Indeterminate Practices,Determinate Form: Southernness as Assemblage

Abstract

Much of the problem in understanding and magnifying southernness lies in problem-spaces and descriptive tropes utilized in Southern Urban Theory (SUT). This fixation not only dilutes the aims of SUT but also continues to privilege particular explanatory and theoretical frames. Taking the case of the built environment of a planned colony called Rajajipuram (Lucknow, India), this article draws attention toward problem-spaces and citizens that have remained marginal in SUT. Remapping urban geography through the built environment in non-elite middle-class localities, the article draws attention toward spaces, motivations, processes, and strategies which reveal how southernness interlaces “life aspirations” amid everyday lived struggles, realities, experiences, opportunities, challenges, and compulsions. Significantly, the built environment of Indian cities always defies varied categories of modern binaries. Instead, it forms an assemblage that reveals simultaneity of indeterminacy (i.e., interactions among varied components—administrative and regulatory with citizens’ techniques) but determinacy of the emergent form. Such problem-spaces not only shift the theoretical gaze but also reveal other epistemological possibilities, particularly “organic growth,” of southern cities. Southernness is qualitative and substantive rather than terminological which requires “historically alert and methodologically feasible” (Arif, 2015, p. 54) exploration of cultural continuities and commonalities—spatial and temporal. Perhaps, such an approach will not only bridge the gaps between cohorts—southern urbanism and subaltern urbanization—but help build a comprehensive theory of southern cities.