Shyam sunder Sirimalla
Thesis Director: Prof Paola Viganò, Lab-U
Thesis Co-director: Prof. Vincent Kaufmann, LASUR
Start date: January 2022 Defense date (expected): December 2025
Grant: EPFLglobaLeaders
How do social injustices produce and shape spatial injustices viz. dichotomies of slums and affluent localities and contestation of governance planning process in it, including the role of planners and architects?
How the notion of actual spatial proximity and spaces of encounters between urban elite and urban poor at living spaces and public spaces be understood, captured, synthesized, and mapped systematically with its intricacy at multiple dimensions interms of urban experience?
How can the local knowledge and spaces of encounters be used to better design and plan the public spaces to stimulate the informal economy for the well-being of home-based workers and street vendors? Meanwhile, accommodating the needs of informal workers and their capacity to access and navigate in space?
Abstract
Public space, accessibility, and the ability to move in space are vital for the socio-economic well-being of the poor, destitute, and especially those in the lower strata such as slum dwellers and informal workers. Albeit the enforcement mechanism of informal economy is pervasive in India, the question of informal workers and their access to public space has tended to be neglected. Furthermore, slums are perpetually circumvented in the urban planning and governance processes. This is only exacerbating with the nuances of India’s national urban schemes and smart city mission despite the contestation to cater the infrastructure.
Moreover, this research attempts to lodge the phenomenon of co-location in the limelight, “the actual spatial proximities between affluent and poor at living spaces and public spaces” in Hyderabad city. This unveiled into the unique mosaic urban fabric of the wealthy neighborhoods and pockets of slums, in juxtaposition to most western megacities, whereas seclusion between these two parties is rather explicit. It is apparent that despite the colossal indifferences between the affluent and poor, there is no ghettoization atleast spatially. This generates incentives for poor to locate in close physical proximity to affluent colonies as sources of labor and services. In other words, acts as an enforcement mechanism. Thereafter, a manifestation of this socio-spatial dialectic is epitomizing the narrative of “mechanism of sharing” between the Poor and the bourgeoisie in the city.
Ergo, this study gazes into the spatial proximity and spaces of encounters between rich and poor to better design and plan the public spaces to stimulate the informal economy and accommodate the needs of informal workers and their capacity to move in space in Hyderabad city. As a proof of concept, the empirical study is conducted to showcase and locate the spatial proximity and spaces of encounters between the poor ‘informal workers such as street vendors and home-based workers’ and the affluent and emerging middle class.