The Numerical Study of Base-Isolated Buildings Under Near-Field and Far-Field Earthquakes

The behavior of base-isolated building frame is investigated with the help of a numerical study for far-field and near-field earthquakes with directivity and fling-step effects. Both design-level and extreme-level earthquakes are considered. Selected response parameters are peak floor displacement, acceleration, base shear, and isolator displacement. Inelastic behavior of base-isolated structure during the earthquake is investigated performing nonlinear time history analysis of a ten-story building frame. This study shows that base isolation is not effective for near-field earthquakes. Even for design-level earthquake, the frame gets significantly into inelastic range for earthquakes with fling-step effect.     

"We have a little bit more finesse, as a nation": Constructing the Polish Worker in London's Building Sites

Abstract:  This paper examines how male Polish builders in London construct themselves relationally to English builders as they negotiate their place within the labour hierarchies of the building site and in the London labour market. This is based on semi-structured interviews and participant photographs taken by Polish migrants arriving in the aftermath of the European Union expansion in May 2004, and now working in building sites across London. These buildings sites are mundane elements of a global city which employ transnational labour, and where differences between Polish and English builders become significant discursive tools of survival in a competitive labour market. The paper illustrates how Polish workers mark themselves as "superior" to English builders through the versatility of their embodied skills, work ethic, artistic qualities, and finesse in their social interactions on the building site. This paper thus provides new ways of understanding the meanings of work and the complexity of identity politics within the spaces of low-paid manual work in a global city.     

“Mongrel City”: Cosmopolitan Neighbourliness in a Delhi Squatter Settlement

Abstract: This paper examines the construction of a “cosmopolitan neighbourliness” which emerges in a Delhi squatter settlement in the context of communal violence. Through interviews with over 80 inhabitants, I suggest that an openness to “others” in the settlement is produced in order to construct a home for oneself in an exclusionary city through a series of relational constructs—between the “cosmopolitan” city and the “parochial” village; between the “murderous” city and the “compassionate” slum; between the exclusionary urban public sphere and the “inclusive” neighbourhood sphere. The squatter settlement is internalised as a microcosm of a “mongrel city”, a place which through its set of oppositional constructs becomes inherently “urban”. “Cosmopolitan neighbourliness”, however, remains fragile and gendered. It is a continuous strategic practice that attempts to bridge across differences of caste and religion through gendered performances that avert and discourage communal violence even when the city becomes murderous.     

Spatialising performance: masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field

While there are many self-reflexive accounts of ‘field’ experience, few researchers have explicitly examined how different places within the field shape gender performances and subsequently the research process. This paper spatialises the notion of ‘performance’ by examining how male and female bodies in particular places of the field are perceived both by researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. The analysis is based on fieldwork in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi where the author and her research assistant conducted semi-structured interviews with the residents. The fieldwork highlighted how the embedded power structures in different places of the field created encounters between different gendered bodies and, in turn, how different relationships between researchers and participants shaped the field ‘experience’. I suggest that the ‘field’ should not be understood as a homogeneous terrain, but as a fragmented collection of places, each constructing multiple gender identities in research, and each telling its own research story.     

‘Samudayik Shakti’: Working-class feminism and social organisation in Subhash Camp,New Delhi

This article illustrates the intersections between architecture and agency in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi, by ‘situating activism in place’. It highlights the significance of place in social action by examining the architecture of everyday places—the house, the street and the square—as the sites of both individual transformations and collective consciousness. Through observations of the activities of and interviews with members of Samudayik Shakti, a women's organisation and a men's panchayat, this article highlights a number of related processes in Subhash Camp: how different women experienced different places through everyday spatial practices; how the spatial practices in these places were shaped by different social structures at different scales, from the family to the state; how the architecture of these places was significant both as sites of control and of emancipation of women's bodies; and how this dynamic contributed to the making of social action in Subhash Camp.     

‘That was natural. This is just artificial’!: Displacement,memory, worship,and connection at a Kashmiri Hindu shrine replica

This paper explores how religion influences place-making for forced migrants, taking the case of a replica of a prominent shrine built by displaced Kashmiri Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir. I explore how the replica provokes a discussion among forced migrants about their relationship to homelands left behind and to places of exile. I also show how place-making for the displaced is marked by uncertainty and creative engagement.     

‘But this is not geography…! of ontological circumcisions and writing feminist geographies from India

Abstract

Feminist geography still remains at the margins of human geography in India. The space occupied by the subfield, the nature of research and the skepticism routinely encountered by feminist geographers ‘doing gender’ in India all point to this marginal status. Drawing upon detailed status reports, personal communications and everyday encounters with patriarchy in the academy, this essay uses an autobiographical lens to address the pervasiveness of misogyny and the politics of gendered parochial and caste-based gatekeeping to make sense of the peculiar but marked ‘ontological circumcision’ of feminist geographies in India. ‘Coming out’ as a feminist geographer and writing gender from such locations is political and should be read as a resistance to these caste-ridden, male dominated and inherently misogynistic contexts.     

Distributed Tuned Mass Dampers for Multi-Mode Control of Benchmark Building under Seismic Excitations

The effectiveness of the multi-mode control of seismically excited building installed with distributed multiple tuned mass dampers (d-MTMDs) is investigated by comparing dynamic response with the other controllers, such as passive friction dampers, semi-active dampers, single tuned mass damper (STMD), and multiple tuned mass dampers (MTMDs-all.top), both installed at the top of the building, and arbitrarily distributed MTMDs (ad-MTMDs). It is concluded that the d-MTMDs exhibit improved performance as compared with the STMD, MTMDs-all.top, and ad-MTMDs. The d-MTMDs are also convenient to install owing to the reduced space requirements, being placed at various floors.