Articles by Ratoola Kundu

The West Bengal government's plan to develop the Rajarhat new township on the periphery of Kolkata in the mid-1990s unwittingly produced an urban landscape that contradicts the master plan. The new town is fragmented into a formal network of roads and gated residential high-rise complexes on the one hand, and dense urban villages with traditional housing layouts on the other. Urban villages and gated communities represent a continuum of new urban living which is marked by a constant need to make sense of the changed reality through varied strategies of place-making. These are in response to the multiple ways in which inhabitants of these very distinct settlement types have been unsettled by urbanisation. The particular emphasis of this paper is on the lived life of inhabitants--examining routine activities that go into the material and social construction of place as well as how place influences social interactions, livelihoods and aspirations.