Subaltern Urbanism Research Articles

Transitions urbaines et religion: Une ethnographie des langages de l'urbanisation subalterne en Afrique et Inde

Lo scopo di questo articolo è esplorare come la religione può essere utilizzata per studiare la transizione urbana e le trasformazioni sociali che l’accompagnano, così come per reinterpretare meglio il continuum che unisce i concetti di “urbano” e “rurale”. Facendo ricorso all’idea di urbanizzazione subalterna, l’articolo compara due nuovi quartieri frutto della trasformazione di antichi villaggi inglobati in città, a Libreville (Gabon) e Pondicherry (India meridionale). L’articolo evidenzia come nei due casi, sebbene con notevoli differenze, le organizzazioni religiose siano particolarmente importanti nel guidare la costruzione del quartiere e delle sue reti sociali. L’articolo dunque conclude che nei due contesti esaminati, i culti religiosi accompagnano e riflettono i diversi modi di “fare la città” a partire dal basso.

Everyday tactics of survival in the Unhomely city

The city is not just an urban landscape, a geogrphical site, or a catalog of housing problems and unplanned growth disasters. It is also a space constituted existentially by those who live in it and whose experiences it shapes. Adapting from Freud, i explore the experience of the urban unhomely as a condition of disturbance and estrangement in Mumbai, and ask how its subaltern citizens cope with it. Focusing on Mumbai's experience during the last few decades but also keeping its longer colonial history in mind, i trace the collision of two opposing forces. On the one hand, we have strategies of survival, a subaltern urbanism that seeks to make the slum dwellers feel at home in the city. Ranged against it is a dominant urbanism, underwritten by social and historical forces, that invades, disturbs, and estranges the city as home for the slum dwellers. I analyze the history of this confrontation between the opposing forces to identify the nature of contemporary everyday tactics of survival practiced by subalterns. I argue that if such practices can be understood in terms of Partha Chatterjee's concept of policial society, they also exceed it. I address excessive subaltern politics of survival in Mumbai.

Composing Urban Orders from Rubbish Electronics: Cityness and the Site Multiple

AbstractWhat do cities look like when rubbish electronics are the vehicle with which they are explored? This article is an experiment designed to offer a response to that question, and in doing so to productively intervene in the conversation about ‘cityness', ‘metrocentricity' and ‘subaltern urbanism'. We intervene by following flows of rubbish electronics and the action that enacts them as waste and value, drawing on fieldwork in Dhaka, Singapore, Accra and Canada's Greater Golden Horseshoe. Our intervention is an experiment in writing an urban geography of rubbish electronics as a site multiple. We show how following the circulation of rubbish electronics offers a manyfolded synopsis of cities: urban enclaves of high finance and the information economy are also industrial waste producers. Peri‐urban industrial zones are also managers of brands, legal liability and corporate public relations. Cities off the map are also urban innovation systems, while waste is rekindled as value and accumulated as poison. Thereby we suggest how a sensitivity to the site multiple may be a helpful way of grappling with shifting ontology and the performativity of our research practices in urban studies.

Migration, Informal Labour and (Trans) Local Productions of Urban Space – The Case of Dhaka's Street Food Vendors

AbstractIn Bangladesh, Dhaka is migrants' most important destination and has itself been fundamentally transformed through migration. But there is ‘no place’ for many migrants in Dhaka. Poorer migrants live in slums and many encroach on public space to sustain their lives – the new urbanites are taking their ‘right to the city’. In doing so, they not only draw on local resources. Their production of the urban space often relates directly to their migration trajectory, their translocal networks, and their simultaneous situatedness at multiple places. Migrants connect ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ and constitute translocal spaces, which contribute to re‐making Dhaka from below.This paper integrates current debates on translocality, informal labour, and subaltern urbanism to address two key questions on transient urban spaces: How do migration trajectories and translocality structure the urban poor's lives? How do migrants make use of local networks and translocal social relations to find work and appropriate ‘their place’ in the city? Empirical research on street food vendors in Dhaka, almost all of whom are internal migrants, builds the basis for my argument. I show that ‘translocal social capital’ and home‐bound identities can be important resources to gain access to urban labour markets and to appropriate one's place in the city. The paper argues that the poor use translocality for their livelihoods and thereby continuously re‐shape the face of the megacity of Dhaka. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Shack Settlement as a Site of Politics: Reflections from South Africa

In South Africa, the shack settlement has become a site of acute political intensity in recent years. However, political action organized from the shack settlement is frequently presented as being outside of the domain of the political—as a spasmodic response to deprivation, as criminal or consequent to external conspiracy. This paper argues that liberal, as well as some currents of Marxist and nationalist thought, have demonstrated an inability, or refusal, to recognize popular political agency in the shack settlement. It suggests that Partha Chatterjee’s work on the idea of political society, and Ananya Roy’s thinking about subaltern urbanism provide useful analytical tools to enable more effective recognition of political agency in the shack settlement. However, it notes that while it is necessary to think the shack settlement as a particular situation, it is also important to be attentive to insurgent modes of political agency that transcend that situation.

ASR FORUM: ENGAGING WITH AFRICAN INFORMAL ECONOMIES

Abstract:This article investigates the Taveta Road phenomenon, whereby women garment informal traders occupy a whole street in the central business district in Nairobi, Kenya. It also discusses the implications for urban planning of the presence of women informal traders in the central business district. The article demonstrates that the ability of these traders to move from the margins into the heart of the city is based on their ability to cross borders, organize collectively, and develop entrepreneurial skills that make use of social networks, group agency, and personal initiative. It also illustrates that over time, their gradual encroachment has led to an acceptance of their presence and their integration into the urban economy. These developments—which are referred to as “subaltern urbanism” or “solidarity entrepreneurialism”—have far-reaching implications in terms of the traders’ relationship with the city, state laws, and the national economy.

Understanding Urban Processes in Flint, Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively

AbstractAnanya Roy introduces the concept ‘subaltern urbanism’ in her 2011 article ‘Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism’. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori identification of slums as subaltern urban space, an inductive approach of identifying subaltern urban space would expand the concept and show that subaltern urbanism exists in the global North. I present original research to show that Flint, Michigan, can be considered subaltern urban space. In the final section of the article I argue that this inductive approach to subaltern urbanism can foster comparative research across the North‐South divide, and generate the transfer of knowledge from South to North.

New Ways into the Future: The ‘Authors Meet Critics’ Initiative

The article introduces this journal's Authors Meet Critics initiative which will offer eight online seminars in 2011 including Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism on October 26, Place, Exclusion and Mortgage Markets on November 22, and State and Society in Local Governance: Lessons from a Multilevel Comparison on December 13.

Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism

This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas - "subaltern urbanism" - which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes. Of these, the ubiquitous ‘slum’ is the most prominent. Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum, subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self-organization and politics. This is a vital and even radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity. However, this article is concerned with the limits of and alternatives to subaltern urbanism. It thus highlights emergent analytical strategies, utilizing theoretical categories that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment such as the megacity, the slum, mass politics and the habitus of the dispossessed. Instead, four categories are discussed — peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and gray spaces. Informed by the urbanism of the global South, these categories break with ontological and topological understandings of subaltern subjects and subaltern spaces.