University of Heidelberg

B11 members work on a variety of topics relating to Delhi and Shanghai. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, they share a strong interest in formations of public sphere, class relations and urban community in the Asian developmental city. Some of the sub-projects address these questions in their historical context – spanning across the twentieth century and covering the colonial and/or Communist eras; others work within a more contemporary framework, exploring the aspirational “world-class” city and evaluating impact and significance of recent events, trends and discourses connected to this effort. All projects combine a focus upon city “imaginaries”. These are  understood in particular in the role of affective and visual urban encounters, through which the city is imagined as an object of emotional or sensory experience. Participating researchers are interested in a wide range of visual sources, cinematic perspectives and performative projects (including events, exhibitions or performance art) to understand how these intangible, playful and ephemeral mediations of the city connect to the “harder” social and economic facts of urban life.

While all B11 members have expertise on either of the two cities, their research combines explorations of transcultural dynamics in at least four different ways:

Global cities such as Shanghai and Delhi are viewed as useful case studies to understand the migration of contested concepts like “public sphere”, “public space” or “urban middle class” and their local impact in the context of hyper-transitional societies and developmental state fabrics in Asia. The post-colonial and post-Communist conditions of the urban in China and India are seen as productive places to study creative and cross-cultural adaptations of public-sphere terminologies.   

Sub-projects engage with the urban in Asia as important local ground for testing social change and for pushing cultural boundaries, recognising the inherent contradiction of global cities as privileged transnational entities, partially emancipated from the nation-state, and carefully regulated and disciplined show-cases of national development models. Aspirations to become “world-class” are contrasted with persistent parochialisms and with local fears of unpredictable transnational diffusions; however, they are also critiqued against the value of the “ordinary city” (Jennifer Robinson) and against supplanting local resources with narrow global-city models.

Urban spaces in China and India differ and require attention to their specific local or national conditions. In this, they are starting points for recognising the pluralism among models of the global city within Asia itself. The project aims to contribute to comparative urban studies by building upon the theoretical work of global-city scholars such as Jennifer Robinson. It will complement her work with stronger focus upon diverse urban environments and will connect her rich comparative methodology of an “informal” urbanism to detailed empirical case studies in the field. 

The affective, visual or emotional city is recognised as an important driver of both official branding campaigns and of informal, quotidian experiences of urban life. Global cities are increasingly studied and compared through their local sensorium. Visual images, sounds, tactile and olfactory dimensions of the city are not only sources of shared urban ideals, communicated at ease across local contexts; they are also distinct repositories of local value, memory and belonging. Our project enquires into these processes beyond “Western” cities and asks how a sensory standardisation of urban modernity occurs within a complex palimpsest of a vernacular, post-colonial and post-Communist sensorium in Asia. It recognises also the creative potential of these cities for crafting alternative imaginaries of urban form, atmosphere and public space.