Old city, new city : Locating the past in urban India

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As part of the first Trehan India Initiative Theme Year at the University of Michigan, a three-panel interdisciplinary graduate student conference will be held September 25, 2009. This Theme Year, entitled “State, Space and Citizenship: Indian Cities in the Global Era,” takes urbanization to be one of the defining elements of change in contemporary India.

Offering a ‘historical turn’ to the issues raised by the Theme Year, this interdisciplinary graduate student conference centers on the question of how the past is regularly—or irregularly—bounded, contested and re-framed in the dynamic discourses of urban planning, development and citizenship in India. What are the various avatars assumed by ‘the past’ in the context of contemporary urbanization (e.g. tradition, heritage, the authentic indigenous, nostalgia, official histories, subaltern interpretations)? What is the role of the past in urban planning and development agendas, claims to citizenship and space, and the changing discourses of the state? How is the past encountered, designed, or interpreted as material, discursive, and/or symbolic?