Lecture Room 2, Faculty of Architecture and History of Art, Scroope Terrace
About
Maan Barua (University of Cambridge)
Please register at: Maan Barua - Amphibious Urbanism
About the talk:
What might the urban become if one challenged the proposition that cities are equated with land? How might urban theory be done differently if wetness was brought into centre stage in the politics of habitation? Starting from Guwahati, a city of 1.2 million people in northeast India that constitutes the South within the Global South, this talk furnishes the outlines of an amphibious urbanism: a recalibration of urbanicity by interrogating life (bios) from the wet surrounds (amphi-). Three cuts into the amphibious are presented: (1) plotting, rather than planning, as the idiom of city-making; (2) incompletion contra built form as a feature of urban ontology; and (3) dispossession by accumulation, and not just accumulation by dispossession, as a material condition of extended urbanisation. These themes are drawn together to interrogate a future urban condition. The talk draws from a book and visual project steeped in ethnographic endeavour.