session 3
Passages
of Play: People, Media, Objects and Spaces In Mumbai's Slum
Localities
by Prasad Khanolkar
Passages
of Play: People, Media, Objects and Spaces In Mumbai's Slum
Localities
by Prasad Khanolkar
on Friday, December 20, 2024,
at 6:00 PM IST
School of Environment & ArchitectureCKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091
In this book, Prasad Khanolkar offers a new way of thinking about ‘slums’ and southern cities based on a grounded engagement with the relationship between media, objects, spaces, and people in the everyday life of slum localities in Mumbai, India. Based on extensive fieldwork in slum localities of Mumbai, this book explores how its residents engage in different forms of play in order to extend and expand their field of possibilities, despite the limitations and fixities. The book attends to some of these playacts: imparting stories with different thicknesses, rehearsing roles on and offscreen, engaging in deceptive performances, experimenting with repetitive everyday rhythms, and recycling matter and forms. Through these playacts, urban residents explore the virtual abilities of different mediums to put bodies, objects, and spaces into new forms of relationships and create passages to depart from programmed urban futures. By attending to these proliferating urban passages of different residents in slum localities, the book makes a case for rethinking southern cities as mediums for urban lives to converge and depart without an overarching framework.
about
Prasad Khanolkar is an urban scholar with a background in the fields of architecture, planning, human geography and South Asian Studies. His work as an academic and a practitioner largely focuses on the incongruous and collaborative operations through which marginalised urban residents assemble urban lives and habitats in different cities of the Global South. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai.
