Understanding Third World urban condition is at the very heart of understanding the global condition, IPSITA CHATTERJEE explains how
The global condition, in many ways, is being shaped by the urban spaces of the Third World, where the majority of people are likely to be living. Understanding the Third World urban condition is, therefore, at the very heart of understanding the global condition. The Third World urban condition is, however, a collage of contradictions - it is simultaneously the site for spectacular Olympic games and also the site for spectacular slums. It is tall, imposing, shining, and green and at the same time interstitial, marginal, and exclusionary. It embeds megalomaniac landscapes of malls, image maximum theatres, and sports stadiums, and also embeds landscapes of slum eviction, poor removal, and demolition — in fact, the megalomaniac landscapes are predicated on a microscopic overhaul of the poverty-scapes of contemporary city life.
Urban geographers, planners, anthropologists, and sociologists have vividly put forward the exclusionary urban morphology, many arguing that globalisation and associated policies of neoliberal structural adjustments have deepened the urban contradictions. Much research devoted to understanding the global urban condition is, therefore, a quest to make explicit the contradictory nature of urban change under neoliberal globalisation
In this book, I explore one all-pervasive and perhaps ever-present urban contradiction, namely displacement. Displacement is a contradiction, because it uproots some while simultaneously emplacing others. Displacement is so fundamental to urban exploitation, and because the urban is so central to the global condition, displacement defines the global condition.
Conceptualising displacement should be a more ubiquitous exercise than it has been -while interstate or international migration, movement of refugees across space, has been rigorously studied, and while the politics and economics of slum demolition and eviction have also received considerable attention, what is latent here is that displacement forms the fundamental mechanism on which these processes of migration, urbanisation, urban development, and slum clearance are predicated. The uprooting or deterritorialisation is exploitative, because it robs people of their right to home, livelihood, place, and memory and allows others to accumulate space, place, profit, livelihood, and memory. Their re-rooting or resettlement in new spaces can be equally exploitative, because these new spaces may be oppressive in their new tropes of cultural and economic alienation.
Displacement embeds uprooting and re-rooting, both of which territorially ground exploitation. Therefore, displacement is usually always the socio-spatial dialectic of urban exploitation, and it is also the socio-spatial dialectic of accumulation for those who can displace “others.”
The Third World urban context is replete with multifarious displacements - of people moving from rural areas into cities, of people shoved out from interstitial spaces of railway stations, from under overpasses, and from pavements, of entire slums pushed out of “prime” locations, of people chucked out of formal jobs, and much more. The politics that aims to resist displacement, in turn, attempts to ground emancipation. I have chosen a globalising city in India, Ahmedabad, which I know quite well, to understand how class and ethno-religious exploitation is grounded through displacement, how emancipation is forged through resistance, and how imaginaries of emancipation are fractured.
Exploitation happens not only because the accumulators of capital, that is, the global and local political and economic elite extract surplus value from labour by depressing wages and increasing hours of work as Marx (1990) explicates. But the extraction of surplus value is itself a sócio-spatial process, whereby labouring landscapes and lifescapes — homes, hearths, and job networks of labour — are usurped, bulldozed, flattened, and reproduced into landscapes and lifescapes of accumulation. The theft of space from labour and its conversion into spaces of profit is achieved through displacement and resettlement. It is as if the swear, blood, and toils of labour that seep into the pores of the very earth it inhabits are torn away from under their feet, bleached off their blood stains and the sweat carefully removed to produce a new earth that is estranged from labor and the very process of laboring. When the labouring poor are heterogeneous in their ethno-religious composition with a sizable portion belonging to an oppressed religious minority, for example, the Muslims of Ahmedabad, the socio-spatial extraction of surplus is a class and an ethno-religious process. The resettlement of the exploited in new spaces does not allow reclamation of space, life, and livelihood; instead, it triggers new rounds of exploitation by containerising the poor in resettlement sites not of their choice. Any resistance that frames a struggle to reclaim the city for the labouring poor and the labouring minority poor must, therefore, reclaim surplus value by reclaiming labouring spaces, landscapes, and lifescapes by refusing to be displaced or by demanding the right to stay put, and hence the right to toil, sweat, and stain the very earth that forms its being. The politics of governing an increasingly entrepreneurial city that has a huge mass of poor who are likely to be disenfranchised by the NUP of neoliberal entrepreneurialism must find creative ways to reframe its extractive policies so that they do not appear blatantly exploitative. NUP (as touted by the NUP literature) in the Third World, therefore, is an exercise in identifying and extracting more and more spaces that must be bleached, perfumed, and sanitised for accumulation, but the extraction process itself must rely on strategies and discourses that can carefully cloak the corrosive effects of accumulation.
Excerpts from Displacement, Revolution, and the New Urban Condition by Ipsita Chatterjee, Rs645, published by Sage