Planning the city : urbanization and reform in Calcutta, c. 1800-c. 1940 / Partho Datta.
Material type: TextPublication details: New Delhi : Tulika Books, 2012.Description: xv, 332 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cmISBN:- 9788189487904 (hbk.)
- 818948790 (hbk.)
- 711.40954147 DAT 23 001080
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Book | Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore | 711.40954147 DAT 001080 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 001080 |
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711.40954 GUP 010956 Celebrating public spaces of India / | 711.40954 JAI 002689 Urban land policy and public-private partnership for real estate and infrastructure projects / | 711.40954 STA 000264 ಸಾರ್ವಜನಿಕ ಖಾಸಗಿ ಸಹಭಾಗಿತ್ವ ಹೊರಗುತ್ತಿಗೆ ಮತ್ತು ಅನುಷ್ಠಾನ : | 711.40954147 DAT 001080 Planning the city : | 711.409544 RAM 008367 Jaipur Metropolitan District Master Development Plan, 2025 / | 711.4095456 SAB 016107 A sense of space : | 711.4095475 FIR 005526 First central region conference on architects 1991, souvenir / |
"Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)" --Jamia Millia Islamia.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [295]-315) and index.
'In 1820, an unusual letter was published in the Bengali newspaper Samachar Darpan. It was a plaintive appeal from the rats of the city of Calcutta saying they were being unfairly displaced from their ancient dwellings. Calcutta was indeed going through momentous changes - new roads and neighbourhoods were being planned, channels for draining were being dug, new structures were coming up and existing buildings refurbished. These changes were not random. A new spatial order was coming into its own backed by the powerful ideology of town planning. Planning encompassed not only the regulation of physical spaces, but also the multiple concerns of health, policing and commerce.
Planning happened largely in the guise of ‘improvement’ and the intervention of the colonial government was important. Despite resistance and scepticism, and some reversals, the task of imposing a rational urban order on the city continued. The history of this colonial initiative can be traced through three sets of archival documents which have so far been sparingly used by historians of Calcutta.
Lord Wellesley began the process with his prescriptive Minute on Calcutta in 1803, which led to the setting up of the Lottery Committee in 1817 – so called because funds for the city were raised through public lotteries. The investigation of the Fever Hospital Commission followed in the 1830s and, as the name suggests, the locations of epidemic fevers determined areas for urban restructuring. The Municipality, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, had to reckon with bustis which housed the labouring poor. But it was only after the plague epidemic in 1897 that an autonomous organization to plan the city came into being: the Calcutta Improvement Trust was set up in 1911.
This book examines and assesses the continuity of colonial urban policy and its impact, particularly in terms of the social costs to the displaced population and its implications for understanding planning history generally." --Book cover.
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