Work in Progress
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
This site is currently under construction. Inconvenience is regretted. Kindly bear with us for a better tomorrow!
Shekhar Krishnan
Welcome to my home page at CRIT. All of my latest work and information is now on my weblog, Heptanesian Archives which contains mostly everything I have written and published going back to 1997. For more information about me, have a look at my CV and my papers and publications there.
Since 2005, I have been pursuing my doctorate in the History, Anthropology, and Science Technology & Society at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Since 2007, I have worked as a technology evangelist for Zotero a project of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. Since 2006, I have been affiliated as an Exchange Scholar with Middle Eastern & Asian Languages and Civilizations (MEALAC) at Columbia University. Since 2003, I have been an Executive Member of CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), Mumbai a group of architects, artists and researchers working on urban design and research projects in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
From 1998 to 2005 I lived and worked in Mumbai, where I was Visiting Faculty at the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture (2003-2006), was the founding Coordinator then Associate Director of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) (2001-2003), and was the Founder and Joint Convenor of the Mumbai Study Group at the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai (2000-2002). I also worked in Bangalore as a consultant with the Srishti School of Art Design & Technology and with Mahiti Infotech (2004-2005).
- shekhar@crit.org.in
Posts by Shekhar Krishnan
Community Geographic Information System (GIS)
Sunday, May 1st, 2005
Mumbai is one of Asia’s largest cities, in which urban spaces are the central arenas of political imagination and intervention. The past decade has seen the articulation of a new politics of space in Mumbai — through the contesting claims of the urban poor majority in slums and squatter settlements, assertive residents’ associations and civic reform movements, the prosperous construction industry and builder-politician nexus, and concerned practitioners in the design, architecture and research professions.
In spite of this increased awareness and concern with urban spaces, basic information on housing, land, infrastructure and environment — the right of citizens — remains largely inaccessible, because of bureaucratic obstacles and vested interests. This asymetry of information has given rise to predatory classes of builders and speculators, whose privileged access to information is transformed into “development rights” for construction, eroding accountability to local communities and urban stake-holders, and the planning policies meant to uphold their rights.
Existing applications of new spatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) for commercial services or scientific research remain distant from the needs of these grass-roots communities and local decision-makers. With the increasing demands of citizens for their rights to information on urban space — and recent legislative enactments and public interest litigation on freedom of information — we feel that communities can harness the power of new geo-spatial imaging and mapping technologies to strengthen their demands for secure tenure and housing rights, open and vibrant public spaces, and ecological conservation and sustainable development in the mega-city.
This proposal outlines a project to develop an open-access spatial data infrastructure, and a set of simple tools and applications in localised in Indian languages, for knowledge transfer and participatory urban planning by communities and citizens in the Mumbai Metrpolitan Region. Read the Community GIS Project Proposal and the Community GIS Project Addendum
Industrial Museum Collaboration
Friday, October 1st, 2004
The Industrial Museum Collaboration seeks to address the crisis of civic imagination driven by two dramatic transformations in our contemporary urban landscapes — the deindustrialisation of manufacturing and production, and the dematerialisation of culture and information. These parallel transformations have replaced large-scale factories and organised urban working classes with dispersed networks of subcontracted and informal production in slums and hinterlands on the one hand; and on the other hand, they have replaced the space of the traditional museum, library and archive with virtual networks of communications, entertainment and commerce.
While these historic industrial and technological changes are common to cities across the world, in Mumbai their articulation in the public sphere remains deeply contested and polarised. In the twenty years since the Bombay Textile Strike inaugurated a post-industrial era of social and spatial restructuring — in which nearly a million factory workers lost their jobs in various industries — political and cultural responses to urban change are divided. They range from the celebratory rhetoric of the utopia of finance and services, styled on Singapore or Hong Kong, to the passionate protests of activists and community groups against the destruction of livelihoods and homes, in factory closures and slum demolitions. The new politics of space and work in post-industrial Mumbai has yet to be comprehensively documented, much less re-imagined, and the importance of a collaborative urbanism to this task is obvious.
In the Industrial Museum Collaboration, we propose a project to develop an Archive and Network, and organise an Exhibition, which can bring together various individual practitioners and groups into dialogue and action on these questions, in relation to the textile mill districts of the inner-city, also known as the Mumbai Mill Lands or Girangaon.