The Social Life of Streets in India: Histories, Contestations and Subjectivities

Streets are places that stimulate activities, interactions, behaviours, and by extension, controls. Yet, within built environment discourse, the street is first and foremost conceptualised as a mute backdrop to movement- vehicular or pedestrian. The current moment of the global pandemic has brought renewed focus on the street as the space of networks, flows and mobilities, since the ‘lockdown’ - or curfew and curtailed movement on the street - has been the preferred mode of controlling the spread of disease.
The Social Life of Streets in India endeavors 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; physicality or 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 like how do we look at streets and in particular, how do we document and conceptualise streets in the Indian context that highlight the particularities in South Asian milieus? Is the street public? Is it merely a physical space? How does the street in its physicality, in its built form, enter or respond to the metaphorical, the literary, the methodological and the social?