CITB02H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter week4: Class Conflict, Nationstates, Beyond Recognition
ANANYA ROY ARTICLE: RE-THINKING SUBALTERN URBANISM
- Mentions megacities are now used to describe the Global South plagued w/
“developmentalism”: underdevelopment, poverty, env. Toxicity, disease
- Articles is about an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban
studies transform ways global cities are studied/represented in urban research
oLooks at Subaltern urbanism (formation of ideas) which undertakes the
theorization of the megacity and its sub-altern spaces and subaltern classes
oHer article is looking to rethink subaltern urbanism shift from studying
poverty to looking at epistemological categories
Also looks at analytical strategies for research including: peripheries,
urban informality, zones of exception, and gray paces
The metonymic slum
- Megacity is a metonym for underdevelopment, the Global South
This metonym conjures up image of filth, sewage 3rd world slumthat constitutes
the geography of this urban/human condition is the frame through which 3rd
world cities are looked at and perceived
Slum is most “common itinerary” by which a 3rd world city (Eg. Megacity) is
recognized
- Slums are looked as distinct eg. Tours of the favela in Rio
o“ethical tourism”
“Dharavi slum is a place of hardship, poverty, but also of enterprise and
non-stop activity
Dharavi is looked at as slum through slumdog millionaire (small area w/
1m people, surrounded by rich people)
People annoyed at being called “dog”
- Slum dog millionaire = poverty pornography, tries to romantacize a way out of the slum
Can be read as poverty pornography a metonym for designating the megacity of
Mubai
Shows the negatives of India (nationalism violence, everyone trying to do a street
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level hustle)
Slums are seen through popular cinema as an entity that “territorializes the
transition from the village to the city”
- Movie release was met with protests by Indians (didn’t like the negative/violent
narrative of the dhanda (street hustle) in the slums sought to reposition Dharavi as a
zone of economic enterprise
- Pukar “a Mumbai-based ‘experimental initiative’ founded by anthropologist Arjun
Appadurai and concerned with ‘urbanization and globalization’,” example of subaltern
urbanisms: try to reposition the space of the slum as that of a vibrant, entrepreneurial
urbanism
Subaltern Urbanism
- Idea of “subaltern” was used to call into question the “elitism of historiography” and
tried to emphasize the “fundamental relationships of power, domination, and
subordination” a space of difference: the demographic difference between the indian
pop. And the elite
- Subaltern politics are popular in poltics and culture became a politics of people
- Roy is talk about: the shift from subaltern as a means of limiting recognition of people
to subaltern as an agent of change (specifically in distinct territories and in granting
them a political identity; areas like slums)
This is how she gets to “subaltern urbanism”
o2 themes: economies of entrepreneurialism and political agency
-“Pukar” argues urban slum is more than warehouse of surplus labour; it’s a space of
home based entrepreneurship however: this has a metonymic character to it b/c
“slum’s entrepreneurialism stands in for a more widespread entrepreneurial spirit”
-Architect Rem Koolhas looks at urbanism of Lagos as a “culture of make-do”, as areas of
“self-organization” creating “intense emancipatory zones” makes megacity appear
alien and distant
oEasy to dismiss
oPair ideas w/ Hernando de Soto libertarian optimism looks at 3rd world slum as
a “people’s economy” w/ entrepreneurs slum is looked as a grassroots
uprising against state bureaucracy
- Big theme in subaltern urbanism is political agency
Mentions “Planet of Slums” Davis mentions the informal workers have “little
access to the culture of collective labour or large-scale class struggle”
-Solomon Benjamin
Delineates the diff. between 3 diff. political areas: (1) policy area penetrated by
real estate lobbies and finance capital; a civil society arena that seeks to restrict
political activity to those deemed to be “legitimate citizens”; and an area of
“occupancy urbanism” through which the urban poor assert territorial claims
- Roy sees SUB-U as a “correction to the silences of urban historiography and theory” that
has repeatedly ignored the urbanism that is the life and livelihood of much of the
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Mentions megacities are now used to describe the global south plagued w/ Also looks at analytical strategies for research including: peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception, and gray paces. Megacity is a metonym for underdevelopment, the global south. This metonym conjures up image of filth, sewage 3rd world slumthat constitutes the geography of this urban/human condition is the frame through which 3rd world cities are looked at and perceived. Slum is most common itinerary by which a 3rd world city (eg. Slums are looked as distinct eg. tours of the favela in rio: ethical tourism . Dharavi slum is a place of hardship, poverty, but also of enterprise and non-stop activity. Dharavi is looked at as slum through slumdog millionaire (small area w/ Slum dog millionaire = poverty pornography, tries to romantacize a way out of the slum. Can be read as poverty pornography a metonym for designating the megacity of.
