The Story of My House: and many others in Delhi
| dc.contributor.advisor | Davis, Howard | |
| dc.contributor.author | Murthy, Manas | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-02-24T19:19:34Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-02-24T19:19:34Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2025-02-24 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation examines the emergence of ‘builder floors’; a new housing type that has proliferated across residential neighborhoods in Delhi, India in recent decades. Drawing on case studies, interviews, spatial documentation, archival research, and personal reflections, I trace how the phenomenon of builder floors intersects with, and makes legible, the economic, social, and morphological transformations of Delhi’s middle-class neighborhoods. Builder floors, as architectural type, draw on precedents of elite private dwellings such as havelis and kothis while offering upward mobility to the middle class. As multistoried buildings, they have drastically altered ground floor sociality, connection to greenery, feelings of privacy and security, and wider social relationships in neighborhoods. Builder floors have also reconfigured social relations within households: for instance, the return of joint family living alongside the hyper-privatization of individual spaces; the emergence of new forms of neighborliness and issues of management of common areas within buildings. As stilted buildings with parking on the ground, they have further prioritized automobile use and contributed to a growing parking crisis in Delhi. However, most crucially, following Karen Barad’s (2007) ‘agential realism’, the study of builder floors helps bring together seemingly disparate urban processes and disciplinary ‘lenses’ that have been critical to Delhi and its development since India’s independence; specifically, the changing relationship between land and property, housing mobility and migration of the middle class, the establishment of automobility, speculative capital and real estate, and the evolving conception of ‘home’. The research takes a post-qualitative approach with concepts from new materialism and posthumanist philosophy and deploys ‘plugging in’ as a method (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023) that dissolves rigid boundaries between theory, data, and analysis. In doing so, my research engages with a wide range of disciplines and bodies of literature, tantamount to a thickening of ‘fields’, where the empirical and the theoretical, the material and the discursive, are juxtaposed without privileging either. Rather than presenting a comprehensive model of Delhi's urbanism, this dissertation offers partial, embodied narratives that speak to broader processes while remaining grounded in lived experience. The dissertation itself takes the form of an assemblage – following Deleuze and Guattari (1987) – with each chapter acting as a plateau generating its own intensity while connecting to others like a ‘rhizome’. Ultimately, this dissertation illuminates how interventions in housing, mobility, or infrastructure inevitably reshape other domains in complex ways, calling for more integrated planning approaches. It highlights the fundamentally entangled nature of the economic mobility of Delhi's middle classes, the evolution of its land-property regime, the workings of speculative capital, and changing domestic imaginaries. Builder floors, I argue, have emerged through multiple ‘parallel becomings’ that reinforce and make each other legible. The significance of this research, in foregrounding the builder floor, lies in the connections it makes between homeownership and a land-property regime; between car ownership and ‘automobility’; between house form and class relations; between statecraft and speculative capital. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/30459 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Automobility | en_US |
| dc.subject | Builder Floors | en_US |
| dc.subject | Delhi | en_US |
| dc.subject | Housing | en_US |
| dc.subject | Middle class | en_US |
| dc.subject | Typology | en_US |
| dc.title | The Story of My House: and many others in Delhi | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Architecture | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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