Srinivas, Smriti

Place for utopia : urban designs from South Asia - New Delhi : Orient Blackswan, 2015 - xi, 207 p. ; ill., (b & w), maps. 24 cm - Global South Asia .

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early twentieth century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and North America. It charts the valency of "utopia" for understanding designs for alternative, occluded, vernacular, or emergent urbanisms in the last hundred years. Central to the designs for utopia in this book are the themes of gardens, children, spiritual topographies, death, and hope.

From the vitalist urban plans of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes in India to the Theosophical Society in Madras and the ways in which it provided a context for a novel South Indian garden design; from the visual, textual, and ritual designs of Californian Vedanta from the 1930s to the present; to the spatial transformations associated with post-1990s highways and rapid transit systems in Bangalore that are shaping an emerging "Indian New Age" of religious and somatic self-styling, Srinivas tells the story of contrapuntal histories, the contiguity of lives, and resonances between utopian worlds that are generative of designs for cultural alternatives and futures.

9788125059554


City planning, South Asia
Cities and towns, South Asia
Geddes, Patrick -- 1854-1932
Religious Ethnology
Sacred building
Utopian architecture
Botanical Garden
New Buddhism
Neohinduism
Vedanta
Adi Shankara
Baba, Sathya Sai
Buddhism
Kali
Maitreya Buddha Pyramid
Reiki
Tantra
Vedanta
Pedestrian method; (Geddes)
Zoological gardens
Bangalore
Chennai
Shirdi
Theosophical Society

307.12160954 / SRI

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