Jyoti Hosagrahar Indigenous Modernities Negotiating architecture and urbanismIndigenous Modernities What are the hallmarks of a ‘modern’ city? Must cities in Asia and Africa acquire architectural elements of modernism from Western convention in order to be ‘modern’? How have regional architectural traditions and building cultures outside the West encountered modernity? Reflecting on the cultural processes underlying urban transformation, Indigenous Modernities investigates what happens when global modernity engages with a place, locality, or tradition. Rec- ognizing that modernity and colonialism are fundamentally connected, Dr. Hosagrahar examines the way ‘traditional’ built forms metamorphose to ‘modern’ in the context of colonialism, and reveals that oppositions like ‘tradi- tional’ and ‘modern,’ or ‘West’ and ‘non-West,’ prevalent in scholarship on the built environment, are culturally constructed The author examines Delhi, India, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as it developed from a walled city into a fragmented metropolis. The transformation was more a palimpsest of plural and contentious processes than a linear path from one well-defined form to another. Citizens and officials of the colonial empire shaped Delhi's landscape together. In the fractured urbanism that emerged from the encounters, the familiar and the new redefined the city. The interpretation of one city reminds us that ‘modern’ Delhi is like any place reconciling the dominant narrative of an imagined ideal with insubordinate local realities. Premised as'they are on ‘difference,’ are the indigenous modernities of Dublin, Prague, and New York less obvious and disquieting than those of Delhi? Jyoti Hosagrahar is Director of Sustainable Urbanism International, an independent non-profit research and policy initiative. She advises on urban devel- opment, historic conservation, and cultural sustainability issues in Asia. She cur- rently teaches at Columbia University, New York. She has previously taught at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and earned her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.ania esses ieee Seta eit ca i i i | i i THE ARCHITEXT SERIES Edited by Thomas A. Markus and Anthony D. King Architectural discourse had traditionally represented buildings as art objects ar technical objects, Yet buildings are also social objects in that they are invested with social meaning and shape social relations. Recognising these assumptions, ‘the Architext series aims to bring together recent debates in social and cultural theory and the study and practice of architecture and urban design. Critical, comparative and interdisciplinary, the books in the series will, by theorising archi- tecture, bring the space of the built environment centrally into the social sciences and humanities, as well as bringing the theoretical insights of the latter into the discourses of architecture and urban design. Particular attention wilt be paid to issues of gender, race, sexuality and the body, to questions of identity and place, to the cultural politics of representation end language, and to the global and postcoloniai contexts in which these are addressed. Already published: Beyond Description Singapore space historicity Edited by Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Wei-Wei Yeo Framing Places Mediating power in built form Kim Dovey Spaces of Global Cultures Architecture, urbanism, identity Anthony D. King Gender Space Architecture An interdisciplinary introduction Edited by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and jain Borden indigenous Modernities Negotiating architecture and urbanistr. Behind the Postcolonial Jyoti Hosagrahar Architecture, urban space and political cultures in Indonesia Abidin Kusno Forthcoming title: Moderns Abroad The Architecture of Oppression The SS, forced labour and the Nazi monumental building economy Paul Jaskot The Words Between the Spaces Buildings and language Thomas A. Markus and Deborah Cameron Writing Spaces Greig Crysler Drifting - Migrancy and Architecture Edited by Stephen Cairns lialian colonial architecture and urbanism Mia Fuller Jyoti Hosagrahar Indigenous Modernities | Negotiating architecture and urbanism omen 82 Routledge BY ylorstrancisGroup LONDON AND NEW YORK