The urban dialectic: Between distant time and thick time

Introduction

From ‘Thick time’ (2022) to ‘Distant time’ (2026), Datta has been at the forefront of urban geography's temporal turn, particularly in the context of smart city urbanism. ‘Thick time’ draws upon the work of South African artist William Kentridge who visualizes it as a rebellion against the colonizing effects of measurable linear time. It is the refusal of time as we know it. In his multimedia installation titled ‘Thick Time’ Kentridge uses the clock, map, and machine to show how colonial modernity gathered difference into a ‘regime of the same’ (Dickinson, 2022) but also how marginal subjects unwind, rewind, slow down, and enrich time (Datta, 2022) to refuse an imposed colonial cadence. Alongside the repetitive movements of the machine at the center of his installation, Kentridge has a video of himself drawing images in charcoal, then erasing them, smudging them, and redrawing them. Traces of the earlier drawing are always visible and this ‘imperfect erasure’ (Dickinson, 2022) reveals the continuities between the past, present, and future that Datta (2026) discusses through the concept metaphor of distant time.

Distant time according to Datta works as a device, a technology for temporal distancing and for creating, managing, and resisting temporal asynchronicities. This temporal distance she argues keeps marginalized citizens at a governable distance from the center, but the distance also affords space to marginal citizens to inhabit ‘thick time’. Datta's paper is about power struggles over space-time – how structures of time discipline space and how spatial forms have temporalities assigned to them. Her paper uses archival material to show how spatial and temporal structures are imposed, experienced, enforced, and subverted. Thus as much as distant time precludes marginal subjects from imaginations of the future, casting them as residue, and pushing them into the shadows, it is in these gray patches (Yiftachel, 2009) that they imaginatively cohere conditions of possibility for existence.

The distant in distant times is doing two kinds of distancing – spatial and temporal. In keeping marginal citizens at a governable distance, distant time reproduces spatial inequality. In connecting the past, present, and future it draws a line between distant moments in history. Datta defines distant time in multi-dimensional ways – space and time across dimensions interacting in the past, present, and future; across contoured verticalities and uneven horizontalities; and across ecologies and scales. One wonders what kinds of insights does a protean concept like distant time allow for in actually understanding urbanism in the ‘here and now’ and ‘there and then’. The perception that urban growth follows a teleological trajectory from informal to formal, from margins to center, from unplanned to planned continues to persist even though scholars have shown urban dynamics to be largely uncertain (McFarlene, 2012). Distant time enables us to see the folding and unfolding of the seemingly fragmented spaces of the urban. It reveals socio-spatial relationships to be contingent, provisional, and yet embedded in historical projections. In other words, distant time tells us of the continuous becoming of the urban. It enables a visualization of a dynamic dialectic between the development dream-world and its latent disenchantment (McFarlene, 2012; Roy, 2011) revealing the city to be a space-time machine (Datta, 2019; Kitchin, 2019).

Through archival work in the Shimla Municipal archives, Datta demonstrates how building and infrastructural construction in both colonial and postcolonial times rely on a contoured relationship between the powers on top of the hill and the residues at the bottom of the hill, between the ascent to modernity and the descent to ecological slippages. This relationship between the top and the bottom never really gets erased even as it morphs through colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal time. In the case of Shimla, uneven spatial and temporal development has a contoured character. Shimla hills slope and rise and hierarchies pretty much follow the curve. I am interested in extending the lines of these contours onto the plains. To see what are the different ways in which temporal distancing is maintained and challenged. To see what happens to distant time when we move from the contour to the grid. While the contours in Shimla spatially embedded social hierarchies map onto the Shimla slopes, how does a grid that claims spatial equality function to frame temporal distancing?

In order to explore the gird, I discuss the case of Chandigarh that lies about 200 km down the slopes from Shimla. Chandigarh is situated at the foothills of the Shivaliks and gently stretches the Shimla contours onto the plains even as the hills form a visual backdrop to the ‘flat’ city. Designed by the Swiss-French modernist architect Le Corbusier and his team, as the replacement of Lahore, the new capital for Punjab, the Chandigarh plan superimposes an orthogonal grid onto the space-time of fertile Punjab fields. This distancing from Shimla also allows me to explore intermediate spatio-temporal orders that lie in-between the colonial city and the smart city.

Contoured time to grid time

Chandigarh, Brave new Chandigarh … born out of the harsh plains of Punjab without umbilical cord. (Charles Correa, 1987: 73)

Chandigarh was built as the first planned city in postcolonial India in the aftermath of the partition. In 1947, when Lahore the cultural and political capital of Punjab became part of Pakistan, Shimla housed the eastern Punjab government as a temporary measure. The capital of Punjab was eventually shifted to Chandigarh in 1953. This new capital for Punjab was planned to restore the nation's faith in the future and to give material form to an emergent national consciousness (Kalia, 1999; Shaw, 2009). As the state sought to literally construct a future for a newly Independent country, it attempted to erase any reference to the past by distancing itself from memories of the violence surrounding partition. This was achieved by imposing an abstract grid onto the lived space of the city. Space was disciplined to align with a particular temporal frame – a future without a past – modernity. ‘Time, in this sense, is a real-world installation on the planetary scale’ (Dickinson, 2022).

The State here dwells in distant time as it seeks to transport and take along subjects of a newly independent nation-state into the future, into modernity, into becoming citizens. Those who inhabit the grid become citizens while those in the peripheries remain subjects of the State compelled to wait their turn. Distant time is the spatial and temporal distance between being a subject and being a citizen – a historical queue (Massey, 2005), that propels some into the imagined modernity of the postcolonial state while leaving others in the shadows of a discursive past that contains all that is to be distanced from. Neither integrated nor eliminated, in a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Yiftachel, 2009: 89, 90) these subjects are kept at a governable distance by the State by design (Datta, 2024) and through the instruments of urban planning.

Rose-Redwood and Bigon (2018) view ‘gridding as a world-making device’. They point to the multiple ways in which the grid form partitions space-time thereby making space legible for governing at a distance (Grant, 2001). In the case, of Chandigarh, the grid informs postcolonial urban identity and is referenced as a futuring device despite its historical antecedents. A grid contains space as well as time. The Chandigarh grid materially anchors class hierarchies into the built form with sector sizes and amenities decreasing and urban density increasing as one moves down the grid from the North to the South (Sharma et al., 2023). Planned urban projects leave behind a residue as they impose a new imagined spatio-temporal order on an assumed tabula rasa. The Chandigarh grid is no different. It relegates existing, demolished, and surrounding villages to a backward time and pushes the laboring classes including those working on the construction of the city to the peripheries outside modern time. Alongside Chandigarh's construction was the slow, clandestine, and deliberate gathering of construction waste and its transformation into beautiful sculptures in Chandigarh's periphery by a city engineer called Nek Chand. The area is now called the rock garden and can be read as a metaphor for an accretion of distant time.

Chandigarh is colloquially referred to as ‘the city beautiful’ and it has been the present future for most newer urban developments in north India. Today Chandigarh straddles its adherence to multiple timeframes. It is celebrated as a UNESCO heritage site and at the same time tagged as the most modern city in India. Amidst these seemingly distant timeframes, Chandigarh administration aspires to execute the smart city mission. Kitchin (2019) contends smart cities to be space-time machines that are significantly altering the spatialities and temporalities of the urbanscape. Datta speaks to the continuities between the colonial and the postcolonial in the context of the smart city in Shimla. Important to unravel is what changes and what remains the same. Is smart city a break in the history of postcolonial urbanism – is it the kind of break that came with Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, and Gandhinagar? On the scale of the nation-state, how does the smart city produce, reproduce, and navigate the differentiated and contextualized ways in which distant time is performed?

On 1 May 2023, the Chandigarh administration demolished labor colony number 4, situated just outside the grid adjacent to the planned industrial area. The demolitions are part of the smart city agenda of a ‘slum-free’ city. The colony housed close to 50,000 residents, many of them residing in the multiple and shifting allotments in the city for more than 50 years with tentative authorization from the State. Temporality is used as an apparatus of governance by the state by establishing arbitrary ‘cut-off’ dates, conducting snapshot enumerations and surveys that record inhabitants in slices of time (Sabhlok, 2023). Most residents living here had electricity meters in their names, ration cards, and voter IDs with this address - documents that eastablish residency. Yet, the fact that they were not present at the snapshot biometric survey conducted over a day or two in 2005 made them illegal and ineligible for alternative accommodation. As Datta reminds us, temporal uncertainty is a technology of control. A small number of the colony residents were allotted alternative housing by the state, the rest merely picked up whatever could be retrieved from the demolition and set out to once again incrementally build their lives and homes in other possible spatio-temporal crevices of the grid city. As Kentridge's installation showed erasures are never complete, smudges remain, memories travel, anticipations are revived and thick time prevails, simultaneously governed and ignored by distant time.