AIMING FOR THE ‘GREEN’: (Post)Colonial and Aesthetic Politics in the Design of a Purified Gated Environment

Abstract

This article investigates the politics of the design of a golf‐focused gated community in Gurgaon, India. It considers the aesthetic uses of golf and architecture that go into the production of a purified urban environment to explore the relationship between urban development, environmental aesthetics and spatial purification in contemporary India. I demonstrate how an architectural focus on golf reproduces the ‘distribution of the sensible’ by attempting to delimit the field of view: who and what is seen, and what an individual can or cannot see. I show how golf is political—deeply connected to and inseparable from legacies of colonial environmental and spatial purification and exclusion, as well as contemporary aesthetic‐political regimes that justify spatial segregation, cleansing, and the protection of beautiful environments away from the urban poor. The aesthetic emphasis on a beautified, green and empty environment that characterizes the production of golf highlights the aesthetic terms on which environmental selves are imagined and how environmental images are constructed. This is an aesthetic premised on the creation of shared viewership combined with the power to be(long) in a place where one can be with others but not mixed up with them.

Analisis Implementasi Program Pemberian Makanan Tambahan (PMT) untuk Penanggulangan Stunting di Kabupaten Probolinggo

“…Dalam periode krusial ini, pertumbuhan dan perkembangan anak sangat rentan terhadap dampak kekurangan gizi dan hasilnya dapat berdampak jangka panjang pada kesehatan fisik, kecerdasan, serta produktivitas anak tersebut saat dewasa nanti (Kemenkes 2020). Stunting juga merupakan kondisi di mana kesehatan gizi anak tidak mencukupi dalam hal tinggi atau panjang tubuh dibandingkan dengan usianya (Ginting, Kitreerawutiwong, and Mekrungrongwong 2023;Afandi et al 2023;Hartarto et al 2023;Dhami et al 2019;Minh Do, Lissner, and Ascher 2018;Scarpello 2020;Tomsa and Bax 2023;Utami and Cramer 2020;Magnusdottir 2023;Herbert 2024;Pellizzoni 2021;Rana 2023;Waldman 2022;Bloomfield and Steward 2020;DuPuis and Greenberg 2019;Nirmalasari 2020). Berdasarkan Survei Status Gizi Indonesia (SSGI) Kementerian Kesehatan Indonesia, mayoritas kasus stunting di Indonesia ditemukan pada anak rentang usia 24-35 bulan dengan persentase 26,2% (Kemenkes 2021).…”

Nature and the extended city: Wasteland governmentality, the sacred, and anti-wasteland politics in the Aravalli region

“…The work of prominent environmental lawyers like MC Mehta, who through two prominent cases in 2004 and 2009 concerning air and noise pollution in Delhi was able to secure bans on mining and polluting industries in and around Delhi is often used to exemplify 'bourgeois environmentalism' (Crowley, 2020: 55, 56, 196). While middle-classes are indeed complicit in the aesthetic-political regimes that justify spatial segregation (Waldman, 2022), putting their activism at the centre of the enclosure and exploitation of the Aravalli landscape unintentionally absolves the role of the state and its governmentality within which such forms of bourgeois environmentalism emerge. In fact, it is not merely the activism by the middle-classes but rather 'judicial activism' (Bhan, 2016) through which the day-to-day governance of Indian forests has been taken over by the courts (Rosencranz and Lélé, 2008: 11).…”

SOCIOSPATIAL FORMATION OF MIDDLE‐CLASS DISTINCTION: The Educated Middle Classes in Neo‐urban India

“…Such fractures of neo-urban space are reflected in the preference of the middle classes for gated enclaves (Waldman, 2022) and in the resultant distinct geographies of agrarian urban landscapes (Cowan, 2023) of what is characterized as 'Old' Gurugram being juxtaposed with the postliberalization, privatized urban landscape of 'New' Gurugram, with National Highway 8 separating the two. Old Gurugram is characterized by plotted development, whereas New Gurugram is typified by high-rise apartment-style developments, international or global schools, super-speciality hospitals, clubs, and similar.…”