Approaching India's Architecture in the Urban Century
Soumya Dasgupta, University of Illinois
In this paper, I provide an overview of my ongoing dissertation research that explores the systemic shifts in institutionalized architectural productions vis-à-vis the evolving figure of the architect in urban India since the 1991 economic reforms. Drawing from a range of critical scholarship on capitalism, technology, and postcolonialism, I examine how the rise of neoliberalism, informatization, and political Hindutva alters the systems governing architectural productions, changing the spatial environments of India’s cities. Departing from the more conventional approaches of architectural history, I treat architecture as a planetary process of spatial production distributed over expanded networks of national, supranational, and global political economies and shed light on how the government-realtor-architect nexus is operationalized to advance ideological projects.