Global Information Landscapes and
Urban Transformations in Asia

Vienna, 20th - 22th of June 2005

Taha Mehmood

Bio

Taha Mehmood is a media practioner, researcher, and filmmaker. Currently he is working with the Information Society Project at Sarai. His interests include film, new economies, the politics of information, and surveillance.

Lecture

"Proximity and Information Gathering in Delhi"

Abstract

This paper will discuss the urban transformation in the city of Delhi, through the formal (both state and non-state) apparatus that have evolved in the realm of 'practices of information gathering'.

Currently, Delhi represents a site heavy with anxieties, contestations, and disputations which the information gathering assemblage gives rise to when it comes in contact with the highly dense, mobile, complex reality of the city.

Through the triumvirate of a posh residential area [Maharani Bagh], a mixed locality [Kilokri], and a condominium [Laburnum], the paper will analyze the relationships between the mobility of labor, claim of entitlement to lands, protocols of access, and the practice of information gathering, new policies of national identification, and collation and dissemination of data.