[Urbanstudy] Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01

[anant m]

Dear Shveta, 

Thanks for these notes. I see them as helpful in picking up the threads from the discussion in the wake of the Nangla Machi petition. Lawrence raised an interesting question at that time which set me off thinking about the stability and instability of the slum in a somewhat different direction.  L. pointed out that Nangla Machi's legal status has always been at best precarious. Yet, it remained stable (even thrives in some instance) for 30 or 50 years. What is it about the present moment that makes it come unstuck ?  

What you are suggesting is that the survey process, enabled by the discourse of rehab., produces 'individuals'. This survey has two important consequences  1) it constructs viable objects for action by agencies of government 2) it produces new desires, new interests and reorients the actions of individuals and groups of individuals. It has terrible consequences for some and not so terrible consequences for others and perhaps delightful consequences for some. 

I am intrigued by the way you deal with the temporal dimension in your notes. 

You say LNJP was built over years and the slow process of surveying is central to unraveling it. There is some tension between those two statements. Building over time is also a slow process. The myriad networks that constitute LNJP, changing ever so slight every moment, somehow gained a durability which is now coming apart. 

Did surveying play no role at all in that building? to my mind it played as central a role in stabilizing LNJP as it is playing in unraveling it. Government agencies found treating poverty as a particular kind of stable spatial entity - namely the slum worked well. Development and  welfare action could be targeted at that entity through this project or that. Local police stations could keep detailed surveillance maps. That governmental technique individuated, created objects for developmental or welfare action and reoriented these new subjects to identify themselves through I cards, ration cards etc. to legitimately occupy their place.  Of course as in any governmental technique there is always a surplus. A yawning gap, a big failure because lived life simply exceeds the grid. 

I think it is useful to keep these continuities in view for us to be able to come up with better approximations of answers to the question that Lawrence  raised. Why is this particular survey attempting to unravel LNJP whereas earlier surveys provided those little anchors around which people wove their everyday lives. Is this really about dispersing individuals  like scattershot across the city's map ? does the new logic of governing poverty really demand that individuals should not recongregate ? Or is it that they be oriented so as to congregate in more manageable patterns ? How do those patterns relate to the larger urban space? who are the winners and losers within LNJP ? Your notes clearly point to some of the losers. What is not clear however, is a) the losers' relation to the winners in LNJP and beyond,  and b) how over time, some people came to be occupying that particular slot that is marked for the loser. Your notes seem to suggest that
 'gender' as an identity could be the framing device that we are groping for. 

anant

-- On Tue, 3/17/09, Shveta <shveta at sarai.net> wrote:

> From: Shveta <shveta at sarai.net>
> Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantlin of a Neighbourhood 01
> To: Urbanstudygroup at sarai.net
> Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 2:11 AM
> dear All (Solly, Anant and Jeebesh),
> 
> There is a slow process by which a neighbourhood, built
> over decades, is 
> dismantled. Surveys are decisive in this unmaking. Through
> the discourse 
> of rehabilitation, however, the complex fabric of a
> neighbourhood's 
> economic life, financial networks, social security buffers,
> forms of 
> political negotiation, shared social spaces are eroded away
> from the 
> perspectives by which we build a collective assesment of
> eviction and 
> demolition. All that remains is individuals and their
> houses. The 
> individualisation of rehabilitation of houses creates a
> blockage to 
> thinking outside the grid produced by the survey.
> 
> Over a series of postings I'll share my understanding
> of the slow 
> dismantling of the neighbourhood as we are seeing it in
> LNJP.
> 
> warmly
> shveta
> 
> -----------------------
> 
> Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01: Information
> Rehabilitation!
> 
> Perhaps the most successful fiction of our times is the
> fiction of the 
> "stable document" that feeds efficiently into
> information systems. It 
> persists. A document is supposed to be immutable and immune
> to the 
> experiential and perceptional universe of those who have
> acquired it, 
> not acquired it, have a scarcity of documents or have
> produced a surplus 
> of documents around them in their lives. The stuff of life
> is not 
> germane to "information". Many can drop by the
> side, but the information 
> system will keep marching on.
> 
> Shamiya Bano received the house in which she lives as a
> gift from an old 
> man who had made it, and with whom she and her family lived
> as a tenant 
> after they came to the city. Little did she realise during
> the twenty 
> five years in which she built it up with her husband and
> lived in it 
> that they would be jeopardising their family's claim
> for resettlement 
> when her husband got a passport made so he could go to work
> in the UAE.
> 
> Hajiya Begum was old, but not unknown to the ways of the
> world. She knew 
> that after her death, if she wanted to ensure the family
> does not break 
> apart in the tussle over who would be its true claimant,
> she should will 
> her house to her then young grandson. Before her death she
> also 
> remembered to have her ration card with his name in it
> renewed. What her 
> grandson Mohd. Sher did not realise was that in leaving his
> childhood 
> name Raju behind as he stepped into adulthood with an
> election I-card, 
> he would be nullifying any claim for resettlement that
> could be made on 
> account of this, his grandmother's house.
> 
> Buddhima was a mother of a young boy when the first
> official identity 
> cards were issued to the residents of her neighbourhood.
> She got one 
> made in her name; it would be a security for the future of
> her young 
> son. But four years later, when many got their first
> election I-cards 
> made, her son was in the hospital, and she did not fill the
> form to 
> apply for it. When he died, she lived amidst her
> neighbours, who took 
> care of her, and she never applied for a ration card.
> She's an old woman 
> now, with a proof of having once been in the neighbourhood.
> But without 
> paper proof that she has continued living there all these
> years, that's 
> just half of what can make her eligible for resettlement.
> 
> When their mother, Shanno, died three years ago, the father
> of the young 
> children left home, never to return. The neighbourhood
> arranged the 
> marriages of the two eldest daughters, and the younger
> children began to 
> get by by giving the first floor of the house on rent. The
> eldest among 
> these was twelve when they began life on their own, and
> today they can't 
> remember if the documents that will make them eligible for
> resettlement 
> were among the old things of their mother's that they
> gave away several 
> months ago.
> 
> Mahruni was raised by her father's brother, a man who
> had three sons but 
> no daughters. He had her name included in his ration card,
> with her 
> biological father's name listed in the column asking
> "Father's Name". 
> The members of the adoptive family died over the years - of
> age, in 
> accidents, of illness. She didn't renew the ration card
> after that, not 
> realising that she would have to show it years later in
> order to claim 
> resettlement.
> 
> Shakeela has an election I-card and ration card issued in
> her name in 
> 2008. The first official I-card was issued in the name of
> her first 
> husband, the first ration card in the name of the second
> husband, with 
> whom too she parted ways later. Strong-willed enough to
> have lived 
> through three marriages and in the house that she had made,
> she knows 
> her documents are too unstable to ensure her resettlement.
> 
> Surya Bhan Raye built himself and his family a secure home
> in the heart 
> of the city over thirty years. In the intensity of life,
> its velocity, 
> its demands and its urgencies, he did not notice that for
> fifteen years 
> two documents - the ration card and the election I card -
> had begun to 
> record different addresses for his single home. What
> jeopardises his 
> family's claim to resettlement is his stubborness that
> if fifteen of the 
> best years of his life have been lived with these two
> diverging 
> identities, then his future too must be based on an
> acceptance of them.
> 
> Sahiba's father-in-law, long deceased, was known by two
> names all his 
> life, and her husband's documents faithfully tell which
> of the two names 
> he remembered his father more by at different points of
> time in his 
> life. Her family's foggy claim to resettlement is now
> blurred a second 
> time over by the cuts and the scratches she made on the
> identity 
> documents in order to bring to bear upon them their
> consistency.
> 
> - to be contd -
> next Karkhana/Godam/Dukan
> 
> 
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