EVENTS

'Bicycle Cities: Everyday Technology and the Transformation of Urban India, 1890-1950' - 05/02/2010 14:30

A seminar by the Centre for Urban History, hosted by David Arnold

On Friday 5 February 2010, David Arnold of the University of Warwick will give a seminar for the Centre for Urban History, entitled 'Bicycle Cities: Everyday Technology and the Transformation of Urban India, 1890-1950'. This seminar is free and open to the public.

Despite being neglected in most discussions of urban India before the 1960s, and in the theorization of colonial urban morphology, bicycles had become widespread and highly visible aspect of Indian cities by the 1930s. Exemplars of the many imported technologies that were beginning to transform South Asia in the late colonial period, even at the most subaltern levels, bicycles helped reshape urban work-regimes; they figured in new patterns of physical and social mobility, in criminality and the rise of the ‘everyday state’. Never an exclusively European monopoly, bicycles helped shape Indian thinking about health and self-sufficiency, and, as part of the wider ‘traffic problem’ they informed a growing sense of an urban ‘public’.

It will take place at 2.30 in the Seminar Room, Marc Fitch House, 3-5 Salisbury Road. You are welcome to join us for the seminar and tea afterwards.

Staff, students and the general public are all welcome to attend. For further details please contact: kc15@le.ac.uk or tel. 0116 252 2378