava
Violence and Translation – Veena Das
Branding the War: Terror and the Commodity Image – William Mazzarella
“The One Who Really Scares Me” – Paul Virilio Interviewed by Dorothea Hahn
Selections: Discussion Thread Post-9/11 – reader-list@sarai.net [Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Rehan Hasan Ansari, Shammi Nanda, William Mazzarella, Kali Tal, Ravi Sundaram, Zamrooda Khanday, Frederic Madre, Ravikant, Jeebesh Bagchi]
The obliqueWTC – Lars Spuybroek
VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE AND DIGITAL URBANISM
Hyper-Architecture – Ole Bouman
Diagramming – Lars Spuybroek Interviewed by Cho Im Sik
Seeing Cyberspace: The Electrical Infrastructure as Architecture – Brian Caroll
Archifesto: Towards a Digital Urbanism of Radical Difference – Archimedia
THE POLITICS OF INFORMATION
Banking (on) Biologicals: Commodifying the Global Circulations of Human Genetic Material – Kaushik Sunder Rajan
The Face of the Future: Biometric Surveillance and Progress – Rana Dasgupta
Everyday Surveillance: ID Cards, Cameras and a Database of Ditties – Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Blind Intelligence – Sam de Silva
Surveillance: After September 11, 2001 – David Lyon
New Rules, New Actonomy – Geert Lovink & Florian Schneider
Random Thoughts: About the Indymedia Network, Tactical Media… – Evan Henshaw-Plath
The Case for Biolinuxes: And Other Pro-Commons Innovations – K. Ravi Srinivas
Open Publishing – Mathew Arnison
Openlaw – http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/
ALT/OPTION
Panic, War & Semio-Kapital – Franco Berardi Bifo
Globalisation from Below: Migration, Sovereignty, Communication – McKenzie Wark
THIS YEAR / THAT CITY