Description
In India, perhaps more than anywhere else, people are on the move. Up and down villages, towns and cities, in all directions. A large segment of the population has dual affiliations to places. Families and communities can do both, anchor people to ancestral villages, as well as support them over large mobile territories in a town or city, hundreds of miles away.
Setting new roots in cities does not cancel out connections in villages. Small towns fan out into the immediate hinterland to become regular commuting hubs even while habitats remain villages. Industries can be located in rural or urban areas and the peasant can become a taxi-driver or construction labourer before turning to something else.
In our understanding, all this does not make India less urban. If anything at all – it makes it far more urbane in a genuinely contemporary way – in which new technologies such as smart phones and cheap travel make connectivity combine with ancient impulses of mobility, to create a vast urban field the size of a sub-continent.
In all this, trains and the railways have played a pivotal role. They were appropriated by an already mobile population in the early twentieth century to become even more integrated into modern lives. By keeping them cheap and affordable, the people who make up India’s statistical reality, found an ally that allowed them to break rules and belie expectations of what they are meant to do.
This video produced by urbz Mumbai is based on a three-year research project on "circulatory urbanism" funded by the Mobile Lives Forum (Forum Vies Mobiles), a research and prospective institute created by SNCF to prepare for and build mobility transition and scientifically build with it.
This is video was produced for the exhibition Constallation.s at Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux. It is part of urbz' s exhibition on Circulatory Urbanism, a three-year research project funded by the Mobile Lives Forum. The Mobile Lives Forum is a research and prospective institute created by SNCF to prepare for and build mobility transition and scientifically build with it.
#urbz_circulatoryurbanism
Setting new roots in cities does not cancel out connections in villages. Small towns fan out into the immediate hinterland to become regular commuting hubs even while habitats remain villages. Industries can be located in rural or urban areas and the peasant can become a taxi-driver or construction labourer before turning to something else.
In our understanding, all this does not make India less urban. If anything at all – it makes it far more urbane in a genuinely contemporary way – in which new technologies such as smart phones and cheap travel make connectivity combine with ancient impulses of mobility, to create a vast urban field the size of a sub-continent.
In all this, trains and the railways have played a pivotal role. They were appropriated by an already mobile population in the early twentieth century to become even more integrated into modern lives. By keeping them cheap and affordable, the people who make up India’s statistical reality, found an ally that allowed them to break rules and belie expectations of what they are meant to do.
This video produced by urbz Mumbai is based on a three-year research project on "circulatory urbanism" funded by the Mobile Lives Forum (Forum Vies Mobiles), a research and prospective institute created by SNCF to prepare for and build mobility transition and scientifically build with it.
This is video was produced for the exhibition Constallation.s at Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux. It is part of urbz' s exhibition on Circulatory Urbanism, a three-year research project funded by the Mobile Lives Forum. The Mobile Lives Forum is a research and prospective institute created by SNCF to prepare for and build mobility transition and scientifically build with it.
#urbz_circulatoryurbanism
Published
Default Thumbnail
Medium Thumbnail
High Thumbnail
Standard Thumbnail
Max Resolution Thumbnail
Video ID
gwfaHfOCUos
Channel