By Anabel Costa
Growing up in Kolkata, History of Art and Architecture professor Swati Chattopadhyay was a big fan of street cricket. Today, street cricket, and the power structures in everyday life of Indian streets, are the subject of her studies, and her book, Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field.
Swati Chattopadhyay is a professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at UCSB. She discussed her book Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field , as part of a discussion series presented by HAA entitled Unlearning: Race, Space, Art..
Monday afternoon marked the first lecture in a series presented by the UC Santa Barbara Department of History of Art and Architecture (HAA). The discussion series, entitled Unlearning: Race, Space, Art, is produced in conjunction with a graduate seminar by the same name that is taught by Chattopadhyay.
Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field by History of Art and Architecture professor Swati Chattopadhyay, explores the everyday life of Indian streets.
Each event in the four-part series features a conversation with a different author about their book. Monday’s lecture saw Chattopadhyay in conversation with Arijit Sen, a professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Unlearning the City uses the culture of Indian cities and streets to look beyond the infrastructure, and the frameworks in much of urban studies theory that often focus on economics more than people. Instead, she proposes new language and ways to analyze that capture the messy, unstructured and ever-changing human experience in the urban landscape. Chattopadhyay uses street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities to explore these ideas.
Arijit Sen is a professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He joined UCSB professor Swati Chattopadhyay in a discussion on her book Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field.
In Unlearning the City, Chattopadhyay examines activities that are both authorized and unauthorized in municipal spaces. The breach of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6 became a point of discussion with Arijit Sen asking the simple question “what happened at the Capitol?”
“President-elect Biden described it as an insurrection,” said Chattopadhyay. “In my view, it’s not an insurrection, it’s not a revolt, it’s not a coup. This is because the people who invaded the space saw it as their space. Their access was enabled.”
Given the events on January 6, and the nation-wide Black Lives Matter protests last summer following the murder of George Floyd, Chattopadhyay pointed out how differently the two groups of people were treated by law enforcement. “When you think about space and architecture, and when you think about landscape, you are forced to acknowledge and reckon with the connection,” said Chattopadhyay. “Had the people at the Capitol been with Black Lives Matter, they would never have been able to access the building.”
Anabel Costa is a fourth year Theater major with a minor in Professional Writing. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.