Heritage, Crafting Communities and Urban Transformation

Debapriya Chakrabarti

Published by Springer, Singapore, 2022

This book emphasises the need to empower marginalised communities to contribute to decision-making processes within policy realms. It contributes to ongoing debates in the social sciences about infrastructure rights and citizenship, and it throws insight on human–infrastructure interactions in the informal neighbourhoods of the global South.

The book delves into the complexities of caste, gender, class, and political identities and affiliations associated with the multiple factors of inclusion and exclusion particularly in the case of access to infrastructure in informal settlements in urban areas with an added productive function. This book is about how this historic inner-city, situated, religious idol-crafting community is transforming due to factors including access to physical and social infrastructure, local governance policies, sociopolitical hierarchies, and complexities of informal tenure. Drawing on sociocultural norms, and values of idol-crafting practices, it documents, analyses, and presents the networks and relations of the neighbourhood through a spatial and material lens. Findings contribute to understanding how traditional practices of a crafting community are adapting, appropriating, producing, and reshaping informal spaces in Kumartuli.

The book is aimed at academic audiences across the world researching creative industries, Kolkata’s regeneration agenda, and cultural tourism. It will be of interest to the wide disciplines of Urban Studies, Development Studies, Architecture and Planning, and Culture and Tourism Studies.

Edited by Deljana Iossifova, Alexandros Gasparatos, Stylians Zavos, Yahya Gamal and Yin Long

Published by Springer, Singapore, 2022

 This book is about urban infrastructuring as the processes linking infrastructural configurations and their components with other social, ecological, political, or otherwise defined systems as part of urbanisation and globalisation in the Global South. It suggests that infrastructuring is essential to urbanisation and that it is entangled with socio-spatio-ecological transformations that often have negative outcomes over time. Furthermore, it argues that infrastructuring requires an ethical positioning in research and practice in order to enhance infrastructural sustainability in the face of intersecting environmental, social and economic crises.

“Urban Infrastructuring” is developed in three parts. First, it identifies infrastructural entanglements across various urban and urbanising settings in the Global South. Second, it highlights some of the damaging processes and outcomes of urban infrastructuring and argues that the absence, presence and transformation of infrastructure in the Global South (re-)produces socioecological injustice in the short- and long term. Third, the book argues for a shift of infrastructuring agendas towards more just and sustainable interventions. It suggests that an ethico-politics of care should be embedded in systems approaches to infrastructuring in both research and practice. The edited volume contains contributions from authors with backgrounds in a variety of academic disciplines from the natural and social sciences, engineering and the humanities. It provides valuable insights for anyone concerned with the study, design, planning, implementation and maintenance of urban infrastructures to enhance human well-being and sustainability. It will be of interest to researchers and urban decision-makers alike.