For this assignment, you will research a case of socio-spatial segrega

Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism

ANANYA ROY

Abstractijur_1051 223..238

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.

‘Across a filthy, rubbish-filled creek we enter the slum’s heaving residential area, treading carefully to ensure we do not step in human sewage. Live wires hang from wobbly walls; we crouch through corridor-like passages between houses made from reclaimed rubble as the sky disappears above our heads. Behind flimsy doorway curtains we spy babies sleeping on dirty mattresses in tiny single room homes, mothers busy washing, cooking and cleaning.

The few hours I spend touring Mumbai’s teeming Dharavi slum are uncomfortable and upsetting, teetering on voyeuristic. They are also among the most uplifting of my life.

Instead of a neighbourhood characterised by misery, I find a bustling and enterprising place, packed with small- scale industries defying their circumstances to flourish amidst the squalor. Rather than pity, I am inspired by man’s alchemic ability to thrive when the chips are down.’

Crerar (2010)

An earlier version of this article was presented as the IJURR lecture at the 2009 meeting of the Association of American Geographers. I wish to thank IJURR, and especially Roger Keil, for the invitation. Gautam Bhan provided valuable research assistance for this project. The IJURR reviewers helped clarify the concept of subaltern urbanism and the purpose of this article.

Volume 35.2 March 2011 223–38 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01051.x

© 2011 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2011 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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‘Postcolonial studies, unwittingly commemorating a lost object, can become an alibi unless it is placed within a general frame.’

Spivak (1999: 1)

In the urban imagination of the new millennium, the ‘megacity’has become shorthand for the human condition of the global South. Cities of enormous size, they are delineated through what Jennifer Robinson (2002: 531) has called ‘developmentalism’. Their herculean problems of underdevelopment — poverty, environmental toxicity, disease — are the grounds for numerous diagnostic and reformist interventions. The megacity can therefore be understood as the ‘constitutive outside’ of contemporary urban studies, existing in a relationship of difference with the dominant norm of the ‘global city’— urban nodes that are seen to be command and control points of the world economy. Following Chantal Mouffe (2000: 12), who in turn relies on Jacques Derrida, the ‘constitutive outside’ is not a dialectical opposite but rather a condition of emergence, an outside that by being inside creates ‘radical undecidability’. The megacity thus renders the very category of global city impossible, revealing the limits, porosities and fragilities of all global centers. Is there a megacity future for every global city? What global city can function without relational dependence on seemingly distant economies of fossil fuels and cheap labor? In this sense, the megacity marks the limits of archival and ethnographic recognition. In this sense, the megacity is the ‘subaltern’ of urban studies. It cannot be represented in the archives of knowledge and it cannot therefore be the subject of history.

This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. In it, I seek 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 and politics. This is a vital and even radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity. Subaltern urbanism then is an important paradigm, for it seeks to confer recognition on spaces of poverty and forms of popular agency that often remain invisible and neglected in the archives and annals of urban theory.

However, in this article I undertake a study of the limits of such itineraries of recognition by rethinking subaltern urbanism. Drawing on postcolonial theory, I shift the meaning of ‘subaltern’ from the study of spaces of poverty and forms of popular agency to an interrogation of epistemological categories. Following the work of Spivak (1999), the subaltern can be understood as marking the limits of archival and ethnographic recognition; it is that which forces an analysis of dominant epistemologies and methodologies. Meant to be more than epistemological disruption, the article highlights emergent analytical strategies of research. In particular, 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.

The metonymic slum The megacity is a metonym for underdevelopment, Third Worldism, the global South. As a metonym, the megacity conjures up an abject but uplifting human condition, one that lives in filth and sewage but is animated by the ‘alchemic ability’ (Crerar, 2010) to survive and thrive. And it is the slum, the Third World slum, that constitutes the iconic geography of this urban and human condition. It is the ‘recognizable frame’ through which the cities of the global South are perceived and understood, their difference mapped and located (Nuttall and Mbembe, 2005: 193). Much more is at stake here than

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Gilbert’s (2007: 701) fear of the use of a ‘an old, never euphemistic . . . dangerous stereotype’. If we are to pay attention to what postcolonial critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985: 262) has identified as the ‘worlding of what is now called the Third World’, then it is necessary to confront how the megacity is worlded through the icon of the slum. In other words, the slum has become the most common itinerary through which the Third World city (i.e. the megacity) is recognized.

I do not use the term ‘itinerary’ casually. Today, the Third World slum is an itinerary, a ‘touristic transit’ (Freire-Medeiros, 2009). The most obvious example of this is the slum tour, available in the Rocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro, the Soweto township of Johannesburg, the kampungs of Jakarta and the Dharavi slum of Mumbai. One such slum itinerary appears epigraphically as the introduction to this article. In it, The Times journalist Simon Crerar (2010) introduces his readership to the ‘harsh existence of Mumbai’s poor’ but also to ‘spirit and enterprise’, where the ‘pace of work’ amidst ‘buzzing flies’ is ‘breathtaking’. From plastic recyclers to the makers of poppadams, Crerar charts his itinerary of a humming and thriving slum. It is in keeping with the ethos of Reality Tours, the ‘ethical tourism’ agency whose guides lead tours of Dharavi. Reality Tours (n.d.) presents Dharavi, ‘Asia’s biggest ‘slum’, as a ‘a place of poverty and hardship but also a place of enterprise, humour and non-stop activity’. Proud to be featured in travel guides ranging from Frommer’s to Lonely Planet, Reality Tours (ibid.) makes the claim that ‘Dharavi is the heart of small scale industries in Mumbai’ with an ‘annual turnover of approximately US $665 million’. Tour profits are directed towards a nonprofit organization that operates a school for slum children, and slum tourists are discouraged from wielding cameras and photographing slum reality.

Crerar’s recent ‘slum and sightseeing tour’ references two dramatic worldings of Mumbai: the ‘terrorist’ attacks of November 2008 with its killing sites of luxury hotels and urban cafes, and the blockbuster film Slumdog Millionaire. Indeed, Crerar’s (2010) narrative begins with what is already a well-worn cliché: ‘I’ve wanted to visit Mumbai since Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire swept to Oscar glory. The film is set in Dharavi , the dusty creek-bed where one million souls live in an area the size of London’s Hyde Park, surrounded on all sides by Asia’s most expensive real estate’. In Slumdog Millionaire, the various slums of Mumbai are combined into a singular composition that has come to be interpreted as Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum. This too is a metonym — Dharavi: Slum.

Slumdog Millionaire is a worlding of the megacity, and of the metonymic megacity Mumbai. The film, with its story of a young slum-dweller and his dreams and aspiration, has been the focus of protests in India for both its apocalyptic portrayal of the ‘slum’ as poverty pornography — we are not ‘dogs’ the slum dwellers of India have bellowed — and its romanticization of a way out of the slum — Salman Rushdie has thus dismissed the film as impossibly unreal (Flood, 2009). Crerar (2010) notes that his guide on the Dharavi tour expressed annoyance at the derogatory use of the term ‘dog’: ‘People were angry with the way they were represented’.

Slumdog Millionaire can be read as poverty pornography. It can also be read as a metonym, a way of designating the megacity that is Mumbai. The film depicts the violent nightmare that is Mumbai: the riots of 1992–3 when Hindu nationalist mobs burned Muslims alive in the alleys of Mumbai’s slums; the broken dreams of the migrants who flock to the city but become yet another body in the vast circuits of consumption and capital. Which came first: the fictional and cinematic Mumbai or the real Mumbai of ‘reality’ slum and sightseeing tours? After all, Suketu Mehta’s book Maximum City (2004), which itself redraws the line between fiction and ethnography, is an uncanny shadow history of the real Mumbai. Slumdog Millionaire then is only one of the many fictional technologies through which cities like Mumbai are constituted. The film depicts what can be understood as dhandha — entrepreneurial practice akin to street-level hustling. Everyone is out to make a deal — the entrepreneurs of misery who maim children so that they can beg on the sidewalks of Mumbai; the entrepreneurs of space who replace the slums of Dharavi with sky-high condominiums; and the entrepreneurs of

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dreams who devise game shows as a world of fantasy for the rich and poor. Slumdog Millionaire itself has come to be implicated in a new round of dhandha — from the ‘explosion of slum tourism’ (Crerar, 2010) to the putting up ‘for sale’ of Rubina Ali (one of the film’s child actors) by her father. It is this equivalence of cinema and the megacity/slum that Nandy (1999) and Mehta (2008) highlight in different ways. In the wake of the Mumbai killings, Mehta (ibid.) wrote: ‘Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia’. Nandy (1999: 2–3) argues that popular cinema in India is the ‘slum’s eye view’, with the slum as an entity that ‘territorializes the transition from the village to the city . . . from the popular-as-the- folk to the popular-as-the massified’. Here, categories of equivalence such as ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ connect cinema, slum, megacity and postcolonial nation. It can be argued that this equivalence is the condition of subalternity.

The reception of Slumdog Millionaire in India was marked by protests. Pukar, a Mumbai-based ‘experimental initiative’ founded by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and concerned with ‘urbanization and globalization’, presented a native refusal of the film’s violent narrative of slum dhandha. In particular, Pukar took objection to the word ‘slum’ and sought to reposition Dharavi as a zone of economic enterprise. Here is an excerpt from a Pukar opinion-piece published in The New York Times shortly after the release of Slumdog Millionaire:

Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state . . . Dharavi is all about such resourcefulness. Over 60 years ago, it started off as a small village in the marshlands and grew, with no government support, to become a million-dollar economic miracle providing food to Mumbai and exporting crafts and manufactured goods to places as far away as Sweden. No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the prosperity of Dharavi . . . Dharavi is an economic success story that the world must pay attention to during these times of global depression. Understanding such a place solely by the generic term ‘slum’ ignores its complexity and dynamism (Echanove and Srivastava, 2009).

Pukar’s native refusal of Slumdog Millionaire is an example of what I term ‘subaltern urbanism’. Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the megacity, it seeks to resurrect the subaltern space of the slum as that of a vibrant and entrepreneurial urbanism. In doing so, it confers recognition on urban subalterns, and perhaps even on the megacity itself as subaltern subject. I am interested in this itinerary of recognition and how it shapes the emergence of what Rao (2006: 227) has described as the ‘slum as theory’ — that ‘passage from slum as population and terrain’ to the slum as a ‘new territorial principle of order’. Indeed, the metonymic slum is central to the formation that I am designating as ‘subaltern urbanism’.

Subaltern urbanism It is a hallmark of postcolonial theory that the Gramscian concept of ‘subaltern’ was taken up by modern Indian historiography, specifically by the group known as the Subaltern Studies Collective (Sarkar, 1984; Spivak, 2005). In this appropriation of Gramsci’s ‘Southern Question’, the idea of the subaltern was used to call into question the elitism of historiography (Guha, 1988). ‘Emphasizing the fundamental relationships of power, of domination and subordination’ (Sarkar, 1984: 273), the term came to mean a ‘space of difference’ (Spivak, 2005: 476). Most famously, in Ranajit Guha’s (1988: 44) formulation, the subaltern was the ‘demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those . . . described as the “elite” ’. Thus, subalternity came to be seen as the condition of the people, those who did not and could not belong to the elite classes, a ‘general attribute of subordination’ (ibid.: 35). As Spivak (2005: 476) notes, in such usage, the term ‘subaltern’ was closely associated with the idea of the popular. Subaltern

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politics is thus popular politics and popular culture. Further, in the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective, the agency of change came to be located in this sphere of subaltern politics. In this sense, subalternity became more than the ‘general attribute of subordination’; it also became a theory of agency, that of the ‘politics of the people’ (Guha, 1988: 40). More recently, Partha Chatterjee (2004) has advanced the concept of ‘political society’, a ‘popular politics’ that he distinguishes from ‘civil society’ or the politics of rights-bearing, enfranchised bourgeois citizens. Political society, for Chatterjee (ibid.: 40), involves claims to habitation and livelihood by ‘groups of population whose very livelihood or habitation involve violation of the law’.

I am interested in this shift: from the subaltern marking the limits of archival recognition to the subaltern as an agent of change. As the subaltern is granted a distinct political identity, so this figure comes to be associated with distinct territories. One such territory is the slum. It is also in this way that the idea of the subaltern has entered the realm of urban studies, leading to the emergence of a formation that I call subaltern urbanism. Two themes are prominent in subaltern urbanism: economies of entrepreneurialism and political agency.

Let us return for a moment to Pukar’s native refusal of Slumdog Millionaire. Pukar’s claim that Dharavi is an entrepreneurial economy is well borne out by the work of various scholars. Nijman (2010: 13) for example argues that the urban slum is more than a warehousing of surplus labor; it is also a space of ‘home-based entrepreneurship’. It is this economy of entrepreneurialism that is on display in the ‘reality tours’ of Dharavi. This too has a metonymic character, for the slum’s entrepreneurialism stands in for a more widespread entrepreneurial spirit — perhaps that of the megacity, perhaps that even of the postcolonial nation. Thus, leading Indian journalist Barkha Dutt (2009) writes that Slumdog Millionaire is a ‘masterpiece’ of a movie because it depicts the ‘the energy, entrepreneurship and imagination of the slum kids’. She likens this to ‘the jugadu spirit that is so typical of India’.

Jugadu . . . was originally the word for a marvellous invention — a hybrid automotive that welds the body of a jeep with the engine of a water pump and looks like a tractor. Today it has come to be our shorthand for spunkiness — a we-will-get-the-job done attitude no matter how bad the odds are (ibid.).

In similar fashion, global architect, Rem Koolhaas interprets the urbanism of Lagos as a ‘culture of make-do’(Enwezor, 2003: 116). In his encounter with Lagos, part of Harvard’s ‘Project on the City’, Koolhaas is taken with the inventiveness of its residents as they survive the travails of the megacity. He sees such experimental responses as generating ‘ingenious, critical alternative systems’, a type of ‘self-organization’ creating ‘intense emancipatory zones’(Godlewski, 2010: 8–9). It is not surprising then that Koolhaas draws the following conclusion: ‘Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos’. In this way, the seemingly ‘alien and distant’ megacity becomes the platform for a ‘neo-organicist’ analysis of urbanism (Gandy, 2005; Godlewski, 2010). As Gandy (2006) has noted, such imaginations turn on the premise of ‘ontological difference’, the African megacity situated outside the currents of world history. There is a lot that can be said about the personage of the star architect and the project of the Third World megacity. But what concerns me here is the emphasis on self-organizing economies of entrepreneurialism, and how this leads us to a theory of subaltern urbanism.

Koolhaas, delirious with the power of his own gaze, is easy to dismiss. But subaltern urbanism far exceeds footloose architects looking for new projects of exploration. Koolhaas’ ideas are best paired with those of influential global policy guru, Hernando de Soto (2000), whose libertarian optimism presents the Third World slum as a ‘people’s economy’ populated by ‘heroic entrepreneurs’. Here the slum economy is interpreted as a grassroots uprising against state bureaucracy, a revolution from below. For de Soto such economies are rich in assets, albeit in the defective form of dead capital. The ‘mystery of

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capital’ is how such dormant and defective assets can be transformed into liquid capital, thereby unleashing new frontiers of capital accumulation.

There is a striking resemblance between such arguments of economic libertarianism and the utopian schemes of the Left. For example, in a sketch of ‘post-capitalism’, geographers Gibson-Graham (2008: 613) celebrate the ‘exciting proliferation of . . . projects of economic autonomy and experimentation’. Making a case for the performing of ‘new economic worlds’, for an ‘ontology of economic difference’, Gibson-Graham showcase ‘community economies’ and urge us as researchers to make them more real, credible and viable.

Equally important as a theme in subaltern urbanism is the question of political agency. In his widely circulating apocalyptic account of a ‘planet of slums’, Mike Davis (2004: 28) expresses anxiety about the political agency of slum dwellers, asking: ‘To what extent does an informal proletariat possess that most potent of Marxist talismans: “historical agency”?’. Davis argues that ‘uprooted rural migrants and informal workers have been largely dispossessed of fungible labour-power, or reduced to domestic service in the houses of the rich’ and that thus ‘they have little access to the culture of collective labour or large-scale class struggle’. Against such accounts, subaltern urbanism recuperates the figure of the slum dweller as a subject of history.

Take for example the work of Asef Bayat (2000: 533), who argues that, in Third World cities, a ‘marginalized and deinstitutionalized subaltern’ crafts a street politics best understood as ‘the quiet encroachment of the ordinary’. There is almost a Wirthian quality to Bayat’s analysis, for it is the territory of the restructured Third World city that produces this quiet encroachment. More recently, Bayat (2007) has rejected the arguments that link the rise of militant Islamism to the ‘urban ecology of overcrowded slums in the large cities’. The slum, Bayat argues, may not be characterized by radical religiosity but it does engender a distinctive type of political agency: ‘informal life’. For Bayat (2007: 579), ‘informal life’, typified by ‘flexibility, pragmatism, negotiation, as well as constant struggle for survival and self-development’ is the ‘habitus of the dispossessed’. This idea — of a slum habitus — is a key feature of subaltern urbanism.

In a highly sophisticated account, Solomon Benjamin (2008) delineates the differences between three different political arenas: a policy arena 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 arena of ‘occupancy urbanism’ through which the urban poor assert territorial claims, practice vote-bank politics and penetrate the lower, ‘porous’ reaches of state bureaucracy. Benjamin’s analysis is by no means Wirthian. Indeed, his political-economy account of multiple land-tenure regimes firmly grounds the slum in the circuits of finance and real estate capitalism. But in a manner similar to the Subaltern Studies Collective’s conceptualization of popular politics, he grants the poor a distinctive form of political agency: occupancy urbanism. Such urbanism for Benjamin (ibid.: 719, 725) is necessarily ‘subversive’, appropriating ‘real estate surpluses’ and possessing a ‘political consciousness that refuses to be disciplined by NGOs and well- meaning progressive activists’. In this, Benjamin’s analysis bears close resemblance to Chatterjee’s (2004) conceptualization of ‘political society’ as a space of politics formed out of the governmental administration of populations but escaping such forms of developmentalism.

I am highly sympathetic to the cause of subaltern urbanism. I see it as an important correction to the silences of urban historiography and theory, the ‘sanctioned ignorance’ — to borrow a phrase from Spivak (1999: 164) — that has repeatedly ignored the urbanism that is the life and livelihood of much of the world’s humanity. Even Koolhaas’ encounter with Lagos, as Godlewski (2010: 17) notes, can be seen as a sign of the ‘growing sense that architectural theory should address global practice rather than singular monuments in the Western world’. And it would be naïve to fault subaltern urbanism for the various appropriations of slum entrepreneurialism that today make up an increasingly busy traffic of slum tours, blockbuster films, entrepreneurial NGOs, and globally circulating architects and policy c