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Slum as Theory: The South/Asian City and Globalization
... The rapid urbanization and increased population density in Indonesia have resulted in numerous challenges and hazards, including poverty, inequality, unemployment, slum areas, pollution, congestion, overcrowding, high costs of renting, limited green spaces, and other disadvantages [1,9,10,47,[49][50][51]. As a result, community or labor density is often used as a concise measure to indicate the spatial concentration of economic activity. ...
... It is gradually developed through the steady growth of residences and communities [50]. Unfortunately, this urban process and the migration of labor to cities have led to the emergence of slum areas [49,50]. The term «slum» typically describes neighborhoods with poor living conditions but fails to encompass the progressive aspects of urbanization [49]. ...
... Unfortunately, this urban process and the migration of labor to cities have led to the emergence of slum areas [49,50]. The term «slum» typically describes neighborhoods with poor living conditions but fails to encompass the progressive aspects of urbanization [49]. Instead, it has become synonymous with precarity and poverty, contributing to the marginalization of these areas and obscuring the diversity of urban experiences [1,37,[47][48][49][50][51]. ...
... The rapid urbanization and increased population density in Indonesia have resulted in numerous challenges and hazards, including poverty, inequality, unemployment, slum areas, pollution, congestion, overcrowding, high costs of renting, limited green spaces, and other disadvantages [1,9,10,47,[49][50][51]. As a result, community or labor density is often used as a concise measure to indicate the spatial concentration of economic activity. ...
... It is gradually developed through the steady growth of residences and communities [50]. Unfortunately, this urban process and the migration of labor to cities have led to the emergence of slum areas [49,50]. The term «slum» typically describes neighborhoods with poor living conditions but fails to encompass the progressive aspects of urbanization [49]. ...
... Unfortunately, this urban process and the migration of labor to cities have led to the emergence of slum areas [49,50]. The term «slum» typically describes neighborhoods with poor living conditions but fails to encompass the progressive aspects of urbanization [49]. Instead, it has become synonymous with precarity and poverty, contributing to the marginalization of these areas and obscuring the diversity of urban experiences [1,37,[47][48][49][50][51]. ...
Демографический дивиденд имеет существенную связь с экономическими показателями и можетбыть источником как возможностей, так и проблем с точки зрения экономического роста. Болеетого, демографический переход оказывает глубокое причинно-следственное воздействие на рыноктруда и общество в целом. Сегодня Индонезия обладает демографическим дивидендом и стремится развиваться в русле приоритетов новой цифровой эпохи, однако на рынке труда страны доминирует малообразованная рабочая сила, что может стать причиной серьезных проблем. Таким образом, данное исследование выявляет проблемы городского рынка труда в Индонезии, оценивает текущую и рассматривает перспективы новой политики в отношении рабочей силы, сконцентрированной в крупнейших городах. Проведенное исследование основано на данных из различных профессиональных отчетов и исследований, выполненных государственными учреждениями, предприятиями, консорциумами, журналами, систематизированных и обработанных автором, а также литературе, связанной с анализируемой тематикой. Результаты исследования показали значительное влияние демографических факторов на формирование трудовой политики и рынка труда в Индонезии. Однако, чтобы воспользоваться преимуществами демографического дивиденда и избытка рабочей силы, необходимы значительные инвестиции в повышение квалификации и уровня образования работников. В нынешней структуре рабочей силы в Индонезии только 10 % работников имеют высшее образование. Следовательно, городские районы сталкиваются с бедностью и высоким неравенством, вызванными наличием малообразованной рабочей силы, которая мигрирует в города за более высокой зарплатой
... Dans un souci de combler l'urban shadow (McFarlane, 2008), le vide théorique concernant les villes du Sud, de nombreux travaux sont publiés sur divers enjeux des villes du Sud (Rao, 2006;Roy, 2009). Ces écrits portent, par exemple, sur la pauvreté avec le controversé Planet of Slums (Davis, 2006), les pratiques urbaines (Bhan, 2019), la financiarisation (Fauveaud, 2020) et les informalités (Kudva, 2009). ...
In the context of the deployment of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the coastal city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, is targeted by massive Chinese investments. Those investments come with the arrival of many Chinese stakeholders – investors, sellers, workers, tourists – who produce a new urbanization in Sihanoukville. Many casinos are being developed in the city, alongside special economic zones, hotels, gated communities, and various other businesses.
The city seems to be a frontier where touristic, commercial, industrial, and strategic resources must be exploited, and where the Chinese stakeholders enjoy a certain autonomy. Based on neoliberal logics, Cambodian elites, authorities, and landowners above all, build a favorable economic and political environment to attract Chinese investments and take advantage of the situation. The new urbanization produced in Sihanoukville limits the access to the resources to certain populations, which leads to urban fragmentation. Beyond the idea of an opposition between rich Chinese investors and disadvantaged Cambodian inhabitants, the new Sihanoukville highlights divisions between those who have access to the resources and those who have not. Far from BRI’s official image put forward by Beijing, the Chinese presence in Sihanoukville comes with a fragmented urban production.
... Ao comparar os setores de mais baixa renda que vivem nas favelas com os setores de mais baixa renda que vivem fora delas, é possível informar as políticas públicas de enfrentamento à pobreza. Alguns estudiosos de humanidades e ciências sociais argumentaram que um foco teórico nas favelas realiza um trabalho político fundamental, destacando agências e paisagens subalternas (Rao 2006;Roy 2011). No entanto, essa ênfase também pode ser vista como uma negligência na exploração das geografias mais complexas da pobreza urbana no Sul Global, pois há muitas evidências de que as favelas não são os únicos lugares de moradia de pessoas pobres (Arabindoo 2011). ...
A segregação residencial parece ser um fenômeno inerente às cidades brasileiras, presente não só na escala da cidade, mas em diferentes escalas urbanas — de regiões metropolitanas a bairros e ruas. Apesar do grande número de trabalhos sobre segregação ao longo de uma tradição de mais de cem anos de pesquisa, a natureza multiescalar da segregação ainda é pouco explorada na literatura. Esta tese investiga a segregação como uma característica estrutural dos espaços urbanos brasileiros, presente em escalas distintas, mesmo em áreas aparentemente homogêneas. A tese problematiza a definição de segregação residencial através do conceito de escala nos estudos urbanos a fim de investigar a hipótese de que a segregação residencial apresenta um padrão espacial autossimilar em diferentes escalas urbanas. Em outras palavras, a “hipótese da segregação multiescalar urbana”, aqui formulada, postula que o padrão espacial da segregacão residencial nas cidades brasileiras é replicado através das escalas. Esta hipótese é explorada através da identificação de padrões de segregação intra-urbanos em regiões metropolitanas, municípios, bairros e favelas em uma série de estudos complementares. O primeiro estudo investiga a estrutura socioespacial nas duas maiores regiões metropolitanas brasileiras (RMs), São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, com base em grupos populacionais de renda. A análise é feita por meio de técnicas estatísticas e de análise espacial (densidades de Kernel), buscando compreender o padrão de localização dos habitantes mais pobres e mais ricos. O segundo estudo verifica a hipótese da autossimilaridade da segregação residencial. A segregação residencial é mensurada através de diferentes medidas de segregação (índices de Moran, Dissimilaridade e Informação) e sob diferentes unidades espaciais e extensões, da RM à escala intraurbana dos bairros do Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo. Por meio de técnicas estatísticas de correlação e regressão, o estudo identifica uma relação linear entre escala e segregação: quanto maior a área urbana (medida por tamanho da população e área), maior o nível de segregação global. O terceiro estudo explora as características de espaços segregados em diferentes escalas através da análise da presença de fatores de vulnerabilidade ambiental e distribuição desigual de equipamentos e acesso a serviços públicos. Essa análise compara os grupos segregados de alta e baixa renda definidos pelo Indicador Local de Associação Espacial (LISA) no Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo. O estudo final investiga a segregação na escala local das favelas, que são frequentemente consideradas socialmente e espacialmente homogêneas. Ao centrar a análise na escala das favelas enquanto áreas conhecidas como espaços de pobreza, a tese busca verificar a existência de padrões de segregação residencial similares àqueles encontrados na escala da cidade. A fim de obter uma amostra considerável de aglomerados subnormais, o estudo mensura a segregação em favelas em nove cidades brasileiras utilizando o índice de Moran global e local (LISA). O conjunto de achados empíricos produzidos por essas abordagens sucessivas sugere que a segregação residencial apresenta uma característica de autossimilaridade capaz de permear até mesmo áreas que parecem socialmente homogêneas, configurando-se como um fenômeno estrutural, presente em diferentes lugares e escalas simultaneamente.
... Since its earliest days as a city, Mumbai's amphibious margins have been dried and settled, both by massive infrastructural projects of questionable legality and by the labor of marginal residents seeking durable homes at the edge of the terrestrial city (Sharma, 2000;Weinstein, 2014;Doshi and Ranganathan, 2017). The political economy of dessication has been tremendously profitable to the city's municipal government and its real estate development industry, for whom land-making has been key to the making and selling of private property (Appadurai, 2000;Patel and Masselos, 2003;Rao, 2006). As the city has been dried by the political economy of development (see Doshi, 2019), often using garbage from its waste dumps, the city's sewerage infrastructures have been designed to collect and release waste water silently and unobtrusively into the Arabian Sea (Klein, 1986). ...
In this essay, I focus on the remarkable process through which Mumbai's urban administration has continued to release its sewage, largely untreated, into the Arabian Sea. I show how it does this by rendering sewage both legally and materially ambiguous. I urge an attention to the processes of legal and material ambiguation, through which ‘slow violence’ is unevenly administered in Mumbai. Building on the work of Jacqueline Best, I argue that ambiguity does not simply leave open improvised forms of technocratic administration; ambiguity also defers bureaucratic activity in particular domains, while permitting activity in others. Taken together, the municipal administration mobilizes ambiguity so as to evade rendering toxicity an actionable problem of urban living and distributed social vulnerability in the city.
... The 'problem of slums' has come under critical scrutiny in more recent work. The terminology of 'slum' itself has been critiqued for its material and discursive effects (Rao, 2006). Its definitional boundaries in Indian central and state laws are seen as both too restrictive and too encompassing. ...
The millennial turn saw a distinct efflorescence in scholarship on urban India. This essay introduces a Virtual Special Issue on urban studies in India that showcases a selection of articles from the journal’s archives. It traces the disciplinary, thematic and methodological shifts that have marked this millennial turn. On the one hand, the social science of the urban has had a statist bent, reacting to the policy focus on cities as growth engines in the post-liberalisation era. On the other hand, critical urban studies has brought attention to the unregulated, deregulated, unplanned and unintended city produced by dynamic processes of informality acting overtly or covertly against the state’s neoliberal agendas. This introductory essay aims to examine the ways this interplay has unfolded both in the pages of this journal and elsewhere. It locates the Virtual Special Issue selection within a broader review of the state of scholarship in Indian urban studies and marks out areas for productive interventions in the future study of Indian cities.
... Narratives and visual representations, particularly of camps in the Global South, focus on both suffering and resilience of such spaces to signal ultimately the impossible permanence of humanitarian space. There is an interesting parallel here with how "slums" have become the shorthand for urbanization in the Global South (Rao 2006;Roy 2011) and as sites for the aestheticization of poverty (Roy 2003). They too have come to be seen as sites of entrepreneurial misery. ...
... After the deception -in Arabic Iḥbāṭ90 -that followed the movements of 2011, and after resettlement programs exacerbated 84 Holston 2007. 85 Lotfi 2018: 4. 86 Rao 2006;Roy 2011. 87 Bayat 1997. ...
Resettlement programs have always been in the political agenda of public institutions and administrators of Casablanca since its growth during the French Protectorate. Today real estate and private multinational capital sneak into local and national powers, pushing public authorities to clear land for new urban development through demolition and resettlement of local residents. The dwellers of areas such as the old town centre ( medina ) and the slums ( karyan ) increasingly react to displacement by challenging this urban agenda frontally with their bodies and words, but often also deploying what James Scott calls “weapons of the weak”, i.e. implicit acts of resistance and symbolic dissent. Reversing Asef Bayat’s statement, we consider residents of these stigmatized neighbourhoods “revolutionaries without a revolution”, partisans of an intimate cause of their own, that aims at having a home and surviving in a hostile city. Our reflections are the product of two separate fieldwork researches: one with the inhabitants of informal neighbourhoods, another with residents and former residents of the old medina. The two cases show how resettlement affects the sense of belonging and of cohesion of low-income classes by uprooting the founding element of the everyday life: the house. The uncertainty about the possibility to keep their own home deeply conditions the implicit social pact with the monarchy apparatus, and may represent one of the conditions that are undermining the allegiance to the monarchy itself.
... Bringing the discussion to the informal settlements most of the informal settlements worldwide are indeed very well defined territories with attached HABITAT REVIEW 13 (1) (2019) AFRICA values and meanings both for people staying in the informal settlements and outsiders. Thinking about place as a territory, as it happens in informal settlements, may be a sign of collective identity, a sign of a group (Nijman, 2009;Rao, 2006). But it is also a symbol of power demonstration and control that is connected to the need of protection (Cresswell, 2004). ...
The paper seeks to understand how the space and place are conceived and used in Nairobi´s informal settlements. Using the case of Mukuru Kwa Njenga, the study explores three questions around the production of space and place; first, whether in informal settlements there exists abstract or conceived space, second, whether the space responds to a structure of power in the area, and third, how do people use day by day the different categories of space (public, semi-public and private). Fieldwork was carried out in seven 100 x 100m sample areas across the settlement. Data was gathered through structured and non-structured interviews and focused group discussions. The use of space was registered through structured observation of the spatial characteristics, activities and socio-spatial interactions at three different periods of the day: morning, afternoon and night, in different locations. The study finds that, informal settlements indeed have internal structures that resemble the formal city, although in a less systematic way. Ownership of resources and the internal structures of power play a major role in the conception of space into an informal functional space. But opposite to the formal city, there is a large scope for the free action where creativity is reflected and retained, and where the structures of power rarely intervene. The study concludes that understanding the spatial dynamics in the informal settlements and creation of flexible spatial solutions that allow low income people to have a space and place in the city may be the way towards an inclusive transformation. The study recommends multi-functionality of urban space for low cost income dwellers.
... A s the challenge of urban poverty is increasingly tackled at the global level-as evidenced in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11governments are pressed to provide domestic statistics that are useful for cross-country comparison and monitoring (Lucci, Bhatkal, and Khan 2018). Some humanities and social science scholars have argued that a theoretical focus on slums does key political work by foregrounding subaltern agencies and landscapes (Rao 2006;Roy 2011). This emphasis, however, could also be seen as neglecting to explore the more complex geographies of urban poverty in the Global South, because there is plenty of evidence that slums are not the only dwelling places of poor people (Arabindoo 2011). ...
Despite evidence to the contrary, favelas still loom large in Brazilian social imaginary as the quintessential poverty pockets. No study to date has systematically examined the place of favelas within the broader geographies of poverty in Brazilian cities. How prominent are these settlements in the context of urban poverty? How do they fare when compared with other kinds of poor settlements? We tackled these questions by examining the sociospatial patterns of the poor population living in five metropolitan areas across the Brazilian territory. Using tract-level data from the 2010 census, we compared favela and non-favela residents through exploratory, inferential, and spatial analyses. Our results suggest that, although sharing the same socioeconomic and ethnic profile, favela and non-favela households are contrastingly distributed across urban spaces: Whereas favela inhabitants tend to live nearer city centers, non-favela inhabitants tend to concentrate in peripheries. This finding has multidimensional implications. At the empirical dimension it reinforces the importance of evidence-based geographical targeting for poverty alleviation policies. At the technical-normative dimension it challenges the official geospatial definition of favela currently in use. At the epistemological dimension it calls attention to the politics of labeling—calling a settlement a favela helps produce it as such—and how scholars must be critical of them.
... The declaration of an area as a slum is ostensibly to enable the state to intervene in private and public properties in the public interest. As Rao (2012) states: ...
... Demography also drives research agendas more generally. For example, scholars have often framed their calls for a "Southern turn" (Rao 2006) in urban studies by citing the demographic fact that most urbanization is now occurring in countries of the South (Parnell and Oldfield 2014). ...
How are urban population and its growth distributed across urban settlements of different sizes? In the Global South, this is a critical planning question, yet its answer is muddled by contradictory claims in the literature and inconsistent data. Using a new dataset measuring urbanization from 1975 to 2015, we find that urban populations in the South are less concentrated in megacities than in the North—contrary to conventional wisdom. Given an explosion in the number (not simply size) of urban settlements in the South, we suggest reviving the concept of “barefoot planning” as an approach for empowering communities beyond the metropolis to shape the urbanization process.
... Soon after, on 21 March 2015, reported comments by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini While informal settelements in SA are characterised by poor or non-existent water and sanitation facilities, overcrowding, unemployment, poverty, non-permanent structures and lack of tenure, it is worth noting that they are not necessarily synonymous with slums. Indeed, Rao (2006) argues that we must guard against the liberal modernist dichomies between slums and formal settlements in the city, that is, the socially constructed 'urban divide' that is typical of UN Habitat (2010:6) analyses (see also Amin and Thrift, 2002;Cameron and Ndhlovu, 2001;Davis 2004). While the upgrading of informal settlements programme (UISP) in SA is also premised on their perceived "illegality and informality; inappropriate locations; restricted public and private sector investment; poverty and vulnerability; and social stress" (Department of Human Settlements [DHS], 2009:16), it is noteworthy that there may also be cases where murderous behaviour is not a raison d'etre of slums. ...
Using intersectionality as the organising theoretical framework, this article argues that the attitudes of informal settlement residents towards foreigners are complex, varied and moulded by a multiplicity of factors. Gender intersects in complex ways with social class, space (urban/rural) and political/ideological leanings, among other variables, to shape attitudes. The socially constructed characterisation results in inclusion or exclusion. Indeed, the attitudes held by individuals and groups depend on social and economic positioning as well as the spaces they occupy within the urban/rural/class divides. This serves to explain reticence, denialism and/or justification of violence by different groups in informal settlements, and the distinctions between males and females, and between employers and workers.
Therefore, the argument put forward by this article is that attitudes of informal settlement dwellers (as distinct from slum dwellers) in South Africa towards foreigners, and the resulting unequal outcomes, are explicable from multiple forms of oppression, advantage and disadvantage, and hegemonic power structures. These attitudes are dynamic over time. They are fashioned by interconnections and kinship ties between citizens and foreigners. In addition, contestations over resources and opportunity, as well as notions of identity and citizenship, play a part in how the former view the latter. Crucially, gender intersects with social class and region to form the attitudes that are displayed by citizens towards foreigners in South Africa.
... Especially over the last few years, postcolonial urban scholarship strongly tried to find new theoretical and methodological tools in order to defy these controversial divisions. As these thinkers stressed, non-Western contexts, usually referred to as Third Word or Global South urbanization, are normally seen as distortions, a sort of immature configuration of urban development (for example, Rao, 2006). Slums, shantytowns, and urban informality in mega-cities constitute a fashion in the study of non-Western areas, which are often thought about in (negative) comparison with the standard model of city experienced in the Western world. ...
... Furthermore, there is currently a global debate on slums, shanty towns or favelas as informal settlements representing a "set of conditions withsocial, political and cultural effects, which resist the fixing of their values by fiat" (Rao 2006) (see Fig. 2). ...
Spontaneity is a term with a wide range of meanings in the architectural and urban context. In principal, two predominant stereotypes of spontaneity have emerged, one related to "informal" architecture, recognized as a condition of material scarcity, and the other to urban actions performed without premeditation, which have been commonly identified as "unplanned". In many disciplines such as sociology, art, music, literature and natural sciences, spontaneous behaviour is largely viewed as a positive quality, identified as a natural process or act. In an architectural context, however, spontaneity is often associated with poor, deprived and dilapidated urban environments. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to determine the significance of spontaneity in the architectural and urban realm as well as its incorporation in the development of the urban landscape. The first part of this paper will focus on the definition of the term and its recognition in architecture, whereby spontaneity is portrayed as a dynamic, open and unmediated concept. Additionally, taking into account the stereotypical interpretations of spontaneous architecture as informal or unplanned, an epistemological paradox will be revealed in the interaction between the architectural project and its realization. By considering the practical example of Skopje, spontaneity is interpreted as the carrier of the city's genetic material and hence incorporated in the methodology for the urban development of Skopje city.
... It is imperative to further explore the everyday lives and material practices that are constitutive of the realities of informal settlements in recent megacities (Rao 2006). In this paper, we seek to explore distinctive experiences of urban transformations, in relationship to the social and cultural experiences of different castes located within the caste hierarchy that dominated the erstwhile common landscape of Bengaluru. ...
This research assesses the differentiated impacts of urbanisation on communities of Bengaluru, who earlier inhabited agrarian and rural commons landscapes. Drawing on empirical observations from residents of peri-urban erstwhile villages of Bengaluru located next to lakes, we examine changes in their social-ecological practices, linked to the urban transformation of these landscapes. Urbanisation has transformed once-rural landscapes into fast growing urban areas at peripheries of Bengaluru. We show that impacts of urban transition are not homogenous or representative of uniform trends, but diverse, shaped by differing power relationships that manifest themselves within the Indian caste hierarchy. Urban transitions, while undoubtedly bringing about disconnects with the social-ecological landscape, have been disenfranchising in some aspects but emancipatory in other ways, liberating underprivileged castes from the worst practices of exploitation. We argue that urbanisation experiences vary, depending on the past and opens up prospects for challenging the received understanding of urbanisation, through individual experiences.
... Há ainda uma aproximação do campo do urbanismo e do planejamento urbano a esses debates, cujas ideias de um urbanismo subalterno, da informalidade como modo de vida ou da favela como teoria merecem reflexões críticas a serem desdobradas em outra ocasião. Ver, por exemplo: AlSayyad (2004), Roy (2005Roy ( , 2011, Rao (2006) ou Varley (2013). ...
... Zudem wird mit partizipativen, lokalen und selbstbestimmten Projekten des computer-und netzwerkgestützten Urban Designs experimentiert, um infrastrukturelle und soziale Verbesserungen zu ermöglichen. Informelle, metropolitane Siedlungsstrukturen avancieren dabei gar zu Alternativen hergebrachter stadträumlicher Ordnungsmodelle (Picon 2015;Nello und Mele 2016;Rao 2006;Davis 2006). ...
Das grundlegende Verständnis lebender Systeme ist ein fundamentales Ziel der Biologie. Dies beginnt mit der eher passiven Beobachtung und Messung und reicht über Manipulations- und Störungsexperimente bis hin zur Erschaffung neuer Lebensvarianten. Mit dem hier vorgestellten ASSISIbf-Manifest gehen wir nun einen deutlichen Schritt weiter und zielen auf die Erschaffung gänzlicher neuer bio-hybrider Chimären. Durch das Mischen ganzer Gesellschaften, zum Beispiel Tierschwärmen oder -kolonien mit Roboterverbänden, entstehen so soziale Cyborgs. Attrappen werden so zu autonomen Akteuren, die tief in das soziale Gefüge der untersuchten Tiere eindringen können. Die von uns betriebene Neuauflage der Attrappen-getriebenen Verhaltensforschung erlaubt Experimente, die zuvor noch nicht machbar waren: Mithilfe der Akteure, die in die tierische Gesellschaft zuvor eingeschleust wurden, können Informationen kontrolliert vom Experimentator in die Tiergesellschaft induziert werden. Aus der nachfolgenden Beobachtung der Tiere können Rückschlüsse auf die interne Informationsverarbeitung der tierischen Gesellschaft gezogen werden. Wir schlagen hier eine generelle Methode vor, mit der organismisches Verhalten möglichst automatisiert aus den im Fokus befindlichen Organismen extrahiert werden kann (z. B. durch Methoden des Maschinellen Sehens). Mit ebenfalls algorithmischen Methoden (z. B. Maschinelles Lernen, Evolutionäre Algorithmen o. Ä.) wird dann ein Verhaltens- und Interaktions-Modell dieser Lebewesen erzeugt. Implementiert man dieses Modell in künstliche „Mitspieler“ einer tierischen Gesellschaft, also z. B. in Roboter, die man in einen Tierschwarm einschleust, dann entstehen bio-hybride Gesellschaften auf diesem Weg beinahe vollautomatisch.
... As a sociohistorical byproduct of the mutations that occur in the rural world and of a demography punctuated by a radical increase in inequalities, the process of socioeconomic or environmental exile towards cities rose inexorably throughout the twentieth century 1 . Some authors, such as Manuel Castel and David Harvey, have observed the stigma of dependency through the prism of marginal urbanization 2 . ...
The form of the city and its public spaces are changing in Asia. This short survey tracks the retreat of the European imperial space systems as Asian nations gained independence and the multi-centered, global corporate system of public space-making that emerged from 1990-2008. It also tracks the appearance of a specifically Asian rural-urban space-making system of urban villages that has emerged as a long cultural continuity in and around Asian cities. Four models of urban space are examined: Metropolis, Megalopolis, Fragmented Metropolis, and Megacity/Metacity. All are simultaneously present in the Asian city, forming parallel timelines weaving around each other. After the 2008 crash there is reason to pause and re-evaluate this highly successful, emerging Asian urban system and its public spaces, especially in view of the likely implications of energy supplies and climate change on key Asian cities located in coastal and river valley situations.
Over 2 billion people will live in informal settlements by 2030, often in slum conditions. UN-Habitat has recommended countries adopt city-wide participatory slum upgrading projects and integrate the informal settlements into the formal plans of the city. While there might be honest intentions by the formal governance bodies to do so, often the settlements are invisible from the gaze of the state. In other words, often they are quite literally “off the map.” More problematically, even when mapped, the maps are reduced to a single aspect, based on the agenda of the mapping body such as an NGO and often become useless for any slum upgrading purpose. How could these settlements be put “back on the map,” and more importantly, in a way that matters? In this paper, firstly, I share a “multi-scalar mapping framework” developed for my dissertation research in Karail, the largest informal settlement in Dhaka. Secondly, I briefly describe the methods used to produce the 94 maps. Thirdly, I use an auto-ethnographic narrative to provide a thick description of the process of mapping that I conducted for six months in Karail. The particular methodology can provide pointers to other researchers enabling better practice in informal settlements globally. Lastly, I end the paper by analyzing the maps that were produced based on their potential to be used in a city-wide slum upgrading project. I conclude that such multi-scalar mapping is essential in understanding the socio-economic complexity of informal settlements and engaging as architects and urban designers.KeywordsInformal settlementMappingSpatial justiceMulti-scalarSlum upgrading
Urban anthropology in India resonates with its counterparts in most of the world in that it is multidisciplinary and that it shares the imprint of colonial legacies that urban research trajectories of the global South carry. If the nearly seventy‐five years since Indian independence can be a time line, the first half of that is the slow but sure recognition of the urban in sociological and anthropological perspectives, which were dominated by at the time by “Indian” staples such as tradition and modernity; caste, tribe, and ethnicity; religion and culture; and rural–urban relationships. In the second half, globally prevalent paradigms such as political economy, development, and industrialization begin to find analytical expression in the study of cities. Since the 1990s there has been an incredible growth of work on cities in India, not just multidisciplinary but also ethnographic, with a range of emphases including gender sensitivities, technologies, urban governance, infrastructures, work, consumption, architecture, art, and cinema in addition to the more conventional tropes of the Indian social.
This article considers how urban peripheries are made and unmade by forms of “shifting”. We examine these shifts from the perspective of rickshaw garages and mess dormitories in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which both offer makeshift working and living arrangements to rural–urban migrants. By explicitly situating these spaces as part of the movements and crisscrossing trajectories that animate urban peripheries, we challenge the tendency in urban scholarship to analyze peripheral and marginalized spaces primarily through the lens of habitation. Breaking with residentialist and sedentarist approaches to urban space, we present rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces that are enabling and undergoing various forms of shifting, as their occupants move and alternate between different places, neighborhoods, and spatial arrangements to establish a continuity of work and income. We argue that these forms of manoeuvring are made possible by a degree of spatial malleability that reflects the territorial impermanence of the periphery itself, which is continuously pushed sideways through tandem processes of precariousness and improvement. By directing attention to the “shifting” in “makeshift”, we contribute to a less static understanding of how labor migrants try to hold their place in the city amidst wider processes of exclusion, expansion, and densification.
Slums and informal settlements have long been a policy concern, particularly in post-independence cities of the global South. Although national and local governments devise public policy seeking to address these habitations, these policy initiatives occur in conversation with the often far less visible global policy discourses of international urban development actors. Positing their ideational influence, this study analyses how global discourses from key multilateral agencies and donors have framed the problem of slums and informal settlements over time, to uncover assumptions and biases that ideationally, if indirectly, contribute to urban inequality, marginalization and socio-spatial othering in the city.
Este ensaio, que abre o dossiê “Práticas e processos de produção do espaço urbano: descentrando perspectivas”, toma esse tensionamento como premissa. A perspectiva clássica que apreendeu e analisou a cidade como terreno do progresso civil, do desenvolvimento das potencialidades humanas – ou, então, como palco de reverberação de desconfianças e medos “modernos” –, perdeu de vista uma série de experiências de vida urbana que se acumularam e desenvolveram nas periferias do capitalismo global. Essas experiências são marcadas, de um lado, pelo passado colonial – e, portanto, pelos efeitos do tráfico negreiro transatlântico, da desterritorialização massiva de pessoas, da escravidão, do genocídio e do racismo –, que entrelaça historicamente “Norte-Sul” e “Sul-Sul”; de outro, pelos legados persistentes desse passado, que dificultam que problemas contemporâneos sejam resolvidos – como segregação, desigualdades, falta de infraestrutura, problemas na regulação e gestão urbano-ambiental, etc.
The concept of social cohesion is increasingly being utilised in local and international policy discourse and scholarship. The idea of collective efficacy, defined as ‘social cohesion among neighbours combined with their willingness of intervene on behalf of the common good,’ has been posited as having an important protective effect against violence. This article investigates the relevance of international framings of social cohesion and collective efficacy, which have largely been conceptualised and tested in the global north, to the conditions of social life and violence prevention in a city in the global south. These circumstances are interrogated through an ethnographic study conducted in Khayelitsha township in the Western Cape, where a major internationally funded and conceptualised violence prevention intervention, Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU), has been implemented. The ethnographic material contests some of the key assumptions in international discourses on social cohesion and the manner in which social cohesion has been interpreted and effected in the violence prevention initiatives of VPUU.
The concept of social cohesion is increasingly being utilised in local and international policy discourse and scholarship. The idea of collective efficacy, defined as ‘social cohesion among neighbours combined with their willingness of intervene on behalf of the common good,’ has been posited as having an important protective effect against violence. This article investigates the relevance of international framings of social cohesion and collective efficacy, which have largely been conceptualised and tested in the global north, to the conditions of social life and violence prevention in a city in the global south. These circumstances are interrogated through an ethnographic study conducted in Khayelitsha township in the Western Cape, where a major internationally funded and conceptualised violence prevention intervention, Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU), has been implemented. The ethnographic material contests some of the key assumptions in international discourses on social cohesion and the manner in which social cohesion has been interpreted and effected in the violence prevention initiatives of VPUU.
Drawing upon three years of ethnographic research conducted in drug and alcohol recovery houses and treatment centers in Philadelphia, this article argues that attending to the practice of informality in the subproletariat and precarious working classes of the postindustrial US city helps elucidate the twinned legacies of informality and surveillance in racialized US urban poverty. To do so, it recuperates Bourdieu's practice theory with the invigorating insights of Black studies on the historic legacies of racializing surveillance to theorize the practice of informality in the postindustrial US city. Ultimately, the article argues that informal practice offers a space of concealment forged through the evasion and countersurveillance of racializing surveillance in the postindustrial US city.
While the city has been central to the Indian novel in English since the 1980s, the profusion of urban novels, essays and literary reportages published since the 2000s has triggered a formal and thematic renewal of the literary discourse on the Indian city. At the crossroads of literature and urban studies, this thesis locates this literary phenomenon in the context of India’s embrace of global capitalism in the 1990s, which has resulted in the accelerated expansion and transformation of Indian cities, inspired by the model of the global city. Based on a corpus of fictional and non-fictional texts on Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, I study the development of a critical urban imaginary which expresses the contradictory experience of this urban metamorphosis through the interplay between two major aesthetic modes, and challenges both orientalists and nationalist discourses on the Indian city. These texts oscillate between an epic mode, which defamiliarize urban modernisation and amplifies the collision between antagonistic global social forces in the city, and an ordinary mode, which explores this historical process at the scale of the locality through the lens of everyday life, obliquely shedding light on structural violence but also on tactics devised by urban outcasts to reclaim urban space. These two modes are considered as the two faces of a political literary approach of the city, which rests on the strong historical consciousness of the writers. Their works unveil the multiple layers of a fragmented urban history which contemporary urban planning endeavours to erase.
This chapter outlines the Semiotic Cultural Psychology Theory (SCPT). SCPT defines culture as the dynamics of sensemaking enacted by a social group defined by common participation in a given environment (e.g. a territory, a system of action, a communication setting). Such a dynamics of sensemaking is channelled by embodied, generalised, affect-laden meaning (Symbolic Universes, according to the SCPT terminology) that are active within the cultural milieu. The SCPT view of culture leads us to focus on the processes of interpretations through which social actors shape, react and act upon the socio-political, institutional and economic reality as well as on the way the symbolic fields generated by these processes shape their form, in a recursive semiotic dynamic. Emphasis is placed on how the focus on the recursive linkage between sensemaking and symbolic fields enables us to go beyond the essentialist and descriptive view of the role of culture in society and economy as well as to bridge micro and macro levels of analysis.
This chapter briefly outlines three general conceptions: culture as structure, as distribution of psycho-social traits, as interpretative activity. Specificities, similarities and differences among these approaches are discussed. Moreover, in order to provide common ground to these conceptions, a semantic space of culture is defined. This semantic space is obtained from the combination of two analytic dimensions: the level of analysis (micro vs macro) and the ontological status (culture as process vs culture as entity). Rather than providing a comprehensive definition, the four quadrants obtained by the intersection of these two dimensions maps the inevitable pluralism of culture.
This chapter focuses on cultural pluralism. The phenomenology of cultural pluralism is outlined along with the way the concept is addressed in social and political sciences and policy-making practices; finally, some evidence of the cultural pluralism is provided together with some operative implications for policy-making. .
This chapter analyses the way the notion of culture has approached the realm of policy studies. A burgeoning literature addressed the notion of culture establishing some elements of dialogue:the grid-group theory, ethnography, the argumentative turn and pragmatism, the more insidious position of radical constructionism. Findings from researchers face a more anodyne world of policy-making, where culture is often mobilised as a self-reassuring mantra or for fuelling the retrieval of nationalistic identities or “imagined communities”. In correspondence with the approach developed in the previous chapter, the review of theoretical encounters between policy and culture gives some suggestions for practical advancement.
This chapter provides a cultural interpretation of the current scenario of socio-institutional crisis through the lens of SCPT. The analysis focuses on the recursive interplay between the socioeconomic transformations and the culturally framed way in which peoples make sense of them. At the core of the interpretation discussed in the chapter lies the recognition of the role played by affective sensemaking in the public domain – or the “affectivisation of the public sphere” according to the terms adopted. Several manifestations of this dynamics are analysed together with a general interpretation of it as the way broad segments of societies adapt to regulate semiotically the uncertainty fostered by socio-economic turmoil.
This chapter presents a case study by means of which the three concepts illustrated in the previous chapters are shown at work. The case exemplifies how, why and to what extent a policy of urban regeneration, that is to say the French Politique de la Ville implemented in the North-East of Paris, recognises and uses the cultural dimension, conceptualised through the three tenets of cultural pluralism, performativity of sensemaking, and distribution of semiotic capital. The case shows how the policy takes the cultural dimension into account, and it does that in different ways, from an implicit and normative recognition to a more generative one. Finally, the main characteristics of the policy that allows it to be culturally sensitive are highlighted.
This chapter introduces the notion of performativity, first by examining the importance of communication and the role that discourse analysis has played in shaping policies. Connecting representations and actions is the first dimension of performativity that has already been focused upon by several approaches in policy design and policy-making. The chapter tries to go further and look at performativity as a way of overhauling the design of policies, making room for improvisation, adaption and experimentation. To this end, two case studies are discussed. One of them deals with the rebuilding of trust in post-trauma communities; the other with the open programming of uses in the case of the temporary occupation of an urban development project. The two cases show how performativity in policy-making can go far beyond the simple mixture of linguistic acts and social practices.
This paper aims to explore alternatives to the dominant Euro-American planning approaches, which, while premised on the urban experience of the 19 th and the 20 th century, made passage to the global South through processes of colonisation and globalisation. The need for this exploration arises from the radically different contemporary (21 st century) urban experience concentrated in the global South. Drawing attention to the diverse political, economic and socio-cultural processes as well as attendant knowledge systems specific to the Southern cities, the paper relies on debates and discussions emanating from a two-part seminar series held in Colombia and India. In doing so, the paper makes two broad arguments. First, the dominant planning discourse emanating from the global North is both inadequate and irrelevant to address the varied and diverse experience of Southern cities. Rapid urbanisation processes in the South have manifested and found expressions in diverse urban forms such as primates, peri-urban, sprawls and associated functions. The Euro-American models, given the lack of a similar experience in those geographies, do not account for these forms and functions. Second, the rapid pace of urbanisation and ensuing urban forms of the South should draw on learnings emanating from within the diverse Southern contexts that also showcase similarities. In other words, South-South dialogues emerging from embedded knowledge systems constitute a fertile ground for mutual learning. Set against this background, the paper makes an argument for framing locally rooted urban practices as a pathway to Southern theory for urban planning 2
Everybody knows that the phrase ‘informal settlement’ is a widely used euphemism for ‘slum’, avoiding a word that can be seen to cast a stigma on neighbourhoods of the urban poor. Yet we have also long known that ‘informal settlement’ is a verb – identifying self-organised modes of production through which the urban poor produce affordable housing and urban infrastructure. Here we argue four key points. First, the distinction between slums and informal settlement is evident in UN-Habitat data that suggests that informal settlement has rapidly expanded while slums have not. Second, informality is a paradoxical condition that can be identified with the illegality, insecurity and inferiority of the slum, but also with the incremental self-organisation of urban commoning and the right to the city. Third, while the language of the ‘slum’ will inevitably persist, the UN-Habitat definition is both too broad and too narrow – conflating material conditions with overcrowding and tenure insecurity while excluding overdevelopment. Finally, if we want to understand ‘informal settlement’ as a dominant mode of urban production then we need to stop using it interchangeably with the term ‘slum’ and engage with how it works as the design and planning of housing and urban infrastructure.
The “bourgeois environmentalism” concept framed by Baviskar (2002, 2003, 2006, 2011) till date remains the most powerful paradigm to capture urban environmental projects (restoration, beautification, and housing schemes) facilitating middle-class desires, aspirations, and perceptions of urban environment at the cost of squatter clearance and eviction drives in Indian metropolises. Environmental activism in Kolkata has also been perceived through this prism. Drawing inspiration from situated urban political ecology, and using historical urban political ecology, this chapter empirically investigates, chronologically covers, and qualitatively analyzes varieties of environmental activism across conflicting, negotiating, and mediating actors using two case studies: the environmental movement surrounding the restoration of the Adi Ganga, and rounds of activisms (since the 1990s to the present time) for the preservation and protection of the East Kolkata Wetlands. The empirical findings inform the theoretical grounding that the chapter deploys. Through the two case studies, the chapter asserts that urban environmental activism comprises vibrant stories of violations and victories with long-lasting impact and future directions for urban environmental trajectories that cannot be captured by unilinear understandings and perspectives.
Overlaid on a collage of street scenes, college students wrote: ‘Dear rest of India: Just so you know, I am a proud Indian no matter what my language is, how I look, what I wear, and where I am from’. Development narratives encourage parents to send young people from the Himalayas to major Indian cities for education. Students engage in political actions and play with their identity; simultaneously, racialized as ‘foreign’, they work out their relationship to the nation through reconsideration of home and city. Based on qualitative research, this article seeks to understand how temporary urban migration shapes students’ politics.
In Zeiten rasanter Urbanisierung widmet sich dieser Beitrag dem Zusammenhang von Virtualität und Stadt. Damit wird der Begriff der Virtualität erstens im Hinblick auf eine theoretische Rekonzeption des Verständnisses von Orten und Räumen situiert. Zweitens erfolgt ein Überblick über den Netzkultur-Diskurs der 1990er-Jahre, der den Begriff der Virtuellen Stadt nachhaltig prägte. Drittens geht es um eine computerbasierte Stadtwissenschaft, die Städte als dynamische Gebilde simuliert und visualisiert. Viertens wird am Beispiel von Smart Cities die Integration computergenerierter und gebauter Stadträume auf Basis von Ubiquitous Computing und verteilten Sensornetzwerken untersucht.
This article introduces the concept of popular urbanization to describe a specific urbanization process based on collective initiatives, self-organization and the activities of inhabitants. We understand popular urbanization as an urban strategy through which an urban territory is produced, transformed and appropriated by the people. This concept results from a theoretically guided and empirically grounded comparison of Mexico City, Istanbul and Lagos. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, we bring urbanization processes in these urban regions into conversation with each other through a multidimensional theoretical framework inspired by Henri Lefebvre focusing on material interaction, territorial regulation, and everyday experience. In this way, popular urbanization emerged as a distinct urbanization process, which we identified in all three contexts. While this process is often subsumed under the broader concept of ‘urban informality’, we suggest that it may be helpful to distinguish popular urbanization as primarily led by the people, while commodification and state agencies play minor roles. As popular urbanization unfolds in diverse ways dependent upon the wider urban context, specific political constellations and actions, it results in a variety of spatial outcomes and temporal trajectories. This is therefore a revisable and open concept. In proposing the concept of popular urbanization for further examination, we seek to contribute to the collective development of a decentered vocabulary of urbanization.
South Asia’s bourgeoning agglomerations are argued to derive their imageries from the abstracted northern notions of the urban, partially captured by the umbrella phrase – world-class. This article unpacks the notion of world-class using planning exercises in Colombo and Delhi. I argue that world-class cannot be seen in isolation to read the violence of urbanization, but when planning is historicized, visions like world-class present themselves as a subsequent logical step. Therefore, for any radical opposition to exclusionary planning, we need to look at the possibility of an epistemological rupture in the planning discourse rather than to critique the notion of world-class.
Slum eradication has been a concern in South Asian cities since the colonial times. Legislation and policies are being framed both out of national desires and international strategies. However, very little is being studied on how these legislation and policies come into being, specifically geography’s influence in their formulation. The article analyses parliamentary debates from India (Rajya Sabha, 1953–2014), and outlines the process of historical, political, and institutional domi- nance of Delhi. It shows that the slum legislation and policies in India are formulated by abstracting cases from the Delhi slums. This knowledge hegemony of Delhi is discussed within the growing consideration towards urban theory’s southern shift, which puts the Southern cities (megacities) as underdogs. The paper argues that at a regional level, these megacities exert the same hegemony that the southern theory wants to avoid. The results argue towards broadening the southern theory and ordinary city discussions.
Acronyms vii Introduction: The Proper Name 1 Chapter 1: Deccan Pastoral: The Making of an Ethnohistorical Imagination in Western India 20 Chapter 2: Bombay and the Politics of Urban Desire 37 Chapter 3: "Say with Pride That We Are Hindus": Shiv Sena and Communal Populism 70 Chapter 4: Thane City: The Making of Politcal Dadaism 101 Chapter 5: Riots, Policing, and Truth Telling in Bombay 121 Chapter 6: In the Muslim Mohalla 160 Chapter 7: Living the Dream: Governance, Graft, and Goons 194 Conclusion: Politics as Permanent performance 227 Notes 235 Glossary 251 Bibliography 255 Index 267
Social Text 22.4 (2004) 9-15
The great colonial empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, brutal engines for the extraction of rents, crops, and minerals from tropical countrysides. Colonial cities and entrepôts, although often vast, sprawling, and dynamic, were demographically rather insignificant.
The urban populations of the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch empires at their Edwardian zenith probably didn't exceed 3 to 5 percent of colonized humanity. The same ratios generally prevailed in the cases of the decayed Spanish and Portuguese empires, as well as in the conquests of nouveaux riches like Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Although there were some important exceptions—for example, Ireland, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, and South Africa (after 1910)—even in these cases, city dwellers were rarely more than one-sixth of the population.
Nor were colonial cities the most important centers of native resistance. It might have been expected that the ports and administrative centers, with their extreme inequalities, their concentrations of indigenous intellectuals, and their embryonic labor movements, would have been the principal incubators of revolutionary nationalism. In many cases, in fact, the urban milieu was the decisive progenitor of nationalist and anticolonial theory. But the colonial city was only episodically, and usually very briefly, the actual theater of violent revolt.
Indeed, it is striking how few repressive resources, especially European troops, were needed to control large colonial cities like Cairo, Havana, Bombay, Manila, or even Dublin. In part this was because of the existence of large comprador middle classes, whose nationalism, if it existed, usually took cautious, incremental, and nonviolent forms. But many of the urban poor were also integrated, as servants, soldiers, prostitutes, and petty traders, into the parasitic ecology of the colonial metropolis. In Dublin in 1916, the slum poor jeered the survivors of the Easter Rebellion as they were led away to British prisons.
The sustainable zones of anticolonial resistance were in the countrysides, and the recurrent pattern of modern national liberation movements —as far back, even, as the North American and Irish revolutions of the late eighteenth century—were the flight of urban revolutionary avant-gardes to rural redoubts with durably anchored traditions of revolt.
Thus Cuban nationalists both in the 1860s and 1950s abandoned the cities for the rebel sierras of eastern Cuba; urban Arab nationalists took refuge in the Rif or the villages of Upper Egypt; Sinn Fein fled Dublin and Cork for the Wicklow and Galty hills; Gandhi turned to the great soul of the Indian countryside; Emilio Aguinaldo retreated to the rugged mountainsides of Luzon; and the young Communist parties of China, Vietnam, and Indonesia all made their long marches from the cities to remote rural fortresses.
For pre-1940 empires, therefore, social control was largely a problem of rural counterinsurgency. The classic Victorian response was the punitive expedition that sought not only to reduce rebellion in the field but to devastate its subsistence base: thus the Seventh Cavalry exterminating Plains bison, German troops decimating the herds of the Herero, French marines destroying the rice stores of Tonkin, and so on.
But the work of imperial armies was usually incomplete. In the 1890s the Spanish general Weyler sought a more radical solution. He attempted to drain the rural reservoirs of insurgent strength in eastern Cuba by concentrating the population in fetid camps. The "empty" countryside then became a shoot-on-sight killing field without discrimination as to target. Concentration camps and free-fire zones were soon adopted, with even deadlier results, by the British in the Transvaal, the Americans in the Visayas, and the Germans in Southwest Africa.
In 1919-20, faced with the escalating costs of occupying Mesopotamia, Air Minister (and soon, Colonial Minister) Winston Churchill invented a third strategy for coercing the countryside. He became the chief apostle of using airpower, supplemented by flying columns of armored cars, against rural centers of revolt.
As interpreted by its Royal Air Force innovators, air control was as much about creating mass terror as hitting specific targets. During the next decade, the RAF routinely bombed and strafed rural insurgents in Mesopotamia, Afghanistan...
Geography is a discipline with a troubling history. Its modern origins lie in the European expansionism of the 18th and 19th centuries, when it developed as the science of empire. The discipline still treads an uneasy path between scientific endeavour and derring-do, but this wasn't and still isn't the only trouble with geography; it is simply spread too thinly across a huge diversity of sub-disciplines. Nevertheless, a distinct coalescence of events occurred in the 19th century, notably in the founding of geographical societies and the European exploration of Africa, which resulted in the emergence of an almost united geographical endeavour.
Public Culture 12.3 (2000) 627-651
Cities like Bombay -- now Mumbai -- have no clear place in the stories told so far that link late capitalism, globalization, post-Fordism, and the growing dematerialization of capital. Their history is uneven -- in the sense made commonsensical by a certain critical tradition in Marxism. It is also characterized by disjunct, yet adjacent, histories and temporalities. In such cities, Fordist manufacture, craft and artisanal production, service economies involving law, leisure, finance, and banking, and virtual economies involving global finance capital and local stock markets live in an uneasy mix. Certainly, these cities are the loci of the practices of predatory global capital -- here Mumbai belongs with Bangkok, Hong Kong, Saõ Paulo, Los Angeles, Mexico City, London, and Singapore. But these cities also produce the social black holes of the effort to embrace and seduce global capital in their own particular ways, which are tied to varied histories (colonial and otherwise), varied political cultures of citizenship and rule, and varied ecologies of production and finance. Such particularities appear as images of globalization that are cracked and refracted. They are also instances of the elusiveness of global flows at the beginning of the new millennium.
Typically, these cities are large (10-15 million people) and are currently shifting from economies of manufacture and industry to economies of trade, tourism, and finance. They usually attract more poor people than they can handle and more capital than they can absorb. They offer the magic of wealth, celebrity, glamour, and power through their mass media. But they often contain shadow economies that are difficult to measure in traditional terms.
Such cities, too, are the site of various uncertainties about citizenship. People come to them in large numbers from impoverished rural areas. Work is often difficult to obtain and retain. The rich in these cities seek to gate as much of their lives as possible, travelling from guarded homes to darkened cars to air-conditioned offices, moving always in an envelope of privilege through the heat of public poverty and the dust of dispossession. Frequently, these are cities where crime is an integral part of municipal order and where fear of the poor is steadily increasing. And these are cities where the circulation of wealth in the form of cash is ostentatious and immense, but the sources of cash are always restricted, mysterious, or unpredictable. Put another way, even for those who have secure salaries or wages, the search for cash in order to make ends meet is endless. Thus everyday life is shot through with socially mediated chains of debt -- between friends, neighbors, and coworkers -- stretched across the continuum between multinational banks and other organized lenders, on the one hand, and loan sharks and thugs, on the other.
Bombay is one such city. It has an interesting history as a set of fishing villages, many named after local goddesses, linked by bridges and causeways and turned into a seat of colonial government in western India. Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it blossomed as a site of commercially oriented bourgeois nationalism, and, until the 1950s, it retained the ethos of a well-managed, Fordist city, dominated by commerce, trade, and manufacture, especially in the realm of textiles. Well into the 1970s, in spite of phenomenal growth in its population and increasing strain on its infrastructure, Bombay remained a civic model for India. Most people with jobs had housing; most basic services (such as gas, electricity, water, and milk) reliably reached the salaried middle classes. The laboring classes had reasonably secure occupational niches. The truly destitute were always there, but even they fit into a complex subeconomy of pavement dwelling, rag picking, petty crime, and charity.
Until about 1960, the trains bringing in white- and blue-collar workers from the outer suburbs to the commercial and political core of the city (the Fort area in South Bombay) seemed to be able to move people around with some dignity and reliability and at relatively low cost. The same was true of the city's buses, bicycles, and trams...
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