Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the
emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that
conforms to M.K. Gandhi's religious need to establish finite
boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi's
conservative and exclusionary conception of religion. Drawing from
rich archival and field materials, the book begins with an
exploration of Gandhi's religiosity of relinquishment and the
British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade's creation of his low-cost
hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas
inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on
the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous, conservative Gandhian
ideals of pursuing self-sacrifice and rendering the pursuit of
self-sacrifice legible as the practice of an exclusionary
varnashramadharma. At a considerable remove from Gandhi's religious
conservatism, successive generations in post-colonial India have
reimagined a secular necessity for this Gandhian low-cost housing
architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing
for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost
housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to
economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the
1970s, during the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological
necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its
reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based
identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra. Each of these moments of
necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost
housing architecture of finitude and also the need to emancipate
Gandhian finitude from Gandhi's own exclusions. This volume is a
critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history.
Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies, political
science, housing studies, urban studies, religious studies, and
anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great
interest to students and researchers of architecture and design,
housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban
studies and development studies.
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