Contested Homelands

Parveen, Nazima

doi:10.5040/9789389812213

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Communal violence and police action were shaped by 'the spatial and architectural order of the city' (p. 123). 'Muslim' and 'non-Muslim' neighbourhoods across Indian cities were demarcated by the streets that established boundaries (Haynes and Rao, 2013;Parveen, 2021), and emerged as sites of conflict, interaction, policing and labelling (pp. 123-127).…”

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Book review: Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth Century Calcutta

Ahmad

2024

Urban Studies

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questions of surfaces. By doing this, she redirects our focus away from the agency of writers and towards the agency of thingssurfaces, place, text, image. It is precisely here that the book's considerable originality lies, but it also takes agency away from a group of people whose voice is rarely heard outside of their marks on walls.The book is beautifully illustrated with Andron's own photographs, in colour throughout. These photographs have been overlaid, graffiti-like, with words directing the reader to think about the ways that surfaces can hold multiple meanings and how graffiti sits alongside all kinds of other urban markings from advertisements to road signs. In addition to reminding the reader of graffiti itself -words applied to the surface of the photograph -the images also remind us of memes. They are clever and arresting. Towards the end of the book, in the Leake Street chapter, we encounter a series of images taken of the same spot every day for 100 days. The effect is a Muybridge-like simulation of the processes of change that occur on an urban surface. I encourage readers to look at the animated versions of this and other similar exercises on the connected website -https://sabinaandron.com/ leake-street/. In other places, we encounter frames where pictures should be, but no picture. Andron uses this strategy to underline the layers of legal copyright protection that increasingly apply to seeming public images. Again -very clever. Routledge should be congratulated for producing a book with so many colour images -a rare thing these days.Andron's book is a treasure. It turns out not to be just another book about graffiti but, rather, a meditation on urban surfaces. The combination of smart use of theory and detailed observation revealed in both the text and (especially) the photographs made me think harder about the role of surfaces in the city. It has made me stop and look with new eyes at the thick layering of the surfaces that surround me. They are not blank pages waiting to be written on but textured plains of dense materiality and meaning -sites, as Andron reminds us, where conflicting forms of discourse happen on a daily basis. Part, perhaps, of a precarious urban commons. ORCID iDTim Cresswell https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9450-9339

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confidence: 99%