Jatkar, Harshavardhan;
(2024)
Subaltern politics at urban borderlands.
Urban Planning
, 9
, Article 6974. 10.17645/up.6974.
(In press).
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Abstract
Cities around the world are developed through modern/colonial boundaries between formal/informal, private/public, vehicular/pedestrian, secular/religious, human/nonhuman, or new/old. Postcolonial and decolonial theorists have demonstrated how borders have served the colonial control of the city through the state apparatus, where differences have reinforced inequalities rather than engendering an open city. While the politics between the two sides of the border is often explored, this article draws attention to the rather unacknowledged role of urban borderlands in making room for subaltern agencies to come into being. To do so, I first demonstrate the bordering effects of modern planning practices through an example of real-estate advertisements. Later, I focus on four urban borderlands, namely-walls, mandals (socio-religious organisations), hill slopes & rivulet banks, and alleyways. Through ethnographic research on two slum rehabilitation projects in Pune, India, I show that the spatiality and temporality produced by these borderlands transcend modern boundaries while making room for subaltern agencies. Walls are used for bending the fixed spatiality of modern apartment buildings; mandals engender a spatiotemporal structure that straddles the religious/secular boundary; hill slopes and rivulet banks support the permanent temporariness of the self-built neighbourhoods; and alleyways allow the public and the private to flow into one another. Here, subaltern agencies effectively transgress modern borders, not by rejecting them but by inhabiting them to make an alternative and open city possible. In effect, this article argues that urban borderlands make visible subaltern agencies that have the potential to dislodge urban theory and practice from their colonial modernist legacy.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Subaltern politics at urban borderlands |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.17645/up.6974 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.17645/up.6974 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © Harshavardhan Jatkar. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | India; modern boundaries; modern planning; postcolonial urbanism; Pune; subaltern agencies; urban borderlands |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Bartlett School Env, Energy and Resources |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10184973 |
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