Designing Cities without designing buildings?
Designing buildings without designing spaces?
Designing spaces without people?
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 INTENT
The intent of this research is to understand the theories of different authors about ‘imagined communities’, and their approach about globally imagined world today.
A few questions will be answered through this research:
Who decides who is to be a part of such an imagined community, and what includes its research agenda and why?
If such a community emerges then is its vision and scope sufficiently imaginative about questions of global power and politics?
Can such communities recreate the research imagination as it creates itself in the physical world? Or is it the global research imagination a form of repetition?
Moreover, we will be looking into the modern form of imagined communities which most of the anthropologists talk about in their theories, and how well are these theories true for macroscopic as well as microscopic worlds.
Therefore, moving towards the end of this paper, we might be able to give an idea of how this attempt will touch the lives of the people with while designing buildings.
1.2 IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Benedict Anderson . 1983 . Imagined Communities
Anderson had an innovative and influential approach to understanding the nation state as a political form. Nations are therefore a product of the collective imaginations of the people who perceive themselves as members. Though most of them will never see each other, they form an imagined community that gives them a sense of collective identity.
Also these communities are born and spread in particular ways into a society, always depending on the time and culture in which those communities fall. Therefore we can say that, at some point during history, a daily structured practice has allowed imaginary people to be part of something, which forms common identities as a result.
Arjun Appadurai . 1990. Globalization . Public Culture
The modern society, is characterized by a new relationship between subjectivities and imagination. The two major, interconnected diacritics affecting this present dynamic are electronic media and mass migration, which impel the work of the imagination. Imaginaries play a constitutive role in social life as the world we now live in emerges more out of subjectively imagined possibilities than the specific trajectories of social forms and practices at a global level. He claims that the world has now become a single system with a range of complex subsystems, in his work.
This approach shows that the theories of Appadurai and Anderson, both writers agree with the fact that humanity lives in an imagined world or community, where its imagination allows people to accept that they belong to such nation, and although they know very little about their local communities or the people who belong there, they accept it firmly as a real nation.
Despite the similarities on the theories from both, they expose different approaches, providing valuable information that makes that their theories achieve an equal level of significance.
Charles Taylor . 2003. Modern Social Imaginaries . Duke University Press
He distinguished between: “the moral order” (I.e. political philosophical ideas held by elites) and a modern “social imaginary” (I.e. imagination shared by ordinary people)
According to his theories “The social imaginary is 'that common understanding which makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.’”
2. ARJUN APPADURAI
2.1 ABOUT
Bombay, India | 1949
India - American Anthropologist
In his anthropological work, he discuss the importance of the modernity of nation-state and globalization. Arjun Appadurai’s introduction to the book, Globalization (2001), entitled ‘Grass roots globalization and the research imagination’ greatly influential notion of the ‘research imagination’, and ‘imagined research communities’.
This line of thought generated certain pertinent questions, such as is ‘research’ constructed and imagined in a particular way by researchers in the social sciences? And does this approach of ‘research’ continues to construct a particular sort of research community?
Appadurai formulates a mental model for the disjunctures between different sorts of global flows by creating terms that serve as an elementary framework which serves to analyse the complex relationship of these flows in five dimensions I.e. Ethnoscape, Mediascape, Technoscape, Finanscape, Ideoscape.
His alternative theory focuses instead on “disjunction”, or points at which different logic, or processes go in different directions and cause ruptures, tensions or conflicts. Appadurai’s theory is based on believes that we now live in such globally imagined worlds and not simply logically imagined world. Also where deterritorialisation, the breaking-down of existing territorial connections, is a major force.
2.2 DISJUNCTION & DIFFERENCE IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Appadurai’s model of global cultural flow, claims that the world has now become a single system with a range of complex subsystems.
People, technology, money, media, images, and ideas now follow increasingly non-isomorphic paths. Of course, at all points in human history, there have been some disjunctures between the flows of these things, but the sheer speed, scale and volume of each of these are now flowing is so great that this disjuncture have become central to the politics of global culture. It serves us with a reflective, multidimensional view on the macroscopic processes of a globalized society and provides useful vocabulary to analyse these complex relationships on a fundamental level.
I suppose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow which can be termed: Ethnoscapes, Mediascapes, Technoscapes, Finanscapes, Ideoscapes.
The structure serves well to exemplify the strong interdependencies between the formulated scapes and points out both the procedural and disjunctive nature of the topic and motives the reader to review his perspectives on the global flow of people, technology, finance, information, and ideologies.
i. Ethnoscape refers to the movement of people across boundaries.
I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups constitute an essential feature, and therefore appear to affect the politics of and between nations to an unprecedented degree across the world. These moving groups can never afford to let their imagination rest too long, and as the international capital shifts its needs, as nation-states shift their policies on refugee populations.
ii. Technoscape refers to the movement of technology.
Technology, both high or low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries. The odd distribution of the technologies is increasingly driven by the economies of scale, of political control, or of market rationality. Also, the increasingly complex relationships between money flow, political possibilities, and the availability of both low and highly skilled labour are the peculiarities of these technoscapes that influence the flow.
iii. Financescape refers to the flow of capital/money across political borders.
The critical point that the global relationship between ethnoscape, technoscape and finanscape is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable since each of these landscapes are subject to its own constraints, and incentives. Thus, even an elementary model of global political economy must take into account the shifting relationships between perspectives on human movement, technological flow, and financial transfers, which can accommodate their deeply disjunctive relationships with one another.
iv. Ideoscape refers to the flow of belief system/ideas.
‘Ideoscapes’, are concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states, and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. These are composed of elements of the enlightenment world view, which consists of a concatenation of ideas, terms, and images, including ‘freedom’, ‘welfare’, ‘rights’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘representation’ and the master-term ‘democracy’.
Thus ‘democracy’ has clearly become a master-term, with powerful echoes but it sits at the centre of a variety of ideoscopes.
So, while an Indian audience may be attentive to the resonances of a political speech, the very relationship of reading to hearing, and seeing may vary in important ways as they shape themselves in different national and transnational contexts.
But their diaspora (a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale) across the world, especially since the nineteenth century, have provided a loosely structured synoptic (surveillance of few by many) of politics, in which different nation-states, as a part of their evolution, have organized their political cultures around different ‘keywords’.
The fluidity of ideoscapes is complicated, particularly by the growing diasporas of intellectuals who continuously inject new meaning into the discourse of democracy in different parts of the world. As a result, this globally variable synaesthesia has hardly even been noted in the present context, but it demands urgent analysis in future approaches.
v. Mediascape refers to the movements of representation & communication practices/media across borders. Both ideoscape and mediascape are closely related.
Mediascape refers to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world; and to the images of the world created through this process.
What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their television, film, and cassette forms) large and complex repertories of images, narratives and ‘ethnoscapes’ to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of ‘new’ and politics are profoundly mixed.
The line between the ‘realistic’ and the ‘fictional’ landscapes they see are blurred, so that the further away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct ‘imagined worlds’ which are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly id assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other ‘imagined world’.
2.3 OVERVIEW
The central problem of today's global interactions is that for polities of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural absorption by polities of larger scale, especially those that are nearby.It is correctly said that ‘One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison’. The new cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order.
Appadurai’s alternative theory focuses instead on disjunctions, or points at which different logics or processes go in different directions and cause ruptures, tensions or conflicts.
Thus the global culture today is a constant struggle by sameness and difference to draw on one another - ‘mutual cannibalisation’. Its brighter side is in the expansion of many individual horizons of hope and fantasy, in the global spread of oral rehydration therapy and other low-tech instruments of well being. Although some issues around ethnocide and the like are already present in it, ‘Disjuncture and Difference’ is generally viewed as a rather positive take on globalization.
3. SUBJECTIVE STUDY
3.1 EXAMPLE: MAJORITIES & MINORITIES
Appadurai believes the relation between nation and state is now disjunctive, nations and states are in constant conflict. States have to let in hostile ideas to become open to global flows, thus ‘under siege’. Too much entry of global forces and they are threatened by revolt; too little and they exit the global field.
Appadurai in his book, ;Fear of Small Numbers’ introduces the dark side of globalization, where he rejects the standard argument identities emerge in reaction to globalization. Rather he argues that these kind of effects are produced by same process as global power. According to Appadurai, modern procedures such as census-taking and population mapping, results in inventions of majorities and minorities.
Minorities exist in a grey area, a thin gap between citizenship and abstract humanity, part of the numerical aggregate of the nation but not the identity-group.
Hence for Appadurai, majorities need minorities in order to exist, as their shadow, as the target of the violence they unleash. States and in-groups use fear of minorities as a way to channel the desire to exorcise newness and uncertainty in response to global flows.
3.2 CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Appadurai is also rather prone to use complexity as an excuse for ignoring or denying structural forces that govern the flow of scapes. So as an implication, it’s all too complicated, high-speed and multi- directional for anything to be made sense of beyond the level of simply recognizing its complexity.
It is true, for instance, that technological flows are now multi-directional, and widespread among all private and public commodities. But it is also true that powers over intellectual property, and technological research are concentrated in the established core countries, where diasporas play an important role as main entities.
This also raises the question of whether all ‘fears of small numbers’ are alike or can they be analyzed and moulded or blended according to living commodities. Appadurai’s theories of the differences between what he seems to see as good and bad kinds of cellular networks is also underdeveloped in ‘Fear of Small Numbers’.
4. LITERATURE REVIEW
4.1 CONTEXT
Ethnoscape slips through borders and between states. An anomaly of current period is that senses of primordial belonging to particular places have been globalized. They are now spread through diasporic groups. Money, commodities and people, etc. chase each other all over the world seeking new combinations.
Appadurai believes that global diffusion and new technologies have loosened the coherence of ideology in which these concepts were originally held together, turning them into elements for new combinations. The different ‘scapes’ are in disjuncture. Each follow different trajectories which are ‘non-isomorphic’ - they are not similar in form. As a result they destabilize one another.
I believe Appadurai’s theories are true and as one of the possibility they affect our sociocultural surroundings as well as designing spaces on a microscopic level. Also forming a new platform for cultural relativism for diasporas of our globally imagined worlds on a smaller scale.
4.2 MICROSCOPIC IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
" Macroscopic to microscopic imagined communities "
Now in the above-mentioned examples we have seen how the scapes destabilize the world as a larger commodity. Moving forward I would like to introduce a new perspective to Appadurai’s theory of Imagine communities, and the fear of small numbers. And also raising the question of whether all ‘fears of small numbers’ are alike.
We are familiar with minorities emerges during globalization which is equally a part of our world as any other human commodity.
Therefore, focusing on how this ‘fear of small numbers might result in a threat and how can we stabilize it based on the five scapes introduced by Appadurai. Concentrating on the microscopic surrounding of our environment and reciprocating based on how a building could respond to such problems, we will be looking for a solution as an architect, as a person living in that environment.
5. APPLICATION
5.1 CHANDIGARH HOUSING PROJECT
Studio Project : Architectural Design | M.Arch | Semester 1
The housing complex is to be built for officers working in Govt. of - Punjab, Haryana & Union Territory and its Boards & Corporations. The Housing Complex should be multi storied flats with all modern amenities with the following broad requirements:
Residences -
4BHK + Attendant DUs – 50%
3BHK – 40%
EWS DUs: 10%
Total Parking Required: 2 ECS per DU for 4 BHK and 3 BHK apartments.
Club house/Community space for residents with sports and recreational facilities. Services areas as requires such as STP, Water storage, Water Harvesting, Electrical installations with back up and solar power, security / communication systems, solid waste collection/ disposal etc. shall be provided as required.
Site is located in highly eco sensitive zone of Sukhna Lake, amidst forest/wildlife corridor of Chandigarh. Natural surroundings of the site are on one side the Lake, other side is the natural hillocks while on other side is the Kishangarh Village and the planned I T park of Chandigarh.
5.2 THEORY BASED MODEL
In most of the hou sing projects constructed in recent years we see how Economically weaker sections are mostly segregated from the main residential units due to several socioeconomic factors. This results in the separation of two imagined communities based on finanscape. (Appadurai’s five scapes)
In this housing project, government officials are to be settled with 10% of EWS of total residential units on the same site. The first thought that comes to our mind while designing is to designate spaces in such a way that the minorities don’t affect the majorities or their daily working environments. But what we forget to notice is that by doing such segregation we are labeling two imagined communities.
Firstly, the government officials who will be occupying most of the residential units. Secondly, the EWS who constitute the shifting world in which we live: immigrants, refugees, guest workers and other moving groups constitute an essential feature, and therefore appear to affect the working chores of people around them to an unprecedented degree across the units. Both are interdependent therefore a model where both fulfil their roles without creating disturbances for each other. This brings us back to the ‘ethnoscapes’, where the central paradox of ethnic politics in today’s world is that primordia (whether of language or skin color or neighbourhood or of kinship) have become globalized in our society.
Therefore, comparing the situation with Appadurai’s macroscopic globally imagined world, we must analyse the situation and examine what cloud be consequences of our proposed designs in this microscopic site and its surroundings Just because some people are differentiated based on their income level, doesn’t mean they don’t have equal rights for their built space. So what I wanted to achieve in my model is how to bridge this gap of segregation and bring about a change where cultural relativism renovates on the same pace for both the communities and eliminate the fear of small numbers and the dark side of globalization on a smaller scale.
6. IMPLEMENTATION
As we can see in fig 1.1 where we designated the location for EWS residential units and in fig 1.2 following the our model the EWS units are scattered along with other residential units in cuboid form to create a uniform space and eliminating the possibilities of differentiating between two imagined communities.
Here in fig 1.3 we can see how EWS is incorporated within residential units without disturbing or creating any microeconomics discrimination
Hence we create a combined imagined community where the vertical hierarchy of government official units is incorporated with a horizontal EWS residential units. The two arrows show how these units will be well connected horizintally and vertically both with an integrated circulation.
7. CONCLUSION
To conclude my theory, I would like to introduce this new perspective of ‘microscopic imagined communities’ and their significance in our surrounding environment. Hence, if we are properly able to analyse these microscopic problems and find similar solution to eliminate such imbalance in globalization flow we might be able to understand the impact of macroscopic impact of Appadurai’s five scapes globally.
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