Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria

The Slow Boil

Street Food, Rights and Public Space in Mumbai

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 232
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Mai 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 440g
• ISBN-13: 9780804798228
• ISBN-10: 0804798222
• Artikelnr.: 44383153

Autorenporträt

Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Introduction
chapter abstract
The introduction examines what is at stake for a study of spatial
contestations in Mumbai. It outlines three theoretical conversations with
which this book engages. Firstly, it discusses how the themes of inequality
and urban citizenship are explored in the literature on conflicts over
space. Secondly, it discusses how transnationally circulating concepts of
streets and public space shape cities in the present. And lastly, it shows
how conflicts over urban transformations must contend with the
incongruities of the "everyday state" and the varied forms of political
recognition it offers. In doing so, this chapter offers a broad outline of
the legal, political and social context of the Mumbai hawker controversy.
2The Unruly City
chapter abstract
The municipal government has dealt with the "hawker nuisance" at least
since the 1880s. And yet, scholars often treat demolitions, dispossessions
of the poor, and elite-oriented development as effects of a new logic of
urban governance associated with neoliberalism. This chapter show that, for
over two centuries, the authorities in Mumbai have struggled to control a
landscape of encroachments and illegalities. The chapter provides an
account of the history of informality in Mumbai to challenge this
assumption of novelty. Drawing from various historical documents-including
official publications, travelogues and early twentieth-century
newspapers-this chapter shows that for over a century, people's encounters
with state functionaries have been characterized by compromise, co-option,
and negotiation rather than anonymity and disciplining. What is new about
the contemporary urban moment is not spatial contestation itself but its
broader significance as a site for negotiating the form and content of
rights.
3Occupied Streets
chapter abstract
This chapter provides an account of how street vendors inhabit the city,
its streets and its public spaces. In doing so, the chapter answers the
questions: What does it mean to work on the side of the road without a
license? And, is it is an act of urban exclusion or of rebellion? Writings
on informal economies typically fall into one camp or the other. By
contrast, this chapter shows how hawkers occupy a contradictory
existence-inhabiting a vulnerable legal existence while deeply enmeshed in
the daily life of a neighborhood. It argues that this space between
precarity and possibility offers a model for urban ethnography: attention
to political economic processes and affective experiences is not mutually
exclusive-with one more "real" than the other-but exist in a generative
tension that is constitutive of urban life.
4Managing Illegality
chapter abstract
Street vendors' spatial claims are secured through cultivating
relationships-sometimes intimate ones-with state functionaries, often
through unofficial payments called hafta, but also through
counter-surveillance, social interactions and public protest. This chapter
examines these encounters with the state. It shows how, despite being
unlicensed, hawkers' everyday experiences are marked by proximity to the
state rather than distance. Street vendors' protracted encounters with BMC
officials, clerks, workers, and the police challenge the language of
abandonment and abjection that informs much scholarship on urban
marginality. As I demonstrate, the street is not only a product of the
disciplinary techniques of rational governance but an outcome of a
negotiated process: in the eyes of the everyday state, unlicensed hawkers
are not simply outside the law, but exist in a spectrum of illegality. This
spectrum opens up possibilities for negotiation.
5Estranged Citizens
chapter abstract
When civic activists brought attention to the "hawker problem" in the
1990s, they raised new questions concerning urban citizenship, corruption,
and the proper form of democratic politics. This activism demonstrated that
the question of whose voice is heard in urban governance was inseparable
from the question of how to speak to the state. This chapter shows how
middle-class residents' engagement with the informal life of the street
produces a sensibility of the "estranged citizen." This sensibility
reflects a feeling of alienation from traditional circuits of power. To
civic activists, street vendors symbolize state corruption and
inefficiency, but also powerlessness in face of the illiberal rights claims
of the poor. However this chapter argue that as a sensibility, the
subjectivity of the estranged citizen is irreducible to a single political.
This ambivalent subjectivity has the potential for open-ended politics that
goes beyond efforts to appropriate urban space.
6Improvisational Urbanism
chapter abstract
Whereas to civic activists Mumbai's fluid, ad hoc, streetscapes represent a
problem, to architects, designers, students, and writers around the world,
these features are increasingly celebrated as a virtue. This concluding
chapter examines the new place of the ad hoc streetscape within
transnational architectural discussions on the megacity. Thirty years ago,
Mumbai's landscape of squatters, slums, and informality was seen as an
embarrassment; now these characteristics are often celebrated in exhibits,
blogs, and films as signs of innovation, ingenuity, and small-scale
entrepreneurialism. Resignifying "underdeveloped" urban landscapes as
instances of "makeshift" or "tactical" urbanism raises new empirical
questions such as, how does informality figure in the "branding" of cities?
And, how is this new way to read urban landscapes recalibrating the
relationships between the universal and the particular taken for granted in
postcolonial theory?