Abstract
The collection of essays that make this edited volume sets out the task of asking what the street means to us while interrogating both the ‘street’ and the ‘us’. How do different people inhabit the street, what meaning do we make of it and what does the street make of us? The street is never far from our conversations, from discussions on infrastructure (potholes, flood, flyovers, highways) and, therefore, an example of the incompetence and corruption of governments to navigation and co-habitation (crowded, occupied, deserted) and rules and regulations (traffic signals, one way). As the editors argue, streets are rarely just physical spaces but imbued with meaning, power and social relations and are the centre of everyday life—from casual encounters between neighbours to large-scale social movements like protests. Streets are also signifiers—of poverty, respectability and criminality—of those who live on them. Gentrified neighbourhoods with leafy, clean, well-lit streets, poorer neighbourhoods with overcrowded, bustling, overflowing streets, heavily policed streets and deserted barren streets produce us as subjects, as much as we give meaning to these spaces. Spatial politics, inequality and the production of meaning are often intimately tied together in knots that are difficult to unentangle. This volume of collected essays, comprising 15 diverse essays, is a step towards this unravelling.
The introduction sets the tone for the volume by questioning binaries of space/place, inside/outside, home/world and familiar/alien, and it does so by reviewing the dominant disciplinary approaches to the study of streets—history, built environment and social sciences such as anthropology and urban studies—and its limitations. Focusing on the everyday life of the streets while acknowledging that the ‘everyday’ remains a well-theorised domain, the chapters in the volume weave the historical and contemporary together. The chapter by Burte, Jaimini and Singh, for instance, contextualises the spatial and temporal politics of the streets within wider geographies of the city and region. This repudiation of the abstraction of the street, dominant in urban studies that fall back to atemporality, foregrounds ‘events’ as a key ingredient to theorising the ‘everyday’. Similarly, contributions by Jha and De articulate the linkages between the historical and the contemporary, the street and society and a multiplicity of connections that discursively produce the cityscape.
A set of essays that link visual cultures, capitalism and consumption that foregrounds urbanisation as it unfolds as a neoliberal spectacle makes for a fascinating read. While one is probably familiar with the literature on ‘lifestyles’ and gentrification, the desirability of the city, and caste, class and gender markers that produce spaces, Sharma, Ganguly and Krishnan in their respective chapters foreground streets as ‘social things’ that are deeply imbricated in the screening of structural inequalities. Similarly, chapters by Banerjee and Joshi see the street as a site of contests, negotiations and mediations between the dispossessed urban poor and middle-class residents, bringing into sharp focus urban informality, mobility and precarity.
Some of the chapters in the book, notably Patil’s contribution, critique the idea of modernity, deeply embedded in the flagship urban development initiative, ‘Smart Cities Mission’ (2015). Patil demonstrates that the theorisation of the neoliberal middle-class capture of street spaces fails to question the binary of the dystopian transformation of the urban mission and utopian ideas of shared commons, thereby eliminating any possibilities of negotiation and pluralistic contestations. Similarly, Bhutia’s work on North Bengal uses the concept of a ‘choke point’ to provide evidence of how local, regional and global are brought together in a moment of conflict and cooperation. Thus, going beyond arguments of inequality, the chapter demonstrates rhythms and flows of the street that enable the locals to enter into the global circulation of commodities and meaning.
Flows form an important motif in the volume—the rhythm of the street, movements and circulation of people, goods and meanings. Likewise, the practices of the everyday, histories of livelihood and survival and contested sociabilities are a central theme and concerns of the volume. For example, the chapter on coastal Kerala (Thomas and Padmanabhan) shows how traditional livelihood meets newer income generators such as tourism, encounters that leave their imprints on the streets and the social lives of local communities. The dialectics of religion and public life is an important theme and discussed by Ghosh, Morwal and Bharat in their respective chapters on festivals and shrines. In context to urban Hyderabad, Ghosh examines how the implementation of road widening programmes erases settlements and their memories; how do shrines continue to remind us of what has been expunged by urban development and modernity? Shrines located on jagged rocks as traces or afterlives of displacement co-exist with flattened roads as promises of development. Similarly, Morwal and Bharat discuss temporal claims made on the street by communities by setting up pandals and shrines, which are deeply gendered and shot through with an understanding of belonging. The idea of spatial religious subjectivities continues to be explored by Bharat as a mode of claim-making in the public sphere by subaltern groups. The final chapter in the volume (Jha), is a deeply reflexive piece on the streets of riot-torn Delhi, and tries to understand the dynamics of violence and vulnerability that haunt a nation torn apart by increasing violence against women and minorities in the last decade.
The volume of essays far exceeds the promise of its title, ‘The Social Life of Streets’, as it presents itself as an important and handy reader for scholars interested in studying urbanisation, public domains and, more specifically, the spatial and temporal politics of India as it deep dives into the promise of ‘Smart Cities’, which insists on making Indian cities future-ready. This book is essential for those keen to understand the politics of this temporality—of both its failures and its contradictions.