Viewing Bhadra: Of Pedestrian Vision in Ahmedabad’s Global City Image

Abstract

This article will examine the redevelopment plan of the Bhadra Fort precincts (the Bhadra Plaza) in the walled city of Ahmedabad to understand the city’s projection of its neoliberal visual ability to produce the symbol and space of global habitude. The Bhadra Fort is the citadel, the ceremonial centre of the city of Ahmedabad that Ahmed Shah founded in 1411. Over the years, as the city of Ahmedabad grew and expanded its city limits, this inner core of the city came to be perceived as a site of disease, communal conflict and general residential decline. The Bhadra project promises to transform the fort precincts into a site of leisure and a source of economic revitalization. I critically trace the rationale of this project taken up by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and Archaeological Survey of India that articulates the seamless integration of the walled city with the rest of the ‘developed’ parts of Ahmedabad. I show that this integration is envisaged as consequent to the complete pedestrianization of the Bhadra Plaza. I argue that the project erases the materiality of its historical space and the history of its use. Unlike de Certeau’s pedestrian whose ways of seeing offered a critique to the hegemony of the planner’s eye, the figure of the pedestrian is now co-opted into the imagination of the Bhadra Plaza.