Mute Vol 2 #3 - Naked Cities – Struggle in the Global Slums
http://www.metamute.org/en/Naked-Cities-Struggle-in-the-Global-Slums
According to UN research data, by 2030 half of the world's population
will be living in slums. Meanwhile, in Durban's Kennedy Road settlement
residents risk arrest and police violence in their struggle for
toilets and drinking water. The statistics are not supposed to talk back.
This issue of Mute, largely sparked by Mike Davis’ claim that in the
megaslums Muhammad and the Holy Ghost have superceded Marx, considers
another view of the world’s burgeoning ‘naked cities’. Where the
populace are refugees without rights or basic amenities, are new forms
of political action emerging?
Texts by:
Amita Baviskar, Iain Boal, Anna Dezeuze, Michael Edwards, Melanie
Gilligan, Anthony Iles, Demetra Kotouza, Penny Koutrolikou,
Josaphat-Robert Large, Félix Morisseau-Leroy, Kevin Pina, Richard
Pithouse, Benedict Seymour and Rachel Weber
Contents of this cluster
1. Editorial
2. 21st Century Noir
3. Thinking Resistance in the Shanty Town
4. 'We Are Ugly, But We Are Here': Haiti Special Introduction
5. U.N.-Liberating Haiti
6. Poem: Tourist
7. Poems: Keep On Keepin' On
8. Slumsploitation – The Favela on Film and TV
9. Lies and Mendicity
10. Thriving On Adversity: The Art of Precariousness
11. Demolishing Delhi: World Class City in the Making
12. Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban
Redevelopment (print issue only)
13. Delta of Heinous: Developing Thames Gateway. Introduction: Another
Green World
14. Great Expectations: Governing Thames Gateway
15. Blue Skies Over Bluewater
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| and india too waddles into the company of world-class
| cities, by the virtue of its slums. thank you planners. and we are
| really, mute in the face of your accomplishments.
Demolishing Delhi: World Class City in the Making Editorial content |
Magazine
By Amita Baviskar
As London gentrifies its way toward the 2012 Olympics, social cleansing
and riverine renewal proceed in parallel but more brutal form in Delhi.
In preparation for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 the city's slum
dwellers are being bulldozed out to make room for shopping malls and
expensive real estate. Amita Baviskar reports on a tale of (more than)
two cities and the slums they destroy to recreate
Banuwal Nagar was a dense cluster of about 1,500 homes, a closely-built
beehive of brick and cement dwellings on a small square of land in
north-west Delhi, India. Its residents were mostly masons, bricklayers
and carpenters, labourers who came to the area in the early 1980s to
build apartment blocks for middle-class families and stayed on. Women
found work cleaning and cooking in the more affluent homes around them.
Over time, as residents invested their savings into improving their
homes, Banuwal Nagar acquired the settled look of a poor yet thriving
community – it had shops and businesses; people rented out the upper
floors of their houses to tenants. There were taps, toilets, and a
neighbourhood temple. On the street in the afternoon, music blared from
a radio, mechanics taking a break from repairing cycle-rickshaws smoked
bidis and drank hot sweet tea, and children walked home from school.
Many of the residents were members of the Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat
Sangam (NMPS), a union of construction labourers, unusual for India
where construction workers are largely unorganised.
....
Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and many other Indian cities figure prominently
in what Mike Davis describes as a ‘planet of slums’. Slum clearances may
give India’s capital the appearance of a ‘clean and green Delhi’ but
environmental activism has simply shifted the problem elsewhere. The
poor live under worse conditions, denied work and shelter, struggling
against greater insecurity and uncertainty. Is Davis right? Has the
late-capitalist triage of humanity already taken place? Even as
demolitions go on around me, I believe that Davis might be wrong in this
case. Bourgeois Delhi’s dreams of urban cleansing are fragile;
ultimately they will collapse under the weight of their hubris. The city
still needs the poor; it needs their labour, enterprise and ingenuity.
The vegetable vendor and the rickshaw puller, the cook and the carpenter
cannot be banished forever. If the urban centre is deprived of their
presence, the centre itself will have to shift. The outskirts of Delhi,
and the National Capital Region of which it is part, continue to witness
phenomenal growth in the service economy and in sectors like
construction. Older resettlement colonies already house thriving
home-based industry. The city has grown to encompass these outlying
areas so that they are no longer on the spatial or social periphery.
This longer-term prospect offers little comfort to those who sleep
hungry tonight because they couldn’t find work. Yet, in their minds, the
promise of cities as places to find freedom and prosperity persists. In
those dreams lies hope.
Amita Baviskar <baviskar1 AT vsnl.com> researches the cultural politics
of environment and development. She is the author of In the Belly of the
River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley and has
edited Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings. She is currently
writing about bourgeois environmentalism and spatial restructuring in
the context of economic liberalisation in Delhi
cont'd....
http://www.metamute.org/en/Demolishing-Delhi