Chronicles of a disturbed city -- Review of Borderland City in New India (original) (raw)
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The Tale of ethno-political and spatial claims in a contested city
2017
Karachi, today, is essentially a city of migrants, the result of successive waves of in-migration triggered by past events and decisions that took place predominantly on the national and the international political stage. This chapter presents an overview of urban geopolitical and developmental histories of post-Partition Karachi in order to show how in-migration of multiple communities and the ethno-political affiliations of various state-backed actors have impacted the planning and development of the city. It discusses the connection between language, ethnicity and politics and how this contributes to ethno-spatial appropriation and contestation, ethnicity-based service monopolies and uneven planning and development of the city. By viewing the urban geopolitics of the city through the spatial-political trajectory of the Muhajir community in Karachi since Partition, the chapter examines the synergistic and often divisive relationship between ethnicity, politics and urban developmen...
Beyond the Enclave: Territorial Transformations and Emerging Urbanisms
2019
Enclaves, camps, ghettos, slums, villages are considered as bounded ‘places of exception’ for ‘foreigners’ who are new to urban spaces, its laws and culture (Agier, 2018). They are underlined by scholars as the outcome of power relations that segregate spaces and social groups use categories of dispossession, eviction, tolerance, integration and upgradation to tackle persisting inequalities. Territory is often deployed as a geopolitical category that arrests the sovereignty of people and spaces. Such perspective resonates when new groups of decision makers take charge, along with politicians, planners, councilors, and developers. “governing” and “planning” remains a challenge as the imagination of a city is seen in fixed spatial categories. However, urban spaces are intensifying, new socio-material connections and flows are emerging between peripheries and enclaves, urban and rural spaces, migrations and everyday rhythms of people and processes. This panel centralizes territorial transformations that unpacks through grounded deterritorialization and reterritorialization, serves as a tool to explore the socio-spatial relations produced at the nexus of everyday life (such as public spaces, spaces of gathering and sociability, places of movements, rural-urban mixtures, interstitial spaces etc.). We call for an interdisciplinary investigation beyond the physical and discursive boundaries, to chronicle the production of socio-material space through social processes and movements of people in cities. This panel seeks to go beyond “territorial forms” to “territorial transformation” to capture emerging urbanisms. We attempt to* 1) understand the city through its socio-spatial linkages, mixed spatial forms, lived experiences of migrants and locals, as well as the nexus that emerges at these conjunctures. 2) How it may contribute to planning and governance. We welcome papers focusing on but not limited to address processes and implications of territorial transformation within Asian urbanisms. We especially encourage comparative studies that unpack such realities at multiple spatial scales in cities.
Space and Polity, 2019
In this introduction, we discuss the scope of the edited volume by outlining the position of Mostar within much broader academic debates on ‘ethnically divided cities’. We question the representations of such contested cities as hopeless spaces of division, and suggest to explore instead the cracks that challenge overpowering logics of partition: the self-directed attempts at inter-ethnic solidarity, grassroots movements for social justice and dignity, and the inconsistent ways people in these cities inhabit and perform ethnic identities. We also introduce the themes of this Special Issue; Divided Cities as Complex Cities; Memories, Affect and Everyday Life; and Grassroots Politics.
KU Leuven / Paris 1, 2022
This dissertation investigates the highly differentiated ‘slums’ that emerged as part of the ever-changing urban periphery. It reconceptualises the notion of consolidation associated with lived practices of city-making and inhabitation, viewing them as territorial transformation to challenge the linear developmentalism thinking of slum upgrading and regularisation. Building on my multi-sited experiences with longitudinal empirical studies, and inspired by the more radical post-colonial urban studies, urbanism, and migration-mobility studies, the assumption addresses simultaneous processes of consolidation (object becoming more solid and joining with other objects to generate structures) as multi-sited territorialisation. By asking how reading space and time reveals lived practises of territorial transformation and depicts the evolving socio-spatial objects and structures co-produced by institutions and inhabitants, I propose an analytical framework encompassing ‘territorial units, structures, and mobilities’. The framework has contributed to dialogue with different urban debates, reinvents critical mapping of space and time, as well as conducts qualitative ethnography to form five chapters on the leading case study–Dharavi (Mumbai). As a result, they elucidate the highly diverse components, context-dependent practices of territorial transformation, demonstrating a complex web of consolidation processes in motion. The findings from Dharavi raise essential questions and phenomena that could travel elsewhere. The mobile lens is particularly important to reveal the diverse starting points and direction of consolidation, alternative resources, potential conflicts, and the hidden reproduction of inequality. To summarise, the dissertation contributes to future comparative gestures and calls for interdisciplinary knowledge co-production not only about, but from the urban periphery.
ETHNICITY & NEIGHBOURHOOD : HOW PEOPLE AND LIFESTYLE ANIMATES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
2014
It’s a very well-known fact that a city is one large entity of various layers assembled; layers being that of infrastructural layers, spatial layers that make the city livable and functional; and the humanitarian layers or societal layers that give a character to the city. People of different cultural and traditional backdrops come together, interact, work and exchange experiences in the city, and then they also live there. People of different backgrounds and origins come there, having various cultural and traditional roots, lifestyle, language and social conduct defines their ‘ethnicity’. People often tend to bind in groups and especially with the ones they can match up to, in terms of their lifestyle, culture and traditional background. In a country like INDIA, where there is a large spread of various cultures, traditions, races and ETHNICITY, people from different background comes to METROPOLIS like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata etc., in search of opportunities for a better life. As a normal tendency people tend to choose their company and friends who have similar racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and in the same way they choose to place themselves in a neighborhood where, there are more concentrations of people from similar backgrounds of ‘ethnicity’. Such setups of neighborhoods where there are more concentrations of people of similar ethnicity can also be termed as ETHNIC NEIGHBORHOODS and are somehow different than most of the social housings or neighborhoods, as the ethnic groups or people gives it a unique character through the way they live, use the space through activities and various other functions and thus they can be seen as different setups of the neighborhood. Through the discourse of the paper, the prime investigation will be to look closely at some cases of ‘ethnic neighborhoods, from cities like DELHI, MUMBAI in INDIA and try to understand the people and their way of living and its effects on the space around their neighborhood; how they adapt to the place or more appropriately how the space adapts their way of living, activities and different usages. The paper shall bring out some cases of ethnicity based either on regional and racial typecast or religion and economic criteria’s. In each case the investigation will be based on understanding the people, their roots and way of living and then their adoption of the space and the neighborhood.
South Asian History and Culture, 2010
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Partitioned Urbanity A Refugee Village Bordering Kolkata
Economic & Political Weekly, 2018
The partition of British India precipitated a set of instruments of governance that shaped occupations, land-use patterns, and forms of citizenship in urban hinterlands. This process is explored through an ethnographic and archival study of a village in Kolkata’s urban periphery, populated by an oppressed caste community called Namasudras, who had suffered repeated displacements. Namasudra refugee labour was crucial in the making of Kolkata’s suburban infrastructure, prompted by a process of state-led “deagrarianisation” and inter-community politico–economic competition that also displaced the local Muslim peasantry
While urban India has been a popular subject of scholarly analysis for decades, the majority of that attention has been focused on its major cities. Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway instead explores contemporary urban life in a smaller city located in India's Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change, showing how this city has been profoundly affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, interethnic tensions, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism. Duncan McDuie-Ra is Professor of Development Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. 'Through a brilliant spatial ethnography, McDuie-Ra takes us inside this fraught space, outlining the dilemmas and possibilities of everyday life, the contradictions and erosions of rule, and the confused transition from unruly frontier to gateway city. He offers a theoretically nuanced and empirically dynamic study of urbanization in one of India's most critical yet little-understood borderlands.' Jason Cons, University of Texas and author of Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border 'With a subtle sense of humour, and fine sensibility to scale, McDuie-Ra, analyses Imphal's transformation from an unruly frontier town to a market gateway. The cast is a motley crew: politicians and shop owners, insurgents and soldiers, nurses and public intellectuals, celebrities and 'ordinary folk' all aspire to make the most of the contingency of change.'