Cities in Flux (original) (raw)

This paper aims at studying the dualism of cities and the existence of antithetical temporality in cities caused by human interventions and appropriations of their everyday spaces. The idea of modernity, and planning is often not accepted completely in a city, and the citizens, or the users of the city often articulate these spaces, and it is the expression of these social, cultural and economic struggles that define a city, a lot more than the built or the Static city. This kind of Ephemeral urbanism of the Kinetic City  (Mehrotra, 2008) resists the homogenizing process of modernization in todays world, even though the spatial and development patterns reflect it. These narratives archive the moments, people and practices that make and unmake a city over the years, and adds a third dimension to the understanding of a city. In todays fast growing world, especially in the developing context, this calls for rethinkin g the normative practice of planning and design. The presence of culture as a generator of context to the sites that might exceed the existing material and conceptual boundaries of the neighborhood (Appadurai, The production of locality, 1996) challenge the notions of the built city. In order to theorize such practices, this article investigates developing world modernity, redefines traditional notions of site, criticality and context through an anthropological theory of locality, and creation of temporal spaces in the Kinetic city. Keywords: locality, modernity, culture, developing, kinetic, urban now, elasticity