session 2
by Nihal Perera
From Victims to Agents of Change: How Ordinary People Create “Lived” Spaces
by Nihal Perera
on Tuesday, December 10, 2024,
at 6:00 PM IST
School of Environment & ArchitectureCKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091
Space is central to society. Per mainstream discourses, social space is largely produced by the state and capital. Nihal Perera’s work takes issue with this preconception and addresses a significant gap left by the leaders in the field of social production of space including Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. As demonstrated in hisPeople’s Spaces(Routledge 2016), the adaptation, interpretation, transformation, and creation of spaces are also carried out by ordinary people. Perera argues that the vast terrain of ordinary actors and spaces which are currently marginalized should be reflected in academic debates and policy decisions and that the local thinking processes that constitute these spaces need to be acknowledged, enabled, and critiqued.
Adopting an inside-out perspective, empathic to the subjects, and using field studies, Professor Perera will demonstrate how subjects reconcile the difference between the intended goals of imposed/provided spaces and ordinary people’s own understandings and expectations of these, creating spaces for their daily activities and cultural practices. At the other end, the spaces ordinary people produce make the state and capital negotiate their needs. He will highlight the need to switch intellectual tools.
about
Nihal Perera, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Ball State University (USA) and the founder and director of CapAsia, immersive-learning semester in Asia (1999-2021). The two-time Fulbright Scholar (China and Myanmar) was also Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore and at King Mongkut Institute of Technology (Thailand), Graham Foundation Fellow (USA), Distinguished Visiting Scholar at University of Alberta (Canada), and an Erasmus Mundus Scholar (Germany and Italy). He also received three Fulbright-Hays awards. An original contributor to the field of “postcolonial urban studies,” and leading scholar of Colombo, his research focuses on how ordinary people negotiate and produce (lived) spaces for their daily activities and cultural practices. Professor Perera has published articles on gender, race, planning, development, Chandigarh, Dharavi, Yangon, and Gary (USA) and his books include Decolonizing Ceylon, Transforming Asian Cities, and People’s Spaces. He has also practiced as an architect (1977-1983) and been the Chief Architect-Planner of the Mahaweli Project (1983-1989), largest development project in Sri Lanka, and regional and physical planner of the Transmigration Project of Indonesia. He has also taught in Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, and Sri Lanka.
