hello everybody..
as promised here is prajna's synopsis of the thesis that won her the gold medal . so here goes..
Transforming Urban Institutions-
Case for a marriage of Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai.
introduction
The thesis began with an attempt to focus upon the apparata of a disciplinary society as insidious mechanisms of social control ; upon how some discourses1 have shaped and created meaning, systems that have gained the status of ‘truth’ and dominate how we define and organise, both ourselves and our social world.
For instance, the institutions of the family, the school, the hospital, the prison serve as such mechanisms that seek to inculcate the human being in the ‘proper’ behaviour of society. While the school defines our knowledges, the family seeks to enforce the discipline of societies, larger moral codes, right from our early childhood. These apparata-institutions act as the seat of power in a society through which operations of social ordering are executed.
If it is true that the mechanism of discipline is becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also miniscule and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them (knowingly or unknowingly), and finally, what ‘ways of operating’ form the counterpart. These ‘ways of operating’ constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by the same apparata.
The goal thus, is to perceive and analyze the operations working within these disciplinary mechanisms and deflecting their functioning; contrary, in that the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light, and build a case for the resistive forms taken by the dispersed, and the makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline.’
marriages in the city
‘Marriage is a ‘matrimonial form’ that not only structures a social tie- - a personal relationship between the two partners, but also fixes the complementarity of roles in the management of a household. The art of married living defines the relation that is dual in form, universal in value, and specific in its intensity and strength… The naturalness of marriage, had been broadly founded on a series of reasons: the indispensable joining of the male and female for procreation; the necessity of prolonging this conjunction, of transforming it into a stable union in order to ensure the education of the offspring; the combination of assistance, comforts and pleasures that married life can provide, with its services and its obligations; and lastly, the forming of the family as the basic unit of the city.’2
The concept of 'Marriage' in the city has evolved as a method of combining urban resources like land, infrastructure, finance by the collaboration of diverse institutions in the city giving rise to newer / mutated institutions that share a symbiotic relationship with each other to exist in the same and multiple spaces.
For e.g. a school for architectural education in Juhu, leases out its auditorium for public ceremonies on weekends and public holidays. While the additional use of the auditorium brings in finance for the school trust, it alters the functioning of the school spatially, in converse; public ceremonies are conducted on the basis of the availability of the premise rather than on an auspicious date determined by the religious calendar.
The thesis uses this concept of marriage - of completely realigning the social and economic arrangements of its subjects through the ritual of a ‘marriage ceremony’- to further assist / structure change in the urban institutions. Thus, it attempts to break the monolith of the institutions, through transformation by negotiations, rather than confrontation.
The concept of marriage also suggests ‘an event’, a celebration that needs to be acknowledged by a society that stands witness to the unison.
the urban jail
The prison, as a social institution of discipline, represents the sovereign power in its highest form. It uses the legitimacy of law to exercise its operations on its subjects for the creation of a ‘civil’ society by isolation of its deviant members thus classifying them as criminal, perverts, neurotic, madmen in need of reprogramming and evaluation.
However, the understanding of the prison has shifted in the last decade to that of an institution for correction, identifying the convict as a victim of sociological disorder and one in need of sympathy and care.
The prison so reconceptualized, however, has remained outside the spatial realm of the everyday life of cities and the people within them, making the transitions between the two, still an arduous process.
The thesis takes up the case of Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai, thus instituted in the outskirts of the city of Bombay (1926). The northward development of the city engulfing the jail in its centre, along with the evolved criminological and penal studies, have given the Arthur Road Jail a new context, providing basis for its urgent transformation as an institution in the city.
the marriage proposal
The thesis proposes the marriage of the Arthur Road Jail to a production unit using the notion of ‘work’ as a two way tool in the marriage –
one as a disciplinary mechanism - to inculcate the ‘right way of life’ by participation in processes of production, through a fixed timetable,
and the other in the form of manual labour - to produce commodities that would bring in revenue to activate other programs in the prison, now being carried out by NGOs from across the city.
The ‘marriage ceremony’ of the prison and the production house occurs in the public space - an ‘event’ vouching for their unison; while the new interface consciously attempts the reconciliation of the prison with the city around it.
architectural design
The design intervention proposes a new programmatic wall that moderates its starkness as a divisive wall to that of a massive backdrop to the public space, released along the most important edge of the site. The public space is enlivened with the new programs of the prison - the library, the canteen, the exhibition, the courthouse, all of which have their own narratives for the urban jail, supplied by the attached work units of the press, the kitchen and the tool box on the inner side of the magnificent security wall.
These new programs for the city, thus, become the multiple entry points into the prison, physical and programmatic, allowing for a new relationship to emerge between the urban jail and the city.
The thesis is an attempt to reconceptualise the institution of the urban jail, by marrying it to a production unit, such that through its produced commodities, it becomes a part of the everyday events of the city.
1 Discourse, according to Foucault, refers to ‘ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations - They are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern…’
2 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 1990.
as promised here is prajna's synopsis of the thesis that won her the gold medal . so here goes..
Transforming Urban Institutions-
Case for a marriage of Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai.
introduction
The thesis began with an attempt to focus upon the apparata of a disciplinary society as insidious mechanisms of social control ; upon how some discourses1 have shaped and created meaning, systems that have gained the status of ‘truth’ and dominate how we define and organise, both ourselves and our social world.
For instance, the institutions of the family, the school, the hospital, the prison serve as such mechanisms that seek to inculcate the human being in the ‘proper’ behaviour of society. While the school defines our knowledges, the family seeks to enforce the discipline of societies, larger moral codes, right from our early childhood. These apparata-institutions act as the seat of power in a society through which operations of social ordering are executed.
If it is true that the mechanism of discipline is becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also miniscule and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them (knowingly or unknowingly), and finally, what ‘ways of operating’ form the counterpart. These ‘ways of operating’ constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by the same apparata.
The goal thus, is to perceive and analyze the operations working within these disciplinary mechanisms and deflecting their functioning; contrary, in that the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light, and build a case for the resistive forms taken by the dispersed, and the makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline.’
marriages in the city
‘Marriage is a ‘matrimonial form’ that not only structures a social tie- - a personal relationship between the two partners, but also fixes the complementarity of roles in the management of a household. The art of married living defines the relation that is dual in form, universal in value, and specific in its intensity and strength… The naturalness of marriage, had been broadly founded on a series of reasons: the indispensable joining of the male and female for procreation; the necessity of prolonging this conjunction, of transforming it into a stable union in order to ensure the education of the offspring; the combination of assistance, comforts and pleasures that married life can provide, with its services and its obligations; and lastly, the forming of the family as the basic unit of the city.’2
The concept of 'Marriage' in the city has evolved as a method of combining urban resources like land, infrastructure, finance by the collaboration of diverse institutions in the city giving rise to newer / mutated institutions that share a symbiotic relationship with each other to exist in the same and multiple spaces.
For e.g. a school for architectural education in Juhu, leases out its auditorium for public ceremonies on weekends and public holidays. While the additional use of the auditorium brings in finance for the school trust, it alters the functioning of the school spatially, in converse; public ceremonies are conducted on the basis of the availability of the premise rather than on an auspicious date determined by the religious calendar.
The thesis uses this concept of marriage - of completely realigning the social and economic arrangements of its subjects through the ritual of a ‘marriage ceremony’- to further assist / structure change in the urban institutions. Thus, it attempts to break the monolith of the institutions, through transformation by negotiations, rather than confrontation.
The concept of marriage also suggests ‘an event’, a celebration that needs to be acknowledged by a society that stands witness to the unison.
the urban jail
The prison, as a social institution of discipline, represents the sovereign power in its highest form. It uses the legitimacy of law to exercise its operations on its subjects for the creation of a ‘civil’ society by isolation of its deviant members thus classifying them as criminal, perverts, neurotic, madmen in need of reprogramming and evaluation.
However, the understanding of the prison has shifted in the last decade to that of an institution for correction, identifying the convict as a victim of sociological disorder and one in need of sympathy and care.
The prison so reconceptualized, however, has remained outside the spatial realm of the everyday life of cities and the people within them, making the transitions between the two, still an arduous process.
The thesis takes up the case of Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai, thus instituted in the outskirts of the city of Bombay (1926). The northward development of the city engulfing the jail in its centre, along with the evolved criminological and penal studies, have given the Arthur Road Jail a new context, providing basis for its urgent transformation as an institution in the city.
the marriage proposal
The thesis proposes the marriage of the Arthur Road Jail to a production unit using the notion of ‘work’ as a two way tool in the marriage –
one as a disciplinary mechanism - to inculcate the ‘right way of life’ by participation in processes of production, through a fixed timetable,
and the other in the form of manual labour - to produce commodities that would bring in revenue to activate other programs in the prison, now being carried out by NGOs from across the city.
The ‘marriage ceremony’ of the prison and the production house occurs in the public space - an ‘event’ vouching for their unison; while the new interface consciously attempts the reconciliation of the prison with the city around it.
architectural design
The design intervention proposes a new programmatic wall that moderates its starkness as a divisive wall to that of a massive backdrop to the public space, released along the most important edge of the site. The public space is enlivened with the new programs of the prison - the library, the canteen, the exhibition, the courthouse, all of which have their own narratives for the urban jail, supplied by the attached work units of the press, the kitchen and the tool box on the inner side of the magnificent security wall.
These new programs for the city, thus, become the multiple entry points into the prison, physical and programmatic, allowing for a new relationship to emerge between the urban jail and the city.
The thesis is an attempt to reconceptualise the institution of the urban jail, by marrying it to a production unit, such that through its produced commodities, it becomes a part of the everyday events of the city.
1 Discourse, according to Foucault, refers to ‘ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations - They are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern…’
2 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 1990.
2 comments:
hey .. my blog seems ot have stopped working.. please bear with me while the dudes at blogger.com try and get it fixed.
Hi Rohan...and Prajna....i just read the synopsis of the thesis...and it seemed really interesting...i wish i had known before about the thesis....cause i was 'made to read' some stuff for a class which could have been relevant....in any case...i dont think my earlier comment was posted....so cheers your highness...krvia rocks.... and rohan...sorry for making u a mediator...Mayur
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