Negotiating Territorial Trajectories: Tandem developments of national roads and local housing transforming urban-rural system in Bengal
Embargoed until 2027-06-04
Author
Date
2024Type
- Doctoral Thesis
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Abstract
The skewed focus towards cities in planning theories and practices, which often overlooks and discounts transformations beyond economic centres, propels the common global issue of uneven regional development, increasing regional inequalities and vulnerabilities. Some territories seem more prepared than others to deal with these growing global crises, where limited capacities and false assumptions even hinder future national policies from making the promised impacts. To address the current challenges in understanding and managing regional development, I propose a novel observational approach – in Tandem, looking at the unfolding of national strategies and their policies from the perspective of changing local construction practices to capture the multiple ways regional outcomes of national policies are framed today.
As little is known about the territorial characteristics driving transformation beyond cities, I took a case study approach. I focused on Indian roads and Bengali homes, tracing the unfolding national road policies and changing local housing typologies in the past thirty years. Through a multi-site study, I built a dataset on the development history of roads and houses in four selected sites. In total, I surveyed 396 households and 621 individuals, interviewed 61 locally elected representatives and state-appointed administrators, clicked 12,365 images and 823 videos of the built environments, and consulted recorded data and policy documents, further indexing them per household and territorial conditions to provide a multi-dimensional outlook. This process not only compensated for the data insufficiencies in state and satellite datasets but also traced the multiple compositions and valences configuring the region.
Analysing the selected arrangement of roads and houses from the vantage point of each other's production revealed how their growing tandem practices, relations and developments framed Bengal's transformation. The findings showed 1) the success (or failure) of national roads depends on how local housing choices change with each phase of the policy cycle, locally transforming infrastructural deployments required; 2) in turn, the growing relation between roads and houses are co-dependent on local institutional and household construction practices that vary per the urban-rural configurations, primary economic sector and historical events of the site, differing the settlement patterns; 3) within comparative site differences, lies the multiplicities of socio-economic conditions among households that create co-existing varied territorial developments, reproducing existing inequalities in newly built environments. Tracing in tandem the relation of roads and houses through the comparative and nested territorial differences evidenced signs of Bengal's transformation up to a decade earlier than in the recent population studies using national census data.
Looking at territorial transformations beyond the city not only reworks how territory is thus conceptualised and operationalised but also considers the temporalities of territory as a matter of gears, speeds, and rhythms—that put elements in touch with each other in different ways and intensities, rather than simply a matter of spatial formatting. This work doesn't call here for another set of reclassifications of urban and rural territories. Rather, it opens up theoretical, empirical and policy works to go beyond geometric accounting of relations, practices and developments as linear, circular and path-dependent and reconsider how different people, places and things come together in tandem. Show more
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https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000676350Publication status
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ETH ZurichSubject
REGIONAL PLANNING POLICY (PHYSICAL PLANNING); INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT (PHYSICAL PLANNING); Roads; Housing; Methodological development; Bengal; India; URBANIZATION (URBAN STUDIES); SPATIAL DEVELOPMENT (PHYSICAL PLANNING); Governance; STS; UrbanismOrganisational unit
08058 - Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC) / Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC)03932 - Topalovic, Milica / Topalovic, Milica
02655 - Netzwerk Stadt u. Landschaft ARCH u BAUG / Network City and Landscape ARCH and BAUG
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