Streets are places that stimulate activities, interactions, behaviours
and, by extension, controls. Yet, within the built environment
discourse, the street is first and foremost conceptualised as a mute
backdrop to movement-vehicular or pedestrian. The Covid-19 pandemic
brought renewed focus on the street as the space of networks, flows and
mobilities as the 'lockdown' was the preferred mode of controlling the
spread of the disease.
The Social Life of Streets in India: Histories, Contestations and
Subjectivities endeavours to understand the complexities of social
dynamics of streets in relation to spatiality and materiality in the
Indian milieu. It draws from a diverse body of scholarship and varied
disciplinary leanings and engages with three broad strands: historical
aspects of streets, the physicality of street as a built environment and
social science discourse mediated through anthropology, urban geography,
social theory and urban studies.
Further the volume deliberates on questions such as: How do we look at
streets and, in particular, how do we document and conceptualise streets
in the Indian context that highlights the particularities of South Asian
milieus? Is the street public? Is it merely a physical space? How does
the street in its physicality and in its built form enter or respond to
the metaphorical, the literary, the methodological and the social?