The Shehr network [Comparative Urban Landscapes & Their Subaltern Citizen-Subjects in North-Africa, the Middle East and South Asia]

The Shehr network is an academic initiative that seeks to further a social-historical and critical understanding of contemporary cities and urban practices in the Middle East and South Asia. The initiative examines the efficacy of the category of the city in modernist discourse and seeks to chart this spatial imagination and its effects through an exploration of the complex processes through which gendered, classed, and raced citizen-subjects have negotiated and been the object of urban projects in these regions. Attuned to both the legacy of modernist conceptual grammars and their inadequacy for understanding the remaking of space and place in the neo-liberal present, the purpose of the network is to open up an arena in which to address the particular positioning(s) of contemporary urban landscapes and urban practices through theme-based workshops, publications and an on-line discussion and exchange forum.
We endeavor to be inter-disciplinary and focus on scholarship that is empirically and theoretically comparative. For this purpose we seek to emphasize shared histories and contemporary processes that enable scholars to speak to the similarities and divergences that manifest urban practices in the Middle East and South Asia. Hence, we have selected the Urdu word Shehr (city) as the name for our network. In doing so we draw upon Urdu’s ability to bridge and exemplify the historical linkages between South Asian and Middle Eastern languages and cultures.