Vyjayanthi Rao - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Vyjayanthi Rao
Perspecta
For this conversation, we take as our point of departure the multiple uses deriving from the lati... more For this conversation, we take as our point of departure the multiple uses deriving from the latin root'capitalis'(chief, principal, in the sense of sovereign power) which is both the root of capital as well as of'capitellum', meaning'small head', or the top of the column in the architectural sense. by juxtaposing these multiple uses, we enter into a contradiction: we are speaking both about the sense of fixing, of the vanguard, of that which tops off and shows off the solidity of the architecture as well as that which circulates and controls the expression ...
Public Culture
The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By ... more The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.
Global Design Competition for National War Memorial and Museum, 2016
Chroniques Yéménites, 2019
Public Culture, 2021
Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interop... more Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interoperability among variegated registers and domains. In contrast, the notion of an “urban majority,” first introduced by the authors nearly a decade ago, points to a different “mathematics” of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of social organization, territory, and mobility intersect and detach, coalesce into enduring cultures of inhabitation or proliferate as momentary occupancies of short-lived situations make up a kind of algorithmic process that continuously produces new functions and new values for individual and collective capacities, backgrounds, and ways of doing things. This capacity, albeit facing new vulnerabilities and recalibration, will become increasingly important in shaping urban change in a post-pandemic era.
Drawing on research in Jakarta, this article reconsiders the importance of heterogeneous economic... more Drawing on research in Jakarta, this article reconsiders the importance of heterogeneous economic practices in the remaking of central-city districts in ways that Governor Fauzi Bowo stated Monday that he refused to totally revise the 2030 Jakarta spatial planning draft as requested by a coalition of concerned citizens, who are advocating greater public participation in their city's future. Fauzi said he would only listen to recommendations of the coalition on the condition that it represented the voice of the majority of Jakartans. Jakarta Post, 23 March 2010 Questions of urbanism in the global South What are cities becoming across the global South? Such an overarching question has been the subject of many contentions. These contentions attempt to enrol the day-to-day urban realities as evidence of particular developmental trends, a continuously emerging architecture of extensive globalized articulation, or a stretching of the parameters through which urbanization is to be con...
To speak about infrastructure is to invoke both the promise of a future as well as imminent traum... more To speak about infrastructure is to invoke both the promise of a future as well as imminent trauma. Underground or above ground, systems that makes urban flows possible are always a threat, even when black-boxed and separated from the smooth flow of conscious urban life (Graham 2010). The city might be turned into a weapon or the city is constantly broken and must be fixed. The city is overflowing and must be contained or the city is too contained and must grow and let off steam. The story of infrastructure always begins with one or another of these historical moments – it is never a story of which infrastructure is itself the subject but a narrative about growth, decay or the end of the city, in which infrastructure happens to play a leading role. This paper grows out of eavesdropping on many conversations about infrastructure not the least of which are the shrill cries of despair about the “infrastructure problems” of mega-cities of the South. My intuition is that part of the cont...
In spite of the fact that an analysis of the different physical sites through which the city exis... more In spite of the fact that an analysis of the different physical sites through which the city exists and invents itself helps us to better understand the specific ways in which the materiality of the infrastructure generates particular sets of relations in the city, I would submit that in the end, in a city like Kinshasa, it is not, or not primarily, the material infrastructure or the built form that makes the city a city. The city, in a way, exists beyond its architecture . . . the infrastructure and architecture that function best in Kinshasa are almost totally invisible on a material level. 1
Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interop... more Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interoperability among variegated registers and domains. In contrast, the notion of an “urban majority,” first introduced by the authors nearly a decade ago, points to a different “mathematics” of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of social organization, territory, and mobility intersect and detach, coalesce into enduring cultures of inhabitation or proliferate as momentary occupancies of short-lived situations make up a kind of algorithmic process that continuously produces new functions and new values for individual and collective capacities, backgrounds, and ways of doing things. This capacity, albeit facing new vulnerabilities and recalibration, will become increasingly important in shaping urban change in a post-pandemic era.
For this conversation, we take as our point of departure the multiple uses deriving from the lati... more For this conversation, we take as our point of departure the multiple uses deriving from the latin root'capitalis'(chief, principal, in the sense of sovereign power) which is both the root of capital as well as of'capitellum', meaning'small head', or the top of the column in the architectural sense. by juxtaposing these multiple uses, we enter into a contradiction: we are speaking both about the sense of fixing, of the vanguard, of that which tops off and shows off the solidity of the architecture as well as that which circulates and controls the expression ...
Public Culture, 2021
The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupti... more The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps and air filters, shopping malls and circuses, urban majorities and children. Yet in the light of the current conditions, these topics reveal a set of conjunctural surprises. The essays in this issue remind us that the coronavirus spreads through particular contexts and that we should poise ourselves to observe and to notice what comes next. This issue opens with two essays about tracking majorities. In “Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of...
Perspecta
For this conversation, we take as our point of departure the multiple uses deriving from the lati... more For this conversation, we take as our point of departure the multiple uses deriving from the latin root'capitalis'(chief, principal, in the sense of sovereign power) which is both the root of capital as well as of'capitellum', meaning'small head', or the top of the column in the architectural sense. by juxtaposing these multiple uses, we enter into a contradiction: we are speaking both about the sense of fixing, of the vanguard, of that which tops off and shows off the solidity of the architecture as well as that which circulates and controls the expression ...
Public Culture
The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By ... more The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.
Global Design Competition for National War Memorial and Museum, 2016
Chroniques Yéménites, 2019
Public Culture, 2021
Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interop... more Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interoperability among variegated registers and domains. In contrast, the notion of an “urban majority,” first introduced by the authors nearly a decade ago, points to a different “mathematics” of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of social organization, territory, and mobility intersect and detach, coalesce into enduring cultures of inhabitation or proliferate as momentary occupancies of short-lived situations make up a kind of algorithmic process that continuously produces new functions and new values for individual and collective capacities, backgrounds, and ways of doing things. This capacity, albeit facing new vulnerabilities and recalibration, will become increasingly important in shaping urban change in a post-pandemic era.
Drawing on research in Jakarta, this article reconsiders the importance of heterogeneous economic... more Drawing on research in Jakarta, this article reconsiders the importance of heterogeneous economic practices in the remaking of central-city districts in ways that Governor Fauzi Bowo stated Monday that he refused to totally revise the 2030 Jakarta spatial planning draft as requested by a coalition of concerned citizens, who are advocating greater public participation in their city's future. Fauzi said he would only listen to recommendations of the coalition on the condition that it represented the voice of the majority of Jakartans. Jakarta Post, 23 March 2010 Questions of urbanism in the global South What are cities becoming across the global South? Such an overarching question has been the subject of many contentions. These contentions attempt to enrol the day-to-day urban realities as evidence of particular developmental trends, a continuously emerging architecture of extensive globalized articulation, or a stretching of the parameters through which urbanization is to be con...
To speak about infrastructure is to invoke both the promise of a future as well as imminent traum... more To speak about infrastructure is to invoke both the promise of a future as well as imminent trauma. Underground or above ground, systems that makes urban flows possible are always a threat, even when black-boxed and separated from the smooth flow of conscious urban life (Graham 2010). The city might be turned into a weapon or the city is constantly broken and must be fixed. The city is overflowing and must be contained or the city is too contained and must grow and let off steam. The story of infrastructure always begins with one or another of these historical moments – it is never a story of which infrastructure is itself the subject but a narrative about growth, decay or the end of the city, in which infrastructure happens to play a leading role. This paper grows out of eavesdropping on many conversations about infrastructure not the least of which are the shrill cries of despair about the “infrastructure problems” of mega-cities of the South. My intuition is that part of the cont...
In spite of the fact that an analysis of the different physical sites through which the city exis... more In spite of the fact that an analysis of the different physical sites through which the city exists and invents itself helps us to better understand the specific ways in which the materiality of the infrastructure generates particular sets of relations in the city, I would submit that in the end, in a city like Kinshasa, it is not, or not primarily, the material infrastructure or the built form that makes the city a city. The city, in a way, exists beyond its architecture . . . the infrastructure and architecture that function best in Kinshasa are almost totally invisible on a material level. 1
Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interop... more Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interoperability among variegated registers and domains. In contrast, the notion of an “urban majority,” first introduced by the authors nearly a decade ago, points to a different “mathematics” of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of social organization, territory, and mobility intersect and detach, coalesce into enduring cultures of inhabitation or proliferate as momentary occupancies of short-lived situations make up a kind of algorithmic process that continuously produces new functions and new values for individual and collective capacities, backgrounds, and ways of doing things. This capacity, albeit facing new vulnerabilities and recalibration, will become increasingly important in shaping urban change in a post-pandemic era.
For this conversation, we take as our point of departure the multiple uses deriving from the lati... more For this conversation, we take as our point of departure the multiple uses deriving from the latin root'capitalis'(chief, principal, in the sense of sovereign power) which is both the root of capital as well as of'capitellum', meaning'small head', or the top of the column in the architectural sense. by juxtaposing these multiple uses, we enter into a contradiction: we are speaking both about the sense of fixing, of the vanguard, of that which tops off and shows off the solidity of the architecture as well as that which circulates and controls the expression ...
Public Culture, 2021
The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupti... more The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps and air filters, shopping malls and circuses, urban majorities and children. Yet in the light of the current conditions, these topics reveal a set of conjunctural surprises. The essays in this issue remind us that the coronavirus spreads through particular contexts and that we should poise ourselves to observe and to notice what comes next. This issue opens with two essays about tracking majorities. In “Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of...