L'oubli des villes de l'Inde. Pour une géographie culturelle de la ville

A Lecture in Centre de Sciences Humaines(CSH), 2 Aurangzeb, New-Delhi at 4pm by Odette Louiset

Odette Louiset is Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Rouen, France, where she teaches Cultural Geography, Urban geography and Epistemology of Geography. Since 2002, she is involved in questions pertaining to heritage, leading to the creation of Masters programme in this field at the University of Rouen. She has published Introduction to the City, and Forgotten Indian Cities (Paris, Armand Colin, 2011, in French). These books propose a social and cultural geography of indian cities and a clarification of city concept through the diversity of city patterns in the world.

Odette Louiset belongs to the pluridisciplinary Laboratory, ERIAC (University of Rouen) where she is directing the thematic rubric "Area and Culture". She is conducting a programme on fiction and reality in representations of space through the social sciences and Literature. She is also participating to an Interdisciplinary Programme dealing with geography and danse, notably about places of dance in India.

L'oubli des villes de l'Inde. Pour une géographie culturelle de la ville, Paris, Armand Colin, 2011.
Through a "Passage to India", this book proposes a way in cultural geography of City, trying to avoid both cultural essentialism and European ethnocentrism. To understand the signification of City in India, we have to understand Indian spatiality as a construct and in its multiple patterns. That is "to untie our "real" under the effect of other cuttings, other syntaxes" (Barthes, 1970). It is necessary to take distance from European pattern which is so present in our scientific models and to adopt a comparative method. Then, the "Passage to India" opens wide perspectives: to think City and its signification, City as a concept through a diversity of patterns.

Organised by: Centre de Sciences Humaines