Abstract
The ubiquitous neighborhood commercial street in India demonstrates how the use of space, accompanied by the temporal patterns of use of the street, creates affordances and agency for diverse groups in the city and offers interactions in public space that are an important building block of urban social order. A detailed analysis of behavior and interactions on the Indian street reveals the workings of the street as a negotiated and fluid space of access, commerce, leisure, sociability, and survival. Bottom-up urbanism here is not characterized by insurgency but operates on complex modes of negotiation where the coexistence of diverse groups, activities, forms, objects, and modes of control, make the street a social, cultural, economic, and political space.
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Mehta, V. (2019). Space, Time, and Agency on the Indian Street. In: Arefi, M., Kickert, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_15
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