Tracking the Indian Rail Trail

Contact : Pierre Gaudino

Circulatory Urbanism in Contemporary India

Circulating urbanism in Contemporary India: An Exploration of the Role of the Railways in the Konkan Urban System.

This research project challenges the dominant model of urban development based on the development of large cities fed by definitive rural emigration. A novel assumption underpins this study: railway lines in India have helped to create an urban system model which links villages, towns and cities in a dense, reversible exchange network of people, goods, services and imaginaries. The aim of the research is to show the contours and shape of this type of urban system, organized around the train. It also aims to assist in formulating policies that will make it possible to move beyond the city-country dichotomy and to take the mobility into account — particularly rail mobility.

The first field study focuses on the Indian network’s newest line, the Konkan, built less than 25 years ago, that supplies the coastal region of the same name, linking it to Mumbai. After a theoretical exploration of the concept of urban system and its forms of development, the researchers will conduct an empirical study based on statistical and cartographical surveys as well as on interviews with passengers, railway staff and local residents, businesspeople and decision-makers in the six key cities of the region served by the Konkan railway line. The research will focus particularly on commuting, the movement of goods between the cities and villages in the region and the imaginary of these mobilities. The research will be illustrated by a photo report that follows the line and its service territory. Following the report from the summer 2013, a follow-up is in progress.

http://urbanology.org/projects/

Publications

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, "Mumbay's Circulatory Urbanism", in Marc Angélil and Rainer Hehl, Empower! - Essays on the Political Economy + Political Ecology of Urban Form, vol. 3, 2014, Ruby Press, pp. 82 - 113

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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Movement

Movement is the crossing of space by people, objects, capital, ideas and other information. It is either oriented, and therefore occurs between an origin and one or more destinations, or it is more akin to the idea of simply wandering, with no real origin or destination.

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