Subaltern Urbanism Research Articles

Peruvian Migration and Community Organisation in Argentina: Transnational and Intergenerational Knowledge in the Social Production of Habitat

This paper analyses the transnational and intergenerational knowledge that Peruvian migrant women bring to the social production of habitat in Argentinean cities. In a context of increasing difficulties for Peruvian families to access urban space, this study highlights migrant women's capacity for agency through community organisation. Based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collected from research carried out in a neighbourhood built by migrants in the city of Cordoba, the article shows that urban experiences of Peruvian women reveal not only spatial segregation, but also a subaltern urbanism that attempts to ensure the sustainability of life.

Fixing Bhim Nagar: a new metonym for subaltern urbanism

This article investigates the processes and politics of slum demolitions in the megacity of Mumbai. Scholars of subaltern urbanism have celebrated the political agency and entrepreneurial ability of the metonymic slums in Mumbai. This article argues instead that paying close attention to the dynamics of the lived realities within informal settlements directs us to the limits of ethnographic and archival imagination where fixers operating within the ‘para-legal’ are practicing a new subaltern urbanism, one that is attentive to the complexity of community within the metonymic slum. Through a detailed analysis of the practices of two fixers, this article shows how, by placing themselves at crucial nodes in the demolition and rehabilitation process, the fixers, on the one hand, were able to delay the displacement of residents; on the other, they created hierarchies in the distribution of resettlement benefits. Focusing on the quotidian practices of fixers operating within the demolished informal settlement brings forth a complicated and contradictory politics that ensure the existence of diverse non-privatized land tenures in the city.

Towards an insurgent urbanism: collaborative counter-hegemonic practices of inhabiting and transforming the cities

This article proposes a debate anchored in a dialogue between concepts of insurgent planning and humane urbanism and the idea of a subaltern urbanism through the lens of a critical reflection on the role of city-building professionals. The paper explores the idea of an insurgent urbanism as a collaborative praxis of city design and development that arises from the protagonism of marginalised communities and the accumulative knowledge of social movements, activists and scholars. It focuses on three different learning dimensions based on the experience of teaching/research actions developed at a self-organised squat in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 2018 and 2022. Dialoguing with ideas of social learning, it shows that these practices have created a relevant exchange of different types of knowledge and have contributed to the development of other solutions that challenge the hegemonic and neoliberal city production and can therefore be seen as alternatives for the development of more egalitarian and imaginative futures that expand beyond the context of squats in Brazil.

Local Economy as the Key Driver of Urbanization in the Indian Sundarbans

The relationship between local economic development and urbanization is a vital policy concern across the world, especially in the developing countries. The local economy exhibits enormous potential in the process of transformation of a rural area into an urban one. Based on the theoretical discourse of planetary and subaltern urbanization, this article explores the role of the local economy, even in the form of banal activities, in the process of urbanization of the Indian Sundarbans, a highly vulnerable part of the Ganga–Brahmaputra delta. For this study, we have relied on two facets of local economy—that of the local market centres, and the household economy of small towns. In the local market analysis, we have analysed market details such as the growth story of entrepreneurs, the function of shops in providing services and in developing their own profit level for sustenance and further growth. Household economy has been analysed from the perspective of changes in the occupational structure, nature of employment and household income in order to understand the surplus generation and reinvestment of the same as the local capital. This article is based on an intensive field survey that used the stratified random sampling method. A total number of 240 households and 100 shops have been surveyed from four towns. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection have been followed. The article argues that the local economy plays a key role in the urbanization process of the Indian Sundarbans, as the regional economy is gradually shifting from the farm to non-farm activities.

The everyday counter-city: Communities creating alternatives through reciprocal care, prefigurative action and subaltern urbanism

Cities are the physical embodiment of power, capital and state control. Yet urban centres are heterogeneous and multiple counter-cities are created within the bounds of the city – contesting the mainstream logic of capital accumulation and hierarchical relationships of power. While one may first envision counter-cities as large sites of protest and consciously alternative communities, everyday counter-cities are also possible. This article combines three theories to develop a framework of everyday counter-cities, drawing together subaltern urbanism, prefiguration and reciprocal relations of care. This paper uses this framework to analyse qualitative research conducted with communities in two informal settlements of migrant communities in Kolkata to explain how these seemingly ordinary places form counter-cities. This paper draws on these examples to argue that a counter-city founded on an ethos of care and anticipatory action for the future is possible, even within situations of high income disparity and inequality.

Situating Slums in Hegemonic Urban Discourse: A Historiography of English-Language Architecture and Planning Journals

Over recent years, the political critique of the characterization of slums has progressively developed within hegemonic urban planning discourse. In planning history, however, the emergence of slums remains associated with the narrative and geographies of underdevelopment in the context of modernization theory. To deconstruct this narrative and thus contribute to the decolonization of planning discourse, this paper undertakes a historiographic analysis of English-language journal publications dealing with different forms of subaltern urbanism. I show how the concept of “slums” has progressively broadened in meaning to encompass an ever-larger array of derogatory concepts, and that the term “slum” is limited to certain geographical hotspots, thereby contributing to geopolitical biases and knowledge gaps. Through the content analysis of publications, I am able to outline a historical periodization of hegemonic planning themes and proposals addressing slums in diverse geographies, along with critical views on their underlying perspectives.

Abandon the Slum? Toward an Alternative Recognition of Urban Informal Dwelling

The focus on urban poverty in the Global South has centered on slum-centric discussions of urban marginality to explain the supposed crisis of Third World cities. Evidently, ideological and material eradication of slums is symptomatic of the erasure of urban poverty and is regarded as a developmental panacea to address all urban problems. Notwithstanding the political significance of this term to understand and respond to subaltern urbanism, the Eurocentric gaze of urban scholars and practitioners in using slum, as an analytical and developmental category, has impeded the recognition of varied forms of dwelling practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with footpath-dwelling communities in Mumbai, I argue that to understand the diversity of dwelling in the city, attention needs to be extended to what could be called non-slums, spaces that embody a set of practices and negotiations that are spatially distinct from those characterizing places officially labeled as slums and expand beyond density politics. Unlike residents of so-called slums, these groups are often dispersed and numerically weak. It is this spatial organization (or the lack of it) that shapes their everyday politics in making their place within the city. The exposed nature of their habitation makes their everyday living transient and sets forth a form of spatiality that is distinct from dense neighborhoods labeled slums. While slums are being peripheralized through various policy and state interventions, these groups continue to hold on to the urban core and in doing so produce new spatializations of poverty and varied subaltern subjectivities of dispossession and belonging.

Subaltern urbanism as a way of life: Redefining and (re)imagining postcolonial urbanity in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT The paper contends that subaltern urbanism is a way of life in the context of contemporary Zimbabwe. Through ethnography conducted in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, between February 2019 and May 2019, the paper extends the concept of subaltern urbanism through presenting subaltern urbanism as a way of life that encapsulates individuality and urban governance. The paper argues that subaltern urbanism is scripted by individuals positioned at the bottom of the social ladder and urban governing institutions. The paper maintains the view that subaltern urbanism as a way of life denotes redefinition and (re)imagining contemporary post-colonial urbanity. Finally, the paper proposes the notion that the author labels as “subalternization of the city” by urban governing institutions and suggests new ways of understanding urbanism in Africa.

Subaltern Urbanisation: Who will speak for slums women?

This paper goes to look at the impact of urbanisation on slums women. The phrase “subaltern urbanisation”, at one level, is probably, best seen as a literary device to focus attention on our space of enquiry, to extend the likelihood of discursive engagement, arguably in the tradition of another such phrase, viz, “global city”. This paper deals with the expertise of ladies and women living in slum communities in cities and domestic violence on these women particularly in Aligarh city. This study makes the project work all totally different from alternative as because the woman and girls share their personal struggles and experiences which they long faced, and still facing once they migrated from their native places to the slums of Aligarh, this shows the loopholes within the urban growth. However, this article is concerned with the limits of and alternatives of subaltern urbanism. Here, this analysis talks about the methodology of the work, realities behind the migration of woman and also the harsh realities they face in urban areas slums, which incident of violence against women and what attract women to the cities.” This report based on the research work which shows that how the women are subaltern in their families and the society simultaneously. First, I might wish to give thanks to those women who share their personal life experiences and I would also like to thank my friends who always being there with me during my survey and at the time of interview which helped me a lot in my task.

Subalterns and the city: Dubai as cross-cultural caravanserai in City of Life and Pinky Memsaab

ABSTRACT Within the archetypal vision of Dubai as ostentatious oil-rich global megacity, this essay’s alternative scoping sees a city of interconnected spatio-cultural archipelagos. In these crisscrossing synapses, marginal outsiders can occupy potentially disruptive positions within mainstream power matrices and exclusionary corridors of capitalism. Interrogating a commonly accepted paradigm of subaltern urbanism, I argue that the invariable typecasting of subaltern spaces and association of subaltern demographics with the spatial strictures of urban slums, shanty towns, ghettoes and favelas retrenches the imaginary of the subaltern as excluded abject destined to dwell apart and dislocated from the epicentre of legitimised social, cultural, economic and political activity. Instead, the subaltern presence within mainstream urban ecosystems of power concentration and capital dominance constitutes a chance for dispossessed outsiders to disrupt the legitimised linearity of privileged stakeholders’ entitlement and always-already assumed ‘right to the city‘. I will appraise two films where Dubai is positioned as a site for subaltern Asian disruptors acting as both silent and voluble agents from within elite social structures. British-Emirati director Ali F. Mostafa’s City of Life(2009) and Pakistani filmmaker Shazia Ali Khan’s Pinky Memsaab (2018) harness Dubai as a cosmopolitan canvas where inter-Asian informal and formal modes of lived experience intertwine with heterotopic transglobal textures of the city’s capital-dominated relational grid. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how subaltern South Asian subjects in exilic global hubs such as Dubai carry potentiality of acting as internal agents, working within capitalism’s mainstream power structures to perform informality as a mode of organic and endogenous resistance.

The ordinariness of struggle and exclusion: a view from across the north–south urban ‘divide’

Abstract Comparative literature on subaltern urbanism neglects inequalities among the poor that mimic exclusionary processes to which they have been subjected, what we call ‘scalar imitation’. Using Robinson’s ‘launching’ tactic towards ‘generative comparison’, we identify and explain the evolution of class differentiation within a resettlement colony in Delhi’s periphery, reference ‘glimpses’ of similar processes in literature on subaltern urbanism, and discuss epistemological underpinnings of our analysis. We revise ‘local uniqueness’, which Massey developed early in her career, and adhere to her later topological sensibilities and Foucault’s ‘ascending analysis’. We conclude by highlighting the blurring of worlding and place making processes.

Subaltern Urbanization: Indian Insights for Urban Theory

AbstractThe concept of subaltern urbanization is about vibrant smaller settlements—outside the metropolitan shadow—sustainably supporting a dispersed pattern of urbanization. We propose a theoretical framework which draws on an empirical research collective using both large statistical and land‐use data sets and detailed case studies in non‐metropolitan Indian geographies. Anchored in postcolonial urban studies, it looks beyond the logic of agglomeration and questions our understanding of settlement hierarchies and the location of social and economic innovation processes, opening up an alternative reading of urbanization that could be valuable for other regions. Local agency is core to this concept, transporting the arguments of the ordinary and the subaltern beyond large cities. Our findings, apart from emphasizing the agency of smaller settlements, highlight their multiple local and translocal flows, shaping an autonomous external engagement that could exist independently of relationships with large cities. Further, even though the rural and the urban seep into each other, they do so organically, unlike the process in planetary urbanization. Additionally, the rural‐urban dichotomy remains performative, in that governance regimes influence the urbanization process. Appreciation of these dynamics can provide insights towards a better understanding of the system of human settlements, which is our goal in advancing this framework.

La periferia autoconstruida: migraciones, informalidad y segregación urbana en Argentina

El objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre la profundidad histórica de la problemática del acceso al espacio urbano por parte de migrantes sudamericanos, en especial bolivianos, paraguayos y peruanos, en la Argentina contemporánea. Con base en una metodológica cualitativa y recuperando los aportes teóricos de la perspectiva de la autonomía de las migraciones, el texto reconstruye las continuidades en el “pensamiento de Estado” que tiende a asociar a cierta migración con el incremento de problemas habitacionales. Al mismo tiempo, muestra la capacidad de agencia que tienen las poblaciones migrantes en torno a la producción social de hábitat, argumentando que las trayectorias migrantes en las ciudades expresan no solo formas de segregación espacial, sino también la existencia de un “urbanismo subalterno” que organiza y estructura la vida y la cotidianidad de un amplio conjunto de la población.

Intersections in Subaltern Urbanism: The narratives of women in urban occupations in Brazil

In the past decade in Brazil, we have witnessed the rise of a new subaltern space, which has prompted a new theoretical category, incorporated in the contemporary epistemologies of Subaltern Urbanism: Urban Occupations. These new terrains of livelihood and self-organization have prompted a series of new resistance strategies, everyday practices and narratives that must be understood and decodified. The Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte—third largest in the country—accounts for over 25 housing occupations in its territory, more than half of which settled in the last five years. Occupation Rosa Leão, established in 2013, is one of them. As it happens in many other occupations, most of its dwellers are black women. They constitute majority in the coordination groups and are often more closely involved in the collective necessities of the community. The present article draws upon the experiences of these women as subjects of their own history to showcase urban occupation as a powerful place for understanding and dismantling the always existing but often overlooked intersection between coloniality and gender. It relies on the activist and academic engagement of both authors in these territories, and specifically in the experience with a women-only self-construction workshop organized in October 2017. Through this workshop, we sought to understand how “usually male” construction knowledge was employed (or not) by women, how it could be used as a tool for domination/emancipation and how gender relations intertwined with such issues in the process.

Notes on a Southern urban practice

Writing alongside Southern urban theorists, this essay argues that the emerging body of “theory from the South” must be simultaneously tied to the production of forms and theories of practice. It must ask: How can a new body of thought give us ways of moving and modes of practice? Drawing from the experience of Indian cities, three such modes of Southern practice are offered: squat as a practice not just of subaltern urbanization but of the state; repair in contradistinction to construct, build and even upgrade; and consolidate rather than focus on the building of a singular, universal network within services and infrastructure. The essay then offers a first set of shared characteristics that may enable us to think of a practice as “Southern”, and urges the expansion of a vocabulary of Southern urban practice.

Autonomy, Erasure, and Persistence in the Urban Gardening Commons

AbstractCollective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal's former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualising urban gardens as commons‐in‐the‐making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one hand, and the state erasure, overwriting or construction of top‐down commons on the other. While showing that urban gardening forges commons of varying persistence, we also demonstrate the ways through which the commons are always closely entwined with processes of enclosure. We further argue that urban gardening commons are divergent and cannot be judged against any abstract ideal of the commons. In conclusion, we suggest that urban gardening commons do not have a “common” in common.

Subaltern counter-urbanism: Work, dispossession and emplacement in Gurgaon, India

This paper draws on field research carried out on two struggles at auto parts factories in Gurgaon between 2014 and 2015. Drawing on workers' accounts from the two struggles, I am concerned with how we might think about the women workers struggle, following Roy (2017) as enacting a gendered politics of emplacement. In doing so, I conceptualise the struggles as instances of subaltern counter-urbanism. Borrowing from Roy's (2011) “subaltern urbanism” and Fraser's (1990) “subaltern counter-publics” the struggles are counter-urban as they emerge from and are mobilised against conditions of urban everyday life which render women fixed into labour systems defined through hypermobility and flexibility. The struggles are equally counter-Urban as they break from hegemonic understandings of urban politics within disciplinary Urban Studies which tie subaltern political subjectivities to the itineries of territory, dis/possession and collective consumption (Roy, 2011). It will be shown that the women's struggles evoke demands for emplacement in the city that are future-oriented, speculative and always tentatively under erasure.

“You can call it a Mufassil Town, but nothing less”: Worlding the new census towns of India

In the census of 2011 in India, more than 2500 new settlements have been classified as urban. Placed under the category of ‘census towns’, not much is known about the urbanization processes unfolding at these sites. This article presents learnings from a qualitative case study of a town in West Bengal, to argue that not only do census towns represent a subaltern urbanization but also that they are produced through a range of parallel and competing projects and practices that do not lend themselves to any easy and formulaic understanding of the urban. Borrowing the idea of “worlding” as a conceptual tool to make sense of these processes, I argue that persistent hierarchies of power in the form of caste relations, form the foundation of this urbanization process even as multiple and divergent claims and discourses seek to mould the making of the town. This calls for renewed attention to the question of social justice when reading Indian urbanization.

Street dogs at the intersection of colonialism and informality: ‘Subaltern animism’ as a posthuman critique of Indian cities

This paper argues that colonial biopolitics and informality co-produce a ‘state of exception' for nonhuman animals in cities, based on the socio-political construct of a human/animal binary. This state is enacted by exceptionalising animals as not-persons, and humans as not-animals, and through urbanisation, a uniquely human claim on land. ‘Colonial' is understood in an anthropocentric sense of (privileged) human imperialism over nonhumans and poor humans. Informality, a carefully produced condition that is exceptional to formal governance and planning, legitimises the view of animals (and poor humans) as ‘trespassers' in urban spaces. This paper examines street canines in Indian cities, demonstrating their marginalisation and eviction at the intersection of colonialism and informality. Last, this paper builds upon ‘subaltern urbanism’ that recognises the agency inherent in marginalised citizens and spaces, to conceptualise ‘subaltern animism’ as a way of acknowledging animal spaces and citizenship in the city.

Citizens without property: Informality and political agency in a Seattle, Washington homeless encampment

Often referred to as “tent cities”, tent encampments have, in the last 10 years, proliferated within and around US cities on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression. Accounts of these informal dwellings tend to focus on the symbolism of the camp, the function of the camp as safe zone, or the camp as a site of apolitical or prepolitical identity formation. This article attempts to broaden and deepen the conversation on informal dwellings in the US by focusing on the tent encampment as a site of creative political agency and experimentation. Drawing upon a body of work referred to by some as “subaltern urbanism”, I examine how everyday practices of camp management produce localized forms of citizenship and governmentality through which “homeless” residents resist stereotypes of pathology and dependence, reclaim their rational autonomy, and recast deviance as negotiable difference in the production of governmental knowledge. Consideration of these practices, I argue, opens up the possibility of a of a view of encampments that foregrounds the agency of the homeless in the production of new political spaces and subjectivities.