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introducing the archive

This collaborative archive is an initiative to document all the buildings that have been demolished in Kolkata, India since 1990, with specific emphasis on documenting the locations of such demolished buildings and thus on the spatial pattern of the urban transformation.

Under 'demolition' we take into account complete and partial demolitions of all kinds (and involving all types of buildings) except the ones due to natural calamities (fire, flood etc.). By 'Kolkata' we consider the area under the Kolkata Municipality Corporation consisting of 141 wards . As for the 'buildings' concerned, we document four types of demolished buildings: (i) squatter settlements, (ii) residential buildings, (iii) commercial buildings and (iv) factories and production units.

This archive developed through the course of the 'Maps for Making Change' workshop organised jointly by Centre for Internet and Society (Bengaluru) and Tactical Technology Collective (Bengaluru and London) during December 2009 - April 2010.

…and the sections

The first two sections the map and the buildings host the spatial and the textual archives respectively.

While the archive begins with a moderate volume of records of buildings demolished during the period concerned, it is meant to expand through collaborative contributions. Please visit the new submissions section to see how you can submit further information and/or to correct any existing mis-information.

The methods section discusses the techniques and the tools that were used to develop this archive — to compile the the data archive and to create this site.

Though primarily meant to be an archive, the initiative can only be fruitful if it can induce public debates and eventually social actions. Please visit the forum to read existing discussions, to contribute to them, and/or to begin new discussions.

a brief (and biased) background

Kolkata (formerly ‘Calcutta’) is located in present West Bengal, an eastern state of India. The city began its life as one of three early port-cities (along with Bombay and Madras) established by the British; then chosen by the British East India Company authorities as the first capital of colonial India;…

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… was the site of Bengali cultural ‘renaissance;’ eventually fell from the (colonial) glory as the imperial capital shifted to New Delhi; but remained the much celebrated urban centre of cultural and intellectual practices in colonial as well as post-colonial India. From pre-independence communal riots, to accommodating migrant settlers from Bangladesh, to becoming the city of parliamentary left politics, to coming together of Naxal/Maoist politics and urban intelligencia, to the city of industrial degeneration and fleeing Bengalis to present days of competitive drawing of private investments in IT, health and other service sectors and the ‘world city’ aspirations – Kolkata has been an unique site of postcolonial Indian history.

Not surprisingly, such a colorful history of the city has been materially manifested in diverse architectural artifacts located throughout the city – from colonial administrative buildings and residential mansions, to Indian ‘para’ (neighbourhoods) of colonial times, settled according to occupational and linguistic orderings, to squatter settlements of Bangladeshi and rural Bengali (Indian) migrants, to ‘world class’ residential (gated) ‘cities’. There however, exist very little geographic/architectural accounts of this transformation in the built space. The municipality corporation has no records of old (pre-colonial) buildings that have been demolished since independence. Most of such demolitions have been illegal, while in case of more visible of such buildings the building laws restrictions have been bypassed by naming the demolition act as repairing or re-fitting the building for modern (read: commercial) purposes.

While there have been some research works on demolitions of various kinds of buildings, these works are disparate and most often (if not always) have not located these sites on a map of the city.

The present work of mapping demolished buildings in Kolkata attempts to combine all these separate endeavours to record these incidents of demolition and map them on an internet-based map. It hopes to attract collaborative efforts from various individuals and groups who are interested in the issues concerned, and to remain an active expanding archive on the transformation of the built fabric of the city of Kolkata.

While it does not directly aim to induce or aid urban rights (such as, right to shelter, or heritage preservation) movements, the archive can surely be used to such ends by interested groups.

acknowledgements

Center for Internet and Society and Tactical Technology Collective organised a series of dynamic and rigorous workshops that provided the essential technical and community (comprised of technical experts as well as fellow map-makers) support without which this archive could not have been realized.

Several organisations and individuals provided multi-directional support in the data collection process. All the data that have been compiled into this archive was initially collected by these organisations and individuals, and appreciating the cause to produce such a map of the demolished city, they made available the data to this initiative. List of these contributors can be found in the contributors section.

license

This site and archive, the city demolished, created and compiled (both codes and media contents) by kol.carto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 India License.