[Reader-list] marking city scapes

[solomon benjamin]

Dear Group
This is a response to Zainab's two richly detailed and wonderful essays which evoke so many senses of the city as it operates for those who are so closely connected to street life but also impacted by broader events. 

Some wonderful lines from Zainab's postings:

Democracy and information operate despite labels and boundaries of legality and illegality. .....People develop tactics over a period of time. They develop tactics of how to deal with power and with persons in power. They know how to make their way around. The key lies in not being fearful of authority. If you fear, you can be terrorized.

I am reminded of a wonderful book that shows Bombay (of the early eighties) in a similar detail, 'Shantaram' by Gregory Roberts. What I feel is critically important in these accounts is that they force us to look at the city terrain from alternative categories, and see how the ones used by architects and planners (to beautify the city and urban form) can seriously hurt others who use the city as a place for survival. The move Zainab writes of selling toys to socks being dictated by what you can save from a police raid in a zone declared as a no-hawking zone. Or then, the move to make VT a museum (by the conservationist?). Are these then competing forms of marking? I am reminded of some recent debates in Bangalore where in the concern for trees being cut, and disappearing wetlands, we have almost a comical reaction - if the issue was not so tragic and serious. First, if one should term tanks as lakes or not, the discussion being steeped in aesthetics - leading to a subtle hedging of
 the more serious underlying political issues. Second, and equally de-politicizing, is the argument to bring back greenery and developing 'mini-forests'. Like the conservation efforts made in Bombay, these three approaches coming from architecture and urban design, see the city as a physical entity and hence the marking of it, in those terms. Can we then move beyond the physical attributes of space and location which seem to imprison us in politically neutralizing categories? Zainab's essay, reminds me of a wonderful book, "Street signs Chicago: Neighborhood and other illusion of big city life" by Bowden and Kreinberg which is a devastating critique of the planners aligning with big business to make the concept of neighborhoods a myth. This however, brings me to what seems a saving grace for our context which in the US has been cleaned out from the era of Tammany Hall: The complex, messy, local politics that still may allow the Shah Rukh, Raghu Kaka, and Arjun Bhai to survive. Such a
 democracy may not resemble the one that George Bush wants (and perhaps thank god for that!) or be one that the BBC sees as being "proper". If some of you saw the recent documentary films on Venezuela and the election of Chavez, such a democracy is also not one coming out as social movements against an authoritarian dictatorship. Instead, it is perhaps one of stealth, of tactic, and how to not feel terrorized despite the difficult situations. Perhaps, this is the real nightmare of the Master planners, the return home landscapists, conservationists and the "Swadesh" types,  the party high commands, the World Bank lending to the MMRDA, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force and their corporate funders, the Kharniars and Ragendra Raos: A politics of "Juugaard" which is human but also few central figures to drive it, which is underground but open in every street corner, and where the everyday acts of people in the street form its building blocks.

Solly Benjamin 26 dec 2004

Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partneronline.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041226/dc1af34b/attachment.html