On the built environments of settler colonialism: Misbah Imtiyaz, Spatial Battlegrounds: Examining the Architecture and Urban Dimensions of the Kashmir Conflict, Doctoral dissertation, Politecnico di Torino, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

On the built environments of settler colonialism: Misbah Imtiyaz, Spatial Battlegrounds: Examining the Architecture and Urban Dimensions of the Kashmir Conflict, Doctoral dissertation, Politecnico di Torino, 2024

11Aug24

Abstract: Drawing from the inspiration from Eyal Weizman’s “Frontier Architecture”, this thesis aims to represent Kashmir through the same lens of analyzing the use of spaces as a tool in occupation and resistance. It aims to study spaces not just as social functional forms but rather as weapons in the context of Kashmir being the highest military zone in the world. It examines the transformation of spaces due to heavy military presence and the gradual spatial processes that led to settler colonialism. The study aims to use an interdisciplinary approach integrating urban theories and spatial critical social theories, with architecture and infrastructures acting as its assemblage units. Spatial analysis tools like cartographic and territorial mappings are employed to understand further the political ramifications embedded within the architecture and urban forms. The study area of the thesis focuses particularly on Srinagar, the summer capital city of India-administered Kashmir. The case studies are these thematic structures, such as camps and cantonments as separate gated territories of Indian occupation in Kashmir, bunkers, and barricades as the control on mobility, shrines, public squares, and parks from being mostly politically mobilized to becoming spaces of remembrance, grief, and protests. Icons and symbols like cinemas and clock towers symbolize authority and control. Bridges tracing memories back to the 90s conflict. and so on. The research aims to understand these urban elements within the conceptual framework of existing scholarship on the relationship between conflict and the built environment. In this thesis, most key points related to defining the link between the two have been studied well to conclude the patterns following the Kashmir occupation and resistance movement. It examines the role of nationalism, graham’s “urban militarism”, the concept of Agamben’s “State of exception”, neo settler colonialism, urbicide, memoricide and spatio-cide. Moreover, understanding how spatial memory, identity and narrative are used as political discourses and how new developments and destruction are used to erase selective memories and replace them with new structures and spatial memories. Thus, the research tries to understand Spatial forms in the context of war and conflict in a neo-colonial zone by critically analyzing the tangible aspects of urban warfare and the transformation of spaces.

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