On Theory and Interdisciplinarity

Marxism

Earlier notes on my attempts to understand 'Who is a Marxist'?

Cultural Retrofits \ Insert Exhibition, 2014

Spatial Mapping Workshop

August 27-28, 2022
for Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts
Conducted by Anuj Daga

Background

Maps are primarily used by a vast majority of the urban population for navigation today. Most of us use them through our phones to move across places, book our rides with competitive fares, find places of interest around us to hang out or eat, or even decide whether to venture out after checking the amount of traffic enroute our destination. While we feel these services by various free apps convenience us (which they indeed do), it is precisely our location in space and time that feeds in their system to generate the geography of congestion, leisure, occupation or rest. Thus, we get mapped into the very object we are consuming.

Cartographic maps - the ones you see on Google Maps or such other services - emerged during the colonial period during the 1700s as a way of accurately (read: scientifically) surveying the extent of land. However, until today, they have remained as the key instruments through which spaces are imagined, represented and reorganized for people at large. The instrument of the cartographic map has been institutionalized as a way of defining and redefining territory by most planning and design bodies across the world. While maps give information about an environment to its users, they also control the way in which we come to inhabit spaces today. The spatial turn of the mid-20th century brought many disciplines of the humanities to critically consider the role of space and place within the social sciences through the interrogation of cartography. Subsequently, it has raised the key concerns regarding who-s and how-s of claiming space within a city/region.

This workshop will open up the ways in which cartographic maps record spatial information and understand what it may disclose about the way we inhabit our space. It introduces the participants to different forms of map making practices across history and potentials and problems of cartographic maps. Further, through mapping exercises, we will make our own maps that will dialogue with institutional maps. What latent aspects of inhabitation can mapping reveal to us? How does space construct power structures that our routines get scripted into? Lastly, how can the knowledge of spatial mapping enable social scientists to interrogate or invent ways of thinking about space?


OBJECTIVES

The workshop will aim at understanding:
● How space is represented in/through maps
● How to read spatial information using maps
● How to make one’s own maps
● How to draw conclusions from a map regarding space and behaviour.



SCHEDULE

DAY 1 / 27th August 2022 / Sat

Session 1 / 9:00 am - 11:00 am
Cartography and the Spatial Turn
What is a map and how does it represent geography? This session will open up the map as a conceptual tool by bringing various perspectives of participants into conversation and steer towards a historical evolution of technical maps that we access today. It will establish the categorical relationship between space and its representation.


Session 2 / 11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Maps and Forms
What are the different forms of maps across time? What do they tell us about space and human relationship with their surroundings? How can these readings be used? This session will look at maps as active tools of interacting and intervening into space. It will ask participants, in groups, to identify ideas that they would like to explore/study by map making.


DAY 2 / 28th August 2022 / Sun

Session 1 / 9:00 am - 11:00 am
Making Maps
In this session, participant groups will workshop their data into the maps and prepare visual representations of space. The session will collate all data within a map and prepare grounds for speculation through this evidence.

Session 2 / 11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Drawing Conclusions
Each student group will present their findings to each other and open up new directions/questions for further inquiry.

Zapurja, Pune by Shirish Beri

Clinical Practice Today

When i must be around 7 to 12 years of age, and when a sickness would necessitate a doctor's visit, we would visit our neighborhood clinic. The ritual would be to take a number from the compounder and wait for your turn. As you entered the cabin, an old man with greying hair would greet and almost immediately ask to lay on the examination bed. This bed would be at waist height or higher, and could only by climbed via two steps. The mattress would be made up of leather, or even faux leather. Mostly we would be accompanied by our mothers who would explain to him the key symptoms. Then the doctor, in a firm voice would ask: 

"Bhook lagti hai?" (Do you feel hungry?)

"Khana peena barabar hai?" (Are you eating well?)

"Sandaas, peshab?" (Stools, urine?)

At the time, i never knew that what we eject from our body could be of so much value to someone. Rather, i would be embarrassed to share those details. Then there would be a laying on the bed and the stethoscope ritual. Breathe in, out, while the doctor hears your chest. These are precisely the acts we perform when we buy one of those toy doctor sets. Then, he would ask to open the mouth, and using the old style steel battery torch, look inside for inflammations of the throat or tonsils. The meticulous order of check up was customary for perhaps everyone suffering from fever or cold. After the procedure, he would write a prescription and none other than the dear compounder sitting just outside in his special cubicle would be waiting to make a pack of tablets. 

I used to enjoy seeing the compounder count his colourful tablets. The colours were always lovely - muted or bright. Sometimes he would break some tablets to make appropriate dosage. I would dread having medicinal syrups. Back then i didn't have the agency to tell the doctor to not give me syrups. These syrups also would be available with the compounder himself. I always thought these must be special, for you can't buy them in a medical shop. Perhaps this aspect also consoled me of having visited a doctor an availed his services. The compounder would take a strip of paper and fold it, and cut the edges diagonally to make a hexagonal pattern. This would be quickly stuck onto a glass bottle that mother's would already carry in anticipation. The pattern on the bottle demarcated the syrub dosage one had to take. The colourful tablets would be packed in a mini envelop that would mostly be made out of brown paper. Such a process would complete the journey to the doctor. The total cost would be 20 rupees.

I am 36 now. Visiting the general physician never leaves me in a happy state. In bigger hospitals, the money has to be paid upfront, and in private clinics it is always a bitter surprise in the end. You enter the cabin. To find the doctor who is more often than not finishing a call or checking their WhatsApp message. While doing so, and even without making an eye contact, he begins his inquiry. In 3 to 4 questions he is ready with his prescription. Over these one and a half minutes you may not even get a chance to look at him on the eye. The doctor's job is done and you are expected to leave. No questions asked, no clarifications expected.

I don't know where such doctors come from and what is their motivation to be a doctor. While i have the agency of voicing my pathological condition today, no doctor seemingly is interested in listening. They do not want to speak or investigate. They do not want to examine you physically at all. I hardly see them using their stethoscopes...if a doctor cannot make space for the patient to converse, the doctor is a sheer failure. He has lost, in my eyes, any respect for occupying the seat he does. These men and women, medical practitioners, may be overworked, uninterested, burdened or just far too bored to listen to a patient repeating the same symptoms as the previous one. However, the art of conversation can relieve any disturbed mind of their pain, at least temporarily. I don't know why i was comfortable with those old school doctors. Perhaps they gave me my due time. I feel cheated every time i visit a general physician in a clinic or hospital today. They are rude, reticent and reserved - who have no empathy with their patients. Perhaps such are doctors in an urban place like Mumbai. Maybe other places may have their own problems. 

I visit doctors today due to the guilt my parents give me. They believe i don't visit doctors when i should, and i don't complete my medicine courses. Perhaps both of these aspects could be true. However this attitude towards the medicine is a rejection to the attitude of indifference and un-empathy that is lent in their first meeting, which puts me in a place of deep mistrust for their prescription. How can a doctor who has not looked at me in the eye, not checked my temperature, not heard my breath, not checked my heart beat get to know what i could be suffering from? On what basis does he write those quick prescriptions with so much confidence? No doctors explain what medicines they are giving to their wards. The only thing they explain is the times at which the must be administered to the body. This kind of apathy leaves me baffled. What kind of a relationship is this, and how is the patient expected to follow such jargonized prescriptions blindly? These are aspects I fail to follow about the medical practitioners. 

I keep thinking about this a lot and i would like some doctors to tell me what are my rights to ask a doctor as a patient, and how can I tackle defensive doctors who create a wall of medical tests (again without explaining) as a way to keep their patients in darkness? Some leads will be useful.

Bodies Unprotected

notes from the introduction to a session of Bodies, un-protected, an international program series that Sandra Noeth was curating in close collaboration with Anna Wagner and the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt/Germany (www.mousonturm.de). it is dedicated to the (un)protection of bodies: which bodies are worth protecting (to us) and on what basis? Which bodies will we campaign for and which ones elude our notice and action?

"
Bodies, un-protected highlights the unequal distribution of bodily protection from different artistic, historical and theoretical perspectives by bringing together experts come from a variety of fields of research and practice to engage with how we can use aesthetic, performative and discursive means to create visibility for diverse bodies and their specific protective needs. The project unfolds over the course of ten months and manifest itself in two programmes of public events in at the beginning of the project (November 2021) and its end (July 2022). In between these two phases, further events modules are taking place in an international context. They are a crucial part of the project that aims at opening up the discussion to different perspectives, practices and realities.
"

Charkop

 

Nagari Niwara Parishad, Goregaon East

This is a typical unit plan of Nagari Niwara Parishad, Goregaon East, Mumbai - a low cost housing project designed by Adarkar Associates during 1981-92. The area allocated to the project was about 62 acres to house about 6000 people who were displaced during the expansion of the city. The plot is adjoining the edges of the national park and therefore at the foot hills of the mountain. The run off of water necessitates a large nallah (drain) that creates a moat-like boundary on one end of one of the plots. The series of bridges and three storey buildings throughout the colony create scaled courtyards and a labyrinthine ground space that opens into different direction.

The courtyards earlier meant as gardens have now been paved and converted into parking spaces for the cars, two-wheelers and bicycles. There is still enough greenery within the overall campus. Each building is a society within a cooperative model with three wings. Different buildings are interconnected by intermediate level bridges - an idea adopted from the earlier Mumbai chawls that housed equal densities of people. These intermediate bridges create spaces for play and pause for young and old alike, and offer a unique perspective of the space between the buildings. 

Most layouts are one room, kitchen format with attached facilities for toilet and bath. The living room is around 3m x 6m, and the kitchen is around 3m x 2.5m - spacious enough for further divisions. Many residents have further subdivided the large living space into smaller study or private bedroom space for themselves. In some cases, the kitchen has been converted into a bedroom, while the cooking space has been carved off from the large living room. However, most of these living room interventions leave the remaining space with less light. Often these partitions are made up of glass in order to allow for light to pass through.

The entire project is made out of concrete - including the walls. This was a unique technique developed during the period which brought down the cost of construction drastically. Although, such a move causes the buildings to heat up excessively during the summers or get extremely damp during the rains. The task of using the walls to install furniture becomes difficult since it is not easy to drill holes in these concrete masses. Nevertheless, the layouts are very efficient and keep all spaces well lit and ventilated throughout the day. The sense of well being is maintained, and the common spaces are social extensions of the apartments.

The Aesthetics of Co-existence

Like many mornings, this morning I was walking along the skywalk of Borivali West (Mumbai) to see more and more homeless lined up with their sleeping mattresses. The period of monsoon especially sees the increase in the number of homeless occupying the space of the skywalk. Here, one sees different bodies intertwined with each other. Men with men, men with women, children with women, children on men on the one hand, and dogs besides humans, cats playing with children, and so on. These intertwining is far for sexual. the intimacy here is a product of the shortage of resources. The limited length of the mattress, the single and only blanket, the only space which may be dry or the best corner to leave space for the pedestrian walk. On passing thought this landscape today, I thought to myself - if this is not co-existence, then what is? 

Of all the hullabaloo that is made of co-existence in the theoretical space within the academia today, here, co-existence is a mere necessity. Yet, the image of co-existence seemed far away from beautiful. Firstly, these bodies lined up on the skywalk certainly had a different sense of cleanliness. To be able to inhabit a ground that is walked by hundreds of feet bringing dust from all over the city requires an alternative level of equation with hygiene. This in addition to the lingering dirt and muck of the rains, the spit and shit of the scavengers, the rubbish and remains of the passersby create a landscape that the middle-class would associate with disgust and disease. Secondly, the absence of shame in loitering, cooking, worshipping, sleeping in the open (air) must require a unique kind of sense of self. To be able to suspend one's state of awareness, vanity and being comfortable in the state of things without being affected by the gaze of the passers by is a leap into the very fact of existence. 

Now that I begin to write the above, I am made aware of how my own sense of shame or self is constructed perhaps throught a certain middle class morality. The idea of co-existence too then, is shaped through such a moral position. This position, layered with an aspiration of the upward classes shapes a peculiar imagination and aesthetic model of co-existence that frames the pedagogical space of the institution. The institutional idea of co-existence that emerges within design schools (planning, architecture, interior, and such) often misses to acknowledge the political economy of marginality. The moment the marginal is made into the mainstream, it is prone to get hijacked by the middle class, or more appropriately the bourgeoisie. Any attempt to upgrade the marginal into the dignified will shift its image into the realm of the middle-class. This situation creates an opportunity of 'exclusionary appropriation'. 

Exclusionary appropriation could be thought of as structurally similar to gentrification. Through the creation of an allurement of an upward tending lifestyle, the lower classes are promised facilities and resources which most may themselves not be able to afford. Thus, identifying themselves clearly separate from that image now, they willingly surrender resources that they once primarily claimed. This trickery is how urban spaces get reformed. This is not the bane of merely the middle class. This could also be the situation for poor or the homeless occupying the margins within urban spaces. The bourgeoisie designers are helpless in thinking about design outside their frames of middle-class-ness. This is primarily because firstly, this is what the apparatus of the design institutions trains them as, and secondly, it is what is their "aspirational normal". Which is to say, their own standards of hygiene and cleanliness are much different from that which they see on the streets. The work of dignifying, in their design process is thus, elevating the poor to at least their levels of hygiene. This decision already puts an economic pressure on those people who transiently occupy open empty pockets of the city when no one else probably claims it. 

What I am trying to articulate is this image of the marginal that discomforts us on the one hand, and produces empathy on the other. This empathy, to be sure, arises out of our middle class morality which, seemingly is too precious to give up. It is shaped by the taught values of being helpful to the other, and if you are a designer, the social cause of your profession. Both of these in their root, are opposed to the aesthetic of the marginal on several ground of economy, cleanliness, privacy, permanence and so on. How do we critically interrogate and address the bourgeoisie entrapment of our design methods?

As I walked ahead thinking of all these things, the skywalk was ready to come to an end. At the bend, a handicapped old man was looking into the steel wares he may have scavenged or collected over time, perhaps for his morning breakfast while a woman was just getting up besides a shrine she has elaborated over the last year. What may have come for an occassion of a single auspicious day (which even the enforcement authorities could not have opposed, in the might of God), has slowly accrued larger over time. Scavenged photographs, discarded objects of worship along with exotic natural rejects like pine cones or dried flowers now adorn a what may be emerging into a permanent corner of worship for all the homeless on the bridge. Just as one moves ahead towards the steps, dirt littered around the petit municipal dustbin rotting in the drizzle of the rain continues to mix into fresh faeces of  what one wonders would be canine or human.