D. Asher Ghertner

Calculating without numbers: aesthetic governmentality in Delhi's slums

Abstract This article looks at the manner in which knowledge of slums in Delhi has been collected, assembled and circulated in two different moments of urban improvement to explore the relationship between calculation and governmentality. Based on an extended study of slum enumeration and the politics of slum demolitions in Delhi, I show that each of these two moments relied on an epistemologically different set of calculative practices – one statistical, the other aesthetic – to render the slum intelligible and secure rule. I specifically show how the statistically rigorous calculative practices of the first moment encountered various technical difficulties and political challenges in producing a governing intelligibility, thus leading to the unruliness of slum space. In response, a new set of governmental techniques operating through the dissemination of aesthetic norms and codes re-secured rule over slums. I describe this shift in governmental technique to demonstrate that the dissemination of aesthetic norms can be both more governmentally effective and practically implementable than the statistical deployment of governmental truths. This suggests the need to expand our understanding of the epistemology of government to include attention to a more diverse array of governmental technologies, some more aesthetic than strictly calculative.

Why gentrification theory fails in ‘much of the world’

I n Schafran’s (2014, 321) paper for City’s re-inaugurated Debates section, he writes that ‘gentrification has never been more relevant as a global urban force’. Noting that ‘Mumbai is gentrifying, Rio is gentrifying, Luanda is gentrifying’, he argues that after 50 years of gentrification scholarship, ‘critical urban studies must continue to investigate and expose the ongoing mutations of this paradigmatic urban transformation’ (Ibid.). Taking up Schafran’s call to ‘throw down the gauntlet’, I want to ask whether gentrification is really such a useful concept for describing displacement in Mumbai, Rio and Luanda. Is it time to lay the concept to bed, to file it away among those 20thcentury concepts we once used to anticipate globalized urbanization? If by gentrification we mean nothing more than a rising rent environment and associated forms of market-induced displacement, then gentrification does indeed appear to be a global phenomenon. However, as I recently argued with specific reference to India (Ghertner 2014), this definition is so broad that it diverts attention away from more fundamental changes in the political economy of land in much of the world. More specifically, I argued that gentrification, as an analytic, renders unthinkable and invisible the regulatory and legal changes that underpin the most violent forms of displacement taking place in cities with enduring legacies of largescale public land ownership, common property, mixed tenure or informality. This includes China, post-socialist Europe, and many Southeast Asian and sub-Saharan African countries with enduring communist or socialist legacies (Rabé, Thongbonh, and Vongsiharath 2007; White et al. 2012; Kovac, Wiessner, and Zischner 2013). It also includes India, a country where up to 25% of all land is commons, not including the vast reserves of state-owned land acquired over 40 years of socialistic land policies (Chopra and Gulati 2001). Cities with large numbers of squatter and unplanned settlements should also be included in this category. ‘Much of the world’, in other words, features a mix of public, common and customary land uses. It is these nonprivate tenure regimes that are being targeted by the planetary trends of land privatization, property formalization and tenure regularization—the dominant drivers of displacement over the past decade (Davis 2006; He 2007; Ghertner 2008; Abasa, Dupret, and Dennis 2012; Payne and Durand-Lasserve 2012; Wolford et al. 2013). Moreover, it is these processes of land transformation that gentrification scholarship has increasingly sought to subsume within its remit. To take but one example, Lees (2012) builds her case for ‘Gentrification in the Global South’ by referring to slum demolition in India, Pakistan and Chile and similar forced displacement from state lands in China— what scholars (including those whose empirical insights Lees draws from) otherwise call ‘property market expansion’ (Shih 2010)—as instances of gentrification. Defenders of the application of gentrification theory to such contexts—and there are many—must hence be understood to be making the implicit assumption that these processes are simply

India's urban revolution: geographies of displacement beyond gentrification

This paper uses an analysis of key dynamics of sociospatial change in Indian cities to offer a sympathetic critique of recent efforts to extend gentrification theory into the Global South. Despite the postcolonial overtures of this new, Southern gentrification literature, the paper argues that the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification of its analytical specificity that it loses both its explanatory power and its political potency. The paper shows that gentrification theory operates on four implicit presumptions, which fail to characterize the primary dynamics of urban change in India. These include: (1) the presumption that lower-class displacement is driven by a reinvestment of capital into disinvested spaces; (2) a property centrism; (3) an agnosticism on the question of extraeconomic force; and (4) the presumption that land from which lower classes are displaced finds a ‘higher and better use’. A priori commitment to the gentrification analytic thus overlooks key features of urban change in contexts, like India, with property, planning, and legal systems different from the postindustrial geographies from which gentrification theory developed. The paper suggests that ‘urban revolution’, ‘enclosures’, and ‘accumulation by dispossession’, while equally abstract terms, more clearly allow for the comparative analysis of displacement. Keywords: enclosure, commons, right to the city, postcolonial city, slum, informality, comparative urbanism

Technology and Tricks: Intra-Household Technology Implementation and Gender Struggles

Abstract This article argues for non-asset-based approaches to the assessment of technology implementation at the household level. It suggests that most studies of technology and gender focus primarily on the relationship between technology implementation and women’s access to material resources without giving adequate attention to non-asset-based strategic possibilities for social change. Using the case of a cookstove improvement program in rural north India, the article shows that existing approaches to studying gender and technology implementation have underspecified the role of strategic gain in household bargaining and that existing theories of ‘resistance’ do not adequately describe the subtle forms of political action that take place in the household. It offers a new way of conceptualizing ‘tricks’ in the realm of household negotiation over technology and policy implementation, places this form of strategic struggle in relation to theories of resistance, and suggests the importance of understanding such struggle for development policy.

Does violence have a signature

Ayona Datta’s essay, “The Intimate City,” deals with complex questions of violence and intimacy in the city, beginning with the “critical event” that became known as the Delhi rape case—a brutal act perpetrated by six lower-class slum residents against a middleclass, female university student. As Datta notes, the Delhi rape case has been analyzed through the same logics of geographical and cultural determinism long relied upon to explain Delhi’s viciously misogynistic public spaces. The geographically deterministic argument holds that Delhi has become India’s “rape capital” because of its lack of geographic cohesion, its incorporation into the neighboring, traditionally patriarchal states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, and its lack (until recently) of a centralized train system that could provide women with safe passage through the city. The culturally deterministic argument, alternatively, attributes the aggressively male character of Delhi’s public spaces to the prevalence of “backward classes” whose “uncouth” behavior and male chauvinism, so the argument goes, stunt the development of the city’s urbanity. Datta suggests that these logics come together in the popular notion that it is the pathology of the slum—which is seen to lack adequate physical space to ensure a clear public–private divide and to harbor culturally marginal classes and castes—that causes sexual violence in the city. She rejects this deterministic logic, noting how it “feeds into wider anxieties around slums in the city” that both justify slum removal and deepen the sexual violence to which poor women are subjected. However, while rejecting the simplicity of the “slum pathology” argument, Datta somewhat surprisingly embarks on an analysis of how female slum dwellers and slum-based social workers deploy this very logic in their accounts of sexual violence. In the three stories that she presents—centered on Ameena, Meenu Kumari, and Shraddha—women in the slum describe the “social and moral degeneration of slum communities” as a function of their tight living spaces and the pathology of the one-room dwelling. In the language of the social worker Meenu Kumari, the tight confines of the slum hut force children to be exposed to adult sexualities from a young age, which leads to the subsequent development of perverse sexual behavior and violence. Datta’s key claim is that behind women’s use of such narratives of slum degeneration lie embedded “claims for the right to intimate space.” While the women do not themselves articulate a specific demand for increased living space, she asks that we interpret their language on these terms, which she further argues can function “as an argument for the right to the city.” The argument that gendered claims for the right to privacy be understood on the terrain of the right to the city is highly provocative and does much to push urban