Practice as Research

Doctoral Thesis

Thesis title: Reimag(in)ing the Western Ghats of India - Situated Knowledge Perspectives for a New Ground of Wetness

The Western Ghats is familiar to me… I was first there as an architecture student, spending my weekends and spare time riding through some of the terrain I have revisited in my doctoral thesis. And of course, getting drenched on the way to college with rolls of drawing sheets that we would iron out later that would still not dry completely. The monsoon and rain is also very familiar, having grown up in Malaysia, where it rained everyday with thunderstorms, and on top of that was the monsoon season that came between November and February.

As an architect and planner, one of the most fundamental things we do is draw lines. We draw them in plan-view to design spaces, separating the kitchen from the bedroom, outside from inside, and land uses, separating residential from industrial, water from land, forest from city. It is as an ecological planner working on a redevelopment project on Chongming Island at the mouth of the Yangtze River in 2003, that I became troubled by the lines I was trying to draw – to separate forest from paddy fields, aquaculture from human settlement, and the river from the island that was growing with siltation 3m each year. I wondered about movement of creatures, fishermen, seeds, air, and soils, that don’t see these lines, and neither could I imagine them when I was on site… a watery slushy mobile world. These are human constructed lines drawn in order to manage. But first, they have to be imagined – through a view from above.

There is a dissonance between the real lived experience of place, and taught knowledge. How are these lines drawn, and what do they do when institutionalized? What do they mean on the ground? And how are temporality, and spatial and material appropriations, recorded and represented? My thesis, is an exploration and search for a new ground, about blurring the known kind of lines that have divided nature from culture, and searching for wetness; unlearning the familiar taught ways of seeing, and uncovering a new lens and methods, and speculating a way of reading and understanding that comes from engagement in place.

My thesis is about evolving new conceptualisations and new ways of thinking of the world, through an immersion and situated-ness in the Western Ghats. The conceptual contributions are multiple: firstly, of unravelling two imaginations of the Ghats, and how each of them materialise in the Ghats. Secondly, it is of how lines are drawn either dividing or gathering the world, and what these lines do physically and materially. Thirdly, it is about new ways of recording places that include change, inscription, weather, earth, and a synthesis of the complexities of the context. This thesis is also about the nuances of situated knowledges and their vocabularies, towards a new description of the Ghats.