Common accents: Professional practices, indigenous voices and vernacular urbanity in Kutch, India

This paper describes the practice of a non-profit development collective based in Kutch, India and their work with indigenous communities in the wake of the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake. Examining the emergence of three settlements – Hodka, the home of a semi-nomadic indigenous community of craftspeople, Junawada, a longstanding settlement of pastoralists and Sadar Nagar, a relocation settlement of peoples from central Bhuj, Kutch – as they developed in the aftermath of the earthquake and over the following decade, this paper maps the relationship between indigenous building practices, the professional knowledge of third sector development agencies and the broader socio-political context. This paper describes how architectural languages and spatial forms common to the communities were articulated by a synthesis of informal and formal architectural and building practices in the context of emergency redevelopment strategies, and how these practices were moulded over time towards normative indigenous ways of being urban. It argues that in so doing, design practitioners invited the development of spaces of resistance, in which communities could begin to re-articulate situated and individual visions of communal life which resisted hegemonic expressions of modernity in favour of existing hybrid modernities common to the communities. Likewise, it argues that by making an opening for professional knowledge in indigenous life, communities gained for themselves access to institutional power, professional systems and resources otherwise denied them through normative development models. This reciprocity is legible in the urban and architectural fabric. As such, this paper suggests, what is visible in the redevelopment of the three Kutchi settlements are common spaces that serve competing visions of urbanity and citizenship. These new spaces derived from synergies that emerged through the active co-production of architectural, urban and spatial form by lay and professional people concerned with the formation of a viable indigenous urbanism for the twenty-first century.