A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia
Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early twentieth century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and North America. It charts the valency of "utopia" for understanding designs for alternative, occluded, vernacular, or emergent urbanisms in the last hundred years. Central to the designs for utopia in this book are the themes of gardens, children, spiritual topographies, death, and hope.

From the vitalist urban plans of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes in India to the Theosophical Society in Madras and the ways in which it provided a context for a novel South Indian garden design; from the visual, textual, and ritual designs of Californian Vedanta from the 1930s to the present; to the spatial transformations associated with post-1990s highways and rapid transit systems in Bangalore that are shaping an emerging “Indian New Age” of religious and somatic self-styling, Srinivas tells the story of contrapuntal histories, the contiguity of lives, and resonances between utopian worlds that are generative of designs for cultural alternatives and futures.

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A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia
Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early twentieth century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and North America. It charts the valency of "utopia" for understanding designs for alternative, occluded, vernacular, or emergent urbanisms in the last hundred years. Central to the designs for utopia in this book are the themes of gardens, children, spiritual topographies, death, and hope.

From the vitalist urban plans of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes in India to the Theosophical Society in Madras and the ways in which it provided a context for a novel South Indian garden design; from the visual, textual, and ritual designs of Californian Vedanta from the 1930s to the present; to the spatial transformations associated with post-1990s highways and rapid transit systems in Bangalore that are shaping an emerging “Indian New Age” of religious and somatic self-styling, Srinivas tells the story of contrapuntal histories, the contiguity of lives, and resonances between utopian worlds that are generative of designs for cultural alternatives and futures.

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A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia

A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia

by Smriti Srinivas
A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia

A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia

by Smriti Srinivas

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Overview

Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early twentieth century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and North America. It charts the valency of "utopia" for understanding designs for alternative, occluded, vernacular, or emergent urbanisms in the last hundred years. Central to the designs for utopia in this book are the themes of gardens, children, spiritual topographies, death, and hope.

From the vitalist urban plans of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes in India to the Theosophical Society in Madras and the ways in which it provided a context for a novel South Indian garden design; from the visual, textual, and ritual designs of Californian Vedanta from the 1930s to the present; to the spatial transformations associated with post-1990s highways and rapid transit systems in Bangalore that are shaping an emerging “Indian New Age” of religious and somatic self-styling, Srinivas tells the story of contrapuntal histories, the contiguity of lives, and resonances between utopian worlds that are generative of designs for cultural alternatives and futures.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780295997384
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Publication date: 11/01/2016
Series: Global South Asia
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Smriti Srinivas is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-Tech City; In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement; and The Mouths of People, The Voice of God: Buddhists and Muslims in the Frontier Commuinty of Ladakh.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction | Placing Timelines

1. Biocentric Eutopias in South Asia

2. Ecotopias, Theosophy, and the South Indian City

3. Utopian Settlements and Californian Vedanta

4. Highways, Thresholds, and an Indian New Age

Conclusion | Designing and Dwelling in Place

Notes

References

Index

What People are Saying About This

AbdouMaliq Simone

"A Place for Utopia digs deep into an archive that details the intricate circuitries of ideas, projects, and institutions affiliated with critical strands of somatic practices and spiritual thought largely centered on and in India. This is a unique book in contemporary urban studies."

Mary Hancock

"A Place for Utopia's effort to engage religiosity as a foundational force is significant. And, although there is a vast literature in humanities and social sciences on utopic forms and their realizations, past and present, this book is distinctive in its breadth and in its transcultural scope."

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