Housing in India’s Second Cities

The pandemic poses an important challenge for urban studies: How does one get familiar with the conditionsof cities from distance? This course takes up this challenge and puts forward methods to get closer to the city while physically being distant. Like a fiction writer is sometimes closer to Tokyo than one's own city. Similarly, it is seen to be possible to get closer to the urban conditions of a city from afar. This course will train students in surveying secondary sources as a means to make sense of urbanization of second cities. The course asks its students the following questions: How are the emerging contexts of urbanization in India’s second cities shaping their housing demand, the spatialities of house and home, and institutional mechanisms for their provision? What theoretical frames help advance a study of housing practices that emerge from such concerns? At stake in these questions lie opportunities to further India’s housing question beyond the current housing debate. This course invites students to survey and build ideas regarding the housing question for three reasons. First, SEA’s research argues that India’s housing question articulates the house as a standard commodity that ought to meet the minimum conditions required to achieve habitability, affordability and tenure security. Its architectural strategy largely manifests in attempts to fulfill the shortage of cheaply-built, efficient standard houses. Such a conceptualization is neither relevant nor efficient, and almost impossible to achieve. Second, there exists very little research on emerging urbanization contexts in second cities. And third, the current debate seldom connects the four aspects - emerging contexts, social and spatial configurations, home making practices and institutional mechanisms.