The City as Action

Retheorizing Urban Studies

Narendar Pani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000551129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In constructing the urban as a set of interconnected actions, this book presents a less travelled route to understanding the city. It leads to a fresh perspective on several issues central to urban theory, including the uniqueness of a city alongside practices it shares with other urban places.

This book presents an innovative theoretical contribution to the field of urban studies, bridging the gap between western centric scholarship and perspectives from the global South. It offers conceptually rich insights, combining notions of cities as organisms, and references to postcolonial urban studies, with insights around aspirations, capabilities, agency, and social identity. It develops concepts, like the Proximity Principle, that help explain the experience of a city.

This conceptualization of the city as a process should interest all who are sensitive to cities, whether they study them in academia or simply develop close associations with specific urban places.

1 In the midst of the urban

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196792-1

As the smog settled on a cold winter night in Delhi, a woman entering the city for the first time found herself desperately wishing she were not alone. When she had been put on that bus by her brother on the highway near her village, others around her had not thought too much about her traveling alone. When the bus broke down on the way she had been left alone to sit on a rock away from the others. By the time the bus restarted and the sun had begun to set, her being alone had become a topic for whispers in the bus. She knew her husband would be waiting for her at the bus stop in the city. He had told her about how unsafe the city was and would surely not leave her alone in it at night. Yet, in a corner of her mind, doubt began to grow. He had just come to the city a few months ago and may not still know it well enough. Would his new job give him the time to wait hours for her? As the bus slowly made its way through the thick smog she was already missing her year-old daughter who she had to leave behind with her parents in the village. Her husband had told her they would not have the time or the money to take care of their daughter in the city. She wondered again what it was that had made her undertake that journey. The simple answer was that her husband told her to, but what was it that had convinced her husband that this was the right thing to do? What was it that had convinced so many like her husband to move to a city at great personal cost?

On the flight to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia a woman software professional found herself wondering about her journey. She would think about the hijab in her cabin baggage, the veil she would have to wear when she went out in the city she was going to live in. Not being a Muslim she had never had to wear a hijab before. Having been an activist in her college days fighting for a variety of women’s rights, she was not quite sure what it would be like living in a country where the right of a woman to drive a car had been a critical issue. She was able to get the job in the software centre only because it was an all-women workplace, with limited scope for dealing face-to-face with men. Riyadh was a city which celebrated so many of the values she was contemptuous of, yet she felt quite liberated by the opportunity to work in it. Coming out of an abusive marriage had not been easy. Seeking a divorce had been frowned upon in her still-conservative Indian city. She had felt a desperate need to move out, and Riyadh had provided that opportunity. On the long flight her analytical mind kept going back to the relationship between the individual and the city. What was it about cities that brought hundreds of thousands of people together, from very different cultures, and still gave them a degree of autonomy to be themselves?

The woman in the queue outside immigration in an airport in Boston would have loved to have had a little more autonomy in her life. She had been married for two years to a husband she had barely met. In their search for an ideal matrimonial match, her Indian family had found a distant relative with a Green Card in the United States. The costs of a wedding good enough for a son-in-law employed in the United States had put a huge financial strain on her parents. They bore the burden, happy in the conviction that the future of their daughter was now secure. The groom had flown in to get married and left soon after the ceremony was over. She had not heard from him for months after the wedding. After a year of waiting for him to call her to the United States, her relatives had begun to get restless. They activated their social network in Boston to get her legal husband to invite her to his home. Another year later he had sent the required documents to her father and she was now entering the United States for the first time. She had heard of it being the land of freedom, but the thought of living in a strange man’s house just because he was her husband made her quite apprehensive. If things went wrong, what was the institutional and other support she could fall back on? She fought hard to get her hopes to overcome her fears, thinking about how a person could develop social networks in an alien city.

These three little tales are not stories of real individuals but they are real in a way that only an abstraction can be: each of the women in them represents the experiences of several other women entering a new urban situation. If these composite women, or their intellectually inclined friends, were to fall back on academia to help them explore the urban condition that awaits them they could easily be drowned in facts. They would find no dearth of empirical evidence of an “urban turn”. The academic debate on urbanization has generated substantial empirical detail, ranging from the celebration of the world crossing the point where a majority of its population lives in variously defined urban centres (Gleeson, 2012), to the informality that marks the functioning of megacities in the developing countries (Mngutyo & Jonathan, 2015); from the rapid urbanization in parts of the developing world (Cohen, 2004), to the influence of global urban command and control centres on the rest of the world (Taylor & Csomós, 2012). If the women were not to be satisfied with mere facts, though, and sought to know how and why cities behave the way they do, they would be met by a variety of not-always-consistent theories and piecemeal responses with a sense of urgency to them.

Policy makers in the parts of the emerging and the less developed worlds that have contributed the most to urbanization have scrambled to meet the challenges of their megacities (Huang, et al., 2016). Non-Government Organizations have, with varying degrees of success and conviction, sought to address the pain that almost inevitably results from rapid social and demographic transitions, especially in economically challenged environments (Fisher, 1997). Academia has responded with a spurt in urban studies that includes drawing the experience of urbanization in the global South into the larger debates on the urban (Roy & Ong, 2011). These efforts to develop a consistent theoretical explanation for what some see as the “urban age” have resulted in several conceptual innovations. World cities theorists have provided both methods for drawing up hierarchies of cities as well as, more promisingly, tools to capture the urban dynamics of globalization. Others have drawn inputs from Critical Social Theory to develop theories of the urban. And yet in this rich and growing body of urban literature it is difficult to miss a sense that the task of developing a comprehensive theory of the urban is far from complete. No school of urban thought has the widespread support that the Chicago School once enjoyed. Instead, as Neil Brenner noted in the second decade of the twenty-first century,

Even a cursory examination of recent works of urban theory reveals that foundational disagreements prevail regarding nearly every imaginable issue – from the conceptualization of what urbanists are (or should be) trying to study to the justification for why they are (or should be) doing so and the elaboration of how best to pursue their agendas.

(Brenner, 2013, p. 92)

There is thus no agreement on even whether the travails of the three composite women I started this exploration with should be a part of urban studies, let alone how best to understand their urban condition.

I enter this contentious terrain not to add another theory to it. There is no dearth of theories to explain specific urban processes, whether it is the circuits of globalization or the nature of agglomeration. I enter it to build on a conviction that the confusion over theorising the urban is, in large part, due to urbanists seeking theories to address what should be a search for an adequate methodology to study the urban. This introductory chapter will make the case for this conviction. The book will proceed to develop a method to understand the urban; a method that will develop the concepts that are needed to analyse that process and its relationship with the city.

The development of this alternative method of visualizing a city will begin with an analytical exploration of the urban that would take it to the vast multitude of relationships that are found in that set of processes. In laying out these relationships, and their relationship with each other, the book will use as a lodestar usually neglected actors in the urban story. The three tales I started with involved composite women who represented a selection of features of other women in the process of moving into an urban experience. I now go a step further to create an even broader composite woman who has elements chosen from the women of the three stories and those of many others. This Woman In the Midst of Agglomeration, Wimoa for short, acts as a lodestar for the exploration of the urban. She is much closer to the bottom of the economic hierarchy than to the top, and is more likely to represent the concerns of the economically and socially underprivileged, in addition to that of the gender that is widely discriminated against. She has also been placed in a megacity of the emerging and less developed worlds to capture an area of rapid urbanization that is not always at the top of the list of concerns of urban theory.

Adopting Wimoa as the lodestar for this book is not without its challenges. For one, her voice is best captured through those of women. In bringing together these voices in an earlier work on women at the threshold of globalization, I had the benefit of a woman co-author with a remarkable ability to strike a rapport with young women workers (Pani & Singh, 2012). The theoretical nature of this book does not provide much room for a similar recording of the voices of individual women, nor does it have the benefit of a woman as its author. The difficulties of developing this book around Wimoa extend beyond her gender. She has been placed at a point in the socio-economic hierarchy where she has to deal with economic and social discrimination. In a country like India the earning of her household would place her at around the poverty line, that is, she would be among the poor but not so poor that she cannot afford the basic costs of migrating to the bottom of the economic hierarchy in the city. The poverty that drives humans to live in the inhuman conditions – which is all that they can afford – in the periphery of a city in the global South, can only be fully understood by those who have experienced it. This author has only been a witness to this level of poverty and has not directly experienced it. Wimoa’s movement from a village to the lower economic strata of a city would also involve her personally experiencing various forms of social discrimination, whether it is based on her caste, tribe, religion, language, ethnicity, or any other identity she may have. This experience is often too complex, and personally damaging, to be fully understood by an outsider. To take an extreme case, those who have lived in close proximity to the vestiges of untouchability in India undergo an experience that others can’t completely fathom. Here again, I have been a witness to, but have not personally experienced, extreme social discrimination.

If, despite the lack of personal experience of some of the characteristics I have attributed to the fictional Wimoa, I have chosen the impact on her to guide the course of this book, it is because of the need to bring gender, as well as economic and social discrimination, closer to the core of urban theory. The fact that the woman has a prominent place in the process of urbanization is quite evident in the global South. Operating within prevailing patriarchal norms, women face the onerous task of maintaining a household in the midst of the uncertainties faced by a family that has just moved to the city. Oddly enough, the domestic workload of women can be even greater in processes of migration where the man sets out to the city alone in search of a job. He uses his social capital to stay at the home of a relative or friend in the city, adding to the burden on the woman maintaining that household. And that woman is often doing so in addition to holding a regular job outside the home (Pani & Singh, 2012). What is more, the nature of gender relations can also alter the course of the process of urbanization. In parts of India characterised by a substantial number of rural workers not being employed for even six months in a year, these workers typically do not have the resources to migrate permanently to expensive cities (Haque, 2022). They are then forced to migrate to the city for short periods in order to maintain their households in the village. The short-term migration usually has a strong gender element to it. The groups of workers who are brought together from villages to work in cities in very difficult shared living conditions, often have little room for women. These large all-male groups of young workers have an impact on the nature of the city they migrate to. They contribute to the urban sprawl, even as their continued loyalty to the village hampers the development of a city identity. And the absence of women in the group can influence the response, particularly that of its adolescent members, to other women in the city.

The nature of a city in the global South can also be affected by socio-economic discrimination in the village. Extreme forms of social discrimination, such as that faced by the Dalits in rural India, can add momentum to the economic pressures that drive them to the city. The degree of anonymity the city provides can buffer some of the extreme social discrimination that is a part of their everyday life in the village. But this process is by no means complete. Some of the discrimination can continue in social relations in the city as well. The interaction between the socio-economic discrimination in the village and that of the city contributes to the emergence of unique patterns of socio-economic inequality in each city; patterns that cannot be brushed aside when exploring the urban. These concerns are shared, in a way, by those, like Ananya Roy, who are interested in the “project of postcolonial urbanism and how the study of cities can be enriched through a renewed engagement with postcolonial studies” (Roy, 2011, p. 307).

Wimoa, as a lodestar, allows for not just women’s interests but also patterns of socio-economic discrimination in the processes of urbanization to be brought into the urban theoretical construct. My not sharing Wimoa’s gender, or her experience of socio-economic discrimination, could contribute to missing some aspects of her involvement in the process of urbanization, even as my lived experience of urbanization in the global South may add the odd fresh perspective to the study of the urban and of the city. This book’s efforts to explore the urban through Wimoa’s eyes may be less than perfect, and just one of the diverse ways in which the urban, and its relationship with the city, can be visualised, but it would help make the method of action that it develops available to even the usually neglected sections of the city.

The challenges of diversity

A major part of the blame for the unfinished theoretical tasks of urban studies must be placed at the door of diversity. There are far too many factors pulling urbanization in very different directions across the world to enable an easy fit into a comprehensive urban theory. The diversity begins at something as basic as the terrain of individual cities. Riyadh, in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert, where petrol is not always much more expensive than water, can have its population spread out over large sprawling tracts of land. In contrast, Mumbai, with its severe constraints of both land and transportation, provides a very different picture of an urban sprawl. Again, Riyadh may have malls comparable in size and design to those in, say, Washington DC, but the experience of being in one is very different in the two cities, especially for women. These cultural differences are, in fact, quite widespread over both time and place. There was a time when Hindus, in pursuit of other-world interests, left their homes to go to Varanasi on the banks of the holy river Ganges to die, in the hope that it would help them in their afterlife (Gesler & Pierce, 2000). In other cultures people can go to a city in pursuit of this-world interests, such as marriages in Las Vegas (Firat, 2001/3). And there are the more stark differences that can be traced to the economy, society, and polity of individual cities; differences that determine not just the material standard of living in a city but also who the city believes you can love and hate, as well as whether you have a say in the way it is governed.

Several of these diverse, and often very visible, characteristics of a city are the result of larger processes. In the decades after the communication revolution much attention has been paid to the processes of globalization. The World Cities literature, in its earlier phase at least, tended to be preoccupied with generating hierarchies of cities, seeming to imply that cities could move up or down this hierarchy (Taylor, 1997). Others have been more concerned with the precise processes in Global Cities (Sassen, 2009). In either case the focus has been on the command and control centres of globalization. But the economic power of these centres emerges, in part, from the resources they tap through cities in other parts of the world. The Y2K problem in the programming of computers of the global North at the turn of the century was addressed largely by tapping technical manpower from cities in the global South, often accounting for a major component of the software earning of the countries where these cities were located (Kumar, 2001). Even bef...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. In the midst of the urban
• 2. The making of urban action
• 3. Spaces and the Proximity Principle
• 4. Negotiations of urban politics
• 5. The place of the city
• 6. The happenings of urban suspense
• 7. The making and unmaking of institutions
• 8. A city is what a city does
• Index