Master of Architecture / Department of Architecture / Gary J. Coates / This research explores the bioclimatic and socio-cultural benefits of Kolkata’s courtyard houses. A typological and historical analysis of courtyard houses from around the world, as well as in Kolkata, provides a context for the field research. The main intention of this study is to explore the roles of solar shading and natural ventilation in courtyard houses located in the hot-humid climatic region. For this purpose interviews with the heads of household of ten courtyard houses in Kolkata were conducted in January 2005, to finally choose three houses for detailed experimental analysis. All three houses have high thermal construction and similar socio-economic conditions. This helped in comparing the results of the temperature (both ambient and surface temperatures) and air speed measurements among the three houses referred to as House A, House B and House C houses. House A and House C houses have shallow courtyards (high aspect ratios which in both cases equal 0.95), while House B house has a deep courtyard (low aspect ratio equal to 0.21). Further, ventilation analysis has been done with the help of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. The simulation study and the experimental data measurements focused on the comfort conditions generated within the house based on their differences in proportion of form and massing. The effects of solar shading and natural ventilation on activity patterns and uses of a space are also examined through occupant surveys. Finally, this research explores the historic courtyard houses in Kolkata, with a view to address the benefits of the universal courtyard form of design and speculate the appropriateness of the vernacular courtyard form in the modern architectural arena of Kolkata.

This dissertation examines the question of whether Transfer of Development Rights (TDR), a technique developed in the United States, might prove useful in Calcutta for urban conservation. ln many cases, municipal governments in India have been unable to preserve structures of historic value because they lacked the funds to compensate the Iosses imposed by designation. The owners of the Iandmark structures suffer financial Iosses for not being allowed to develop their properties to their full potential. The TDR technique has the advantage that through this program the owner of a designated Iandmark Is compensated from the sale of the unused development rights In his property. The community is benefited because of the landmark being preserved without the community’s cost. The City is benefited by the additional tax from the development potentials transferred from the Iandmark properties, which would have remained untaxed otherwise. This paper begins by providing an overview of the developments in building regulations, and emergence of TDR as an useful means for land use management through flexibility in zoning. The ongoing TDR programs of seven American cities and a forthcoming one are then studied to identify the central issues and features of this technique. The next chapter is devoted to the analyses of the problems and prospects of TDR programs in the United States. This includes an examination of the issues derived from the case studies as well as a questionnaire survey. The discussion in the following chapter provides some background on the city of Calcutta. The demand for redevelopment in the central city is compounded by the salutation that the growth of population is not matched by physical expansion of the city. CaIcutta’s economic climate, political environment and conservation ethics are also discussed to provide a comprehensive perspective of the testing ground. The test of the technique in Calcutta is discussed in the following chapter with reference to some cases. The concluding chapter includes the general and particular principles that ought to govern the TDR program in Calcutta. The conclusion also includes the administrative and institutional details that will be necessary to apply TDR technique in Calcutta. To summarize the findings of this research, it can be stated that the existing programs in the US cities have entered a second generation. While the legal issues attracted most attention in the first generation, the emphasis has now shifted to the design and implementation of the programs. The need for the program's close coordination with the overall planning and urban design of the city has been recognized. However, each program is designed according to some bias, and in view of supplementing some other planning goals - some of them being compatible, while others are not. The main issues of the program are: balance between TDR supply and market demand, distance between the originating and receiving sites, urban design and planning in the receiving districts, overage limit ln relation to the zoned density, transfer from public landmarks, banking of TDRs, and a 'single window' administration of the program for easy and 'fast track' approval incentive. Although a general downzoning and suspension of other bonus provisions will facilitate the TDR program, the market does not seem to support such steps. lncorporation of a TDR program in Calcutta is possible without any change in the existing building by-laws, but with a relaxation in the regulations governing the land ownership limits. The TDR prices in the receiving sites in BBD Bag and Esplanade areas commensurably match with the TDR values in the sending district of the Bag. But a district-wise transfer will have to be allowed rather than only to physically attached sites. Other receiving districts in the north and south axis along the rapid transit line have potential for future transfers. / Ph. D.

No description available.

The majority of children, involved in both waged and unwaged work exist beyond the control and comprehension of national and international regulation, within the informal economy. Research has shown that the informal economy, contrary to general perception, is not a sphere of unregulated activity, but rather, operates through alternative structures and techniques of power. Children's work within the informal economy, and therefore outside the regulative reach of the state, is subject to extra-legal modes of regulation that are pursued through elaborate systems of discipline and power exercised by non-state actors, groups, and social institutions and networks. Through a case study on children in Kolkata, India, who are engaged in specific forms of informal work in three distinct urban spaces – domestic servitude in the private realm of the home, small-scale manufacturing and service work in factories and shops, and ragpicking, scavenging and begging on the streets – this thesis aims to explore the way children's lives are constructed through work and space, to uncover the social processes and relations of power that working children navigate in order to build and sustain their livelihoods. I examine the way that children's spaces of work are imbued with social relations of gender, caste, religion, ethnicity and power that are enacted through the construction of hierarchies, divisions of labour, and work regimes. I also explore the politics of these spaces, revealing the primary economic partnerships and obstacles that children contend with in constructing their working lives. Overall, I aim to uncover the ways in which children engage with and negotiate the extra-legal systems of regulation by categorically analysing children's work in the home, shop and factory, and street.

Master of Regional and Community Planning / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Ray B. Weisenburger / This research explores the challenges related to the visual image of a city situated in a developing country. Originated as the colonial capital of British India, Kolkata faces new urban challenges in the post colonial world. This report intends to answer questions of imageability of the city as relevant to the Third World countries. Empathizing on the issues of scarcity of land, traffic congestion, accumulation of the urban poor, inadequacies in infrastructure and the organic expansion of fluid city boundaries under the neo-ideological globalization and liberal economic policies – Kolkata faces a host of urban problems. Imageability of the city usually tries to define the positive image of a city. The question here is, should the notions of imageability be confined to cities that inherently have succeeded in maintaining an appealing public image or should it be applied to the potential qualities of visual appropriateness to cities that have historically remained unattractive? This research intends to explore the visual quality of an area surrounding the five point intersection at Shyambazar, Kolkata, India. This study will be based on a number of observations and the different visual analysis techniques applicable in critically analyzing the visual conditions of an urban street pattern of a megacity in India. The main objective of this study is to find an appropriate visual quality for Kolkata, a megacity in the tropics – considering various related factors like – historical significance, demographic trends, geographical and climatological influences, transportation pattern, existing land use, socio-economic structure and inherent or associated urban problems of planning in developing nations.

Present study deals with training and development strategies in IT service industry in Kolkata region. This study highlighted present trends and common practices in training and development activities in specific and in human resources management in general. InfoTech sector is a thrust area of economic development in developing economies, like in India. Government and private joint initiatives make this sector a sunshine industry sector. Potentials of human resources explore in the professionally managed IT service companies. The training and development activities strengthen capabilities of IT service companies and help them to achieve excellence. Present study evaluated the heart of this knowledge industry, which centered on knowledge workers. Present study briefly elaborated the training and development practices of two top-ranked companies in Kolkata and found some unique modes of delivery of training. This study also pointed out that companies placed in higher value-chain have long-term vision as compared to ones in lower in value-chain.

Configurations of Life historicizes four distinct clusters of biological research in colonial and early post-colonial India: the Zoological Survey of India, the so called ‘wolf-children’ natural experiment by anthropologists, the program in plant physiology and insect behavior at the Bose Institute, and the interdisciplinary group led by JBS Haldane at the Indian Statistical Institute. Each of these clusters, the dissertation shows, was invested in characterizing their sciences as specifically Indian in character: in the case of the “wolf-children,” by seizing on a supposedly endemic Indian social and natural phenomenon, and in the others, by claiming an allegedly Indian epistemological stance. Each, the dissertation argues, sought authority by claiming to provide heterodox and distinctly Indian solutions to the most fundamental question of biological science – what is life? – though they differed wildly on what ‘life,’ or ‘Indian,’ or indeed, ‘science’ itself meant. While the extant historiography has often read the effusion of similar claims to ‘Indianness’ in modern knowledge systems around the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a discursive byproduct of nationalism, this dissertation shows that the pursuit of an ‘Indian’ biology cut across racial, national and ideological lines among scientists working in British and early independent India. Instead, by tracking the complex relations between the institutional politics, material culture, and theoretical concerns across these clusters, the dissertation charts out the proselytization, practice and eventual demise of four very distinct understandings of an Indian science of life, based on ecological fieldwork, so-called natural experiments, laboratory instrumentation, and a holistic synthesis between population genetics, statistics and history, respectively. The question of the meaning of life, the dissertation shows, was mostly a rhetorical device invoked to underline the theoretical and methodological ambitions of these sciences, while enabling their individual conceptualizations of the relations between environments and organisms, between heredity and habitat, or between human and animal, to be read as the configurations of life itself. These attempts to create new, distinctly Indian knowledge systems and practices existed side by side and were informed with the larger popular and political project claiming ancient scientific glory on behalf of India, but their aspirations and methods cannot be historically conflated.

No description available.

This dissertation focuses on the non-market valuation of health-risks of malaria, an infectious disease that imposes a substantive public health burden across the globe, hitting particularly hard the tropical developing nations of Africa and Asia. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals include malaria control as a priority and large investments are underway to promote effective prevention and treatment. Despite such concerted supply-side efforts, malaria-related mortality and morbidity still abound due to a complex interface of factors like climate-change, poverty, inadequate control behavior, infection and prevention externalities, parasite resistance etc. This research project digs into the demand-side of the health problem, considers the "externality" dimension to prevention, and primarily asks the question: how do individuals in developing countries view competing disease-control (prevention) measures, viz. a publicly-administered community-level malaria control measure as against private preventive choices. A theoretical model is developed to help explore the public-private interplay of health risks of malaria. The malaria-endemic regions of Kolkata (India) and its rural fringes comprise the site for an empirical investigation. A field survey (Malaria Risk and Prevention Survey, October-December, 2011) incorporating a mix of stated and revealed preference techniques of health valuation is implemented. Risk-perceptions of respondents are elicited using a measurable visual-aid and individuals' perceived valuations of health-risk reductions, randomly offered with the public and private health treatments, are empirically ascertained. Using a Likelihood Ratio Test on the structural risk parameters, it is seen that individuals’ valuations of health risk reductions are the same across the private and public treatments. The comparative valuation iv exercise, thus, corroborates the externality dimension to malaria control, calling for greater public action to combat malaria. The viability of such a scaled-up public malaria program, in the context of Kolkata, is discussed by comparing the public treatment willingness to pay estimates with the annual estimated costs that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, the civic body in the city of Kolkata, maintains on account of vector control. Results from the comparative valuation exercises also support the idea that private prevention is generally responsive to prevention costs, indicating the importance of price incentives to induce greater prevention. The issues of health valuation and price sensitivity are further explored across various split-samples differentiated on the basis of socio-economic attributes, disease exposure, actual prevention efforts and perceived malaria risks of survey respondents. Such auxiliary exercises help analyze the valuation question in greater depth, and generate policy insights into the potential factors that shape private prevention behavior.

Cette thèse se trouve au croisement de deux thématiques assez larges de l’épistémologie sociale : voyage et spatialité. Mais le champ de recherche se concentre sur la quête de la subjectivité occidentale, et sur la perception de l’espace autre au travers notamment du voyage dans le Tiers-Monde. En premier lieu, nous essayons de comprendre les raisons et les facteurs qui poussent les Occidentaux à entreprendre le voyage à la rencontre de la misère et de l’horreur du Tiers Monde. Ensuite, notre travail cherche à analyser comment la perception et l’appropriation de cette spatialité, en particulier celle de Calcutta, jadis la « seconde ville de l'Empire » britannique, se caractérisent au niveau de l’imaginaire occidental. La thèse est divisée en deux parties à la fois indépendantes et interreliées. Constituée de deux chapitres, la première tente de fournir un cadre explicatif conceptuel aux questions touchant à la problématique du voyage et de la spatialité. Le premier chapitre examine le phénomène des nouveaux tourismes qui se déploient à partir de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle dans les pays du Tiers Monde atteints par la pauvreté extrême, l’inanition, la guerre, etc. Le pouvoir d'attraction de la spatialité postcoloniale qui se reflète dans ce phénomène touristique nous permet d'explorer, dans le chapitre suivant, la portée de la construction sociale et symbolique de l’espace au niveau de l’imaginaire social. La deuxième partie consacre deux chapitres à l’analyse des perceptions occidentales communes de Calcutta en soulignant leur oscillation entre fascination et répulsion. Le chapitre trois s’intéresse à l’émergence et à la durabilité des mythes de la ville qui illustrent cette ambivalence. Le chapitre quatre est voué à une étude comparative de deux romans populaires – Le chant de Kali (2005) de Dan Simmons et La Cité de la joie (1985) de Dominique Lapierre – qui intègrent et reflètent l’imaginaire occidental sur Calcutta. La problématique de ce chapitre ne se limite pas à la vérification du mouvement de fascination-répulsion constitutif du regard occidental sur la métropole indienne, mais elle intègre également la question du rôle de l’espace de l’Autre dans la quête occidentale de sens et de soi. / This work is at the cross-roads of two broad themes of social epistemology: travel and spatiality. The main focus of this research is the occidental subjectivity’s search for self and its perception of spatiality through Third World travel. We first analyze the reasons that motivate Westerners to encounter the misery and horror of the Third World in their travels. We next study the perception and appropriation of this spatiality in the Western imagination, particularly with reference to the Indian metropolis, Calcutta, hitherto considered the second city of the British Empire. This thesis is divided into two independent but related parts. The first part furnishes a conceptual background in order to define and explain issues pertaining to voyage and spatiality. Here, the first chapter elucidates the notion of new tourism, a late-20th century practice of travel to Third World countries ravaged by extreme poverty, war and other disasters. The attraction towards postcolonial spatiality illustrated in this phenomenon, helps us explore, in a subsequent chapter, the symbolic and social construction of space in the collective imagination. In the second part of the thesis, we discuss the ambivalence in the Westerners’ perception of Calcutta. We discuss the emergence and persistence of myths in reference to the city that illustrate the fascination-repulsion that characterize this perception. For this, we present a comparative analysis of two popular novels that reflect collective Occidental imagination : Song of Kali (1985) by Dan Simmons and La Cité de la joie (1985) by Dominique Lapierre. Through an analysis of the abovementioned texts, we reinforce, once more, the importance of the space of the Other in the occidental quest for self definition.