Pushpa Arabindoo

Rhetoric of the 'slum’

Despite Gilberts recent identification of the ‘return of the slum’ as a dangerous trend (2007), scholars such as Rao (2006) assure us that there is a broader theoretical interest in applying the term ‘slum’ in a normative sense, as it offers a new analytic framework for understanding the global cities of the South. Using the recent politics of large-scale slum evictions in Indian cities, this paper explores this tension, asking if a theoretical return to slums can help generate new narratives of poverty, serving as an important site in which historiographies of neoliberalisation in the global South can be unfolded and addressed. It underscores the need for a new direction in collecting ethnographies of the urban poor in India as they negotiate the current political and policy drive for creating ‘slum-free’ cities, conscious that the resulting spatial articulation could possibly reveal how formal and informal geographies connect with each other in increasingly multiple and complex ways. As this paper argues, what is needed in the context of contemporary urban change involving harsh and often violent slum eradication strategies is perhaps not ‘slum as theory’ but a sincere engagement with in-depth, empirical case studies that clarify much of the uncertainty surrounding the spatialisation of urban poverty.

Mobilising for water: hydro-politics of rainwater harvesting in Chennai

In 2003–2004, as the Indian city of Chennai faced an unprecedented water crisis, a debate ensued about finding longer-term sustainable solutions, ranging from expensive desalination plants to modest rainwater harvesting schemes. The latter was enforced by an authoritative state and promoted enthusiastically by environmentalists to raise awareness about the citys much-destroyed hydrological ecosystem. In contrast to the states interpretation reducing it to a compulsory hydraulic installation in individual buildings, environmental NGOs made a concerted effort to develop a more comprehensive intervention in the wider public domain. However, as a dizzying array of socio-political actors came together, concerns emerged about the ability of such a mobilisation to generate a uniform material understanding of rainwater harvesting as a common moral goal. Examining in detail one specific case study of a community-led effort – Puduvellam – this article looks at how, as a grass-roots organisation involved in the restoration of a prominent temple tank in southern Chennai, it rallied support amongst the local (mainly middle-class) residents to create a new topology of ecological consciousness. Its success, however, was only partial and highlights the futility of romanticising rainwater harvesting as an indigenous alternative. More importantly and ironically, its ineffectiveness was enhanced by the crisis itself as it triggered a process of privatisation and commodification of water, with rainwater harvesting eventually being absorbed by the agenda of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’.

The calculus of telescopic urbanism

Developing Amins invocation of a telescopic urbanism as more than a visual metaphor, this paper seeks to rethink its epistemological and methodological focus, resisting at the same time the tendency to oversimplify the relationship between the different optics he outlines. Threatened by a dominant meta-narrative of a numerically driven calculus, this paper identifies an opportunity in Amins telescopic urbanism to reject the ‘big-data’ approach to the city. In this context, it challenges the narrow assumptions about planetary urbanization rooted in a quantitative veneer and a statistical dependency that is arbitrary and ahistorical. Moving beyond our current obsession with the ethos of enumeration, it identifies the need for a situated knowledge that accommodates the statistical alongside the anecdotal outlining not just a thesis on the urban poor but also rethinking the episteme of the city as a machine for learning.

Middle-class moralities: everyday struggle over belonging and prestige in India/Being middle-class in India: a way of life

oppressed nor resistant rebels. They muddle through their lives, working the angles that make the most sense to them within the constraints of their locations. The insightful analysis of marriage and contemporary changes in marriage practices will be of special interest to students and researchers. Polit argues that longer periods of time spent in school, greater age at marriage, the involvement of youth in their own marriage arrangements, and the Sanskritization of marriage practices (especially a shift from bride price to dowry) have decisively affected the ways in which women and girls can negotiate collective agency through gendered performance in local contexts. This has changed the meaning of being young and female in Chamoli. This change also has relevance for the theoretical framing of Polit’s data, as it vividly demonstrates the shifting ways in which embodied performance constructs gender, and illustrates the transformation of performativity and gender meanings over time. Although its vibrant ethnographic analysis of local daily life for Dalit women in Chamoli is impressive, the stories told in Women of Honor would have been still more compelling if more thoroughly situated in the context of relevant feminist scholarship on the region, and political and economic trends in the region. For example, when Polit shifts focus from marriage practices, to analyze gender and place in the experiences of young married women, her analysis would have been enriched had she engaged more thoroughly with feminist ethnographic work on rural women’s lives in the central Himalayas, especially anthropologist Shubhra Gururani’s work published in Gender, Place and Culture. The book as a whole would have been conceptually more rigorous had ethnographic data been more thoroughly situated and analyzed in relationship to regional caste politics and political economy in Uttarakhand (indeed, the movement for a separate state in Uttarakhand was, in part, shaped by regionally distinctive caste politics), and in relationship to national political and economic trends, which have implications for the Sanskritization of marriage practices among Dalits living in Chamoli. Despite this, close attention to shifting gendered performance, its rootedness in place, and the collective agentive possibilities opened up in Dalit women’s daily lives by strategic performance of culturally specific habitus make Women of Honor a rewarding read, and a thoughtful contribution to scholarship on gender construction and agency in South Asia. The book will appeal to cultural geographers and anthropologists, as well as scholars of South Asian, Himalayan, religious, and gender studies.

Editorial: A geology of Marx?

Not many would have heard of Neduvasal, a village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu where, since February 2017, farmers and environmental activists have been protesting against the Central Governments decision to award contracts for development and extraction of hydrocarbons to 31 sites across the country, a vaguely defined 10 km2 of land in Neduvasal being one of them. While the government has maintained that the protestors are ill-informed about the nature of the project, given the history of the national oil conglomerate, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) extracting hydrocarbons in this fertile delta region for decades, fears of oil exploration and production taking over farmers’ fields, livelihoods and future is not unfounded. Against a context of broad rural distress, this particular area has retained a comfortable agrarian economy, but has been fighting environmental threats (mostly around groundwater pollution) from crude oil leaks and abandoned oil wells for a while. The particular proposal that triggered agitations early this year comes out of the Discovered Small Fields initiative, part of Prime Minister Narendra Modis flagship energy policy (within the much trumpeted ‘Make in India’ enterprise) to reduce the countrys dependence on oil imports by 10% by 2022. Within a 100 km distance of Neduvasal there are around 600 wells with only 200 in production. The remaining, barring a few that are used as injection wells are abandoned, resulting in the desiccation of nearly 2000 acres of fertile land (based on an estimate of roughly 5 acres per well), which have now been overrun by the invasive species Prosopis Juniflora, one that has triggered a parallel controversy around the ecology and economy of wastelands in India.

Unprecedented natures?: An anatomy of the Chennai floods

Between November and December 2015, the southern Indian city of Chennai (alongside the northern coastal regions in the state of Tamil Nadu) experienced torrential rains with unanticipated flood consequences. Notoriously known as India’s ‘water scarcity capital’, instead of the proverbial ‘poor monsoons’, a series of low-pressure depressions with ‘record-breaking’ rainfall submerged the city rapidly, as homes and apartments flooded, communications were cut and transportation came to a standstill, including the closure of the airport. Even as environmental activists took the state and its allied actors (in the development and planning sector) to task over what they considered was a deliberate and reckless ‘urbanisation of disaster’, the state sought refuge in the argument that this was an unprecedented (global) weather anomaly. Recognising the need for a more robust (post-) disaster discussion, this paper offers an anatomy of the floods that begs a broader rethink of 21st-century urban disasters and argues that the current discourse offered by the social science of disaster is insufficient in unravelling the complex spatial and environmental histories behind disasters. It goes beyond setting up a mere critique of capitalist urbanisation to offer a cogent debunking of the deeply engrained assumptions about the unprecedented nature of disasters. It does so by dismantling three commonly invoked arguments that transgress any kind of environmental common sense: (1) the 100-year flood fallacy; (2) the ensuing debates around environmental knowledge and subjectivities; and (3) the need to spatially rescale (and regionalise) the rationale of the ‘urbanisation of disaster’. It concludes by raising concerns over the persistence of a resilience discourse, one that relies on the will of the ‘expert’ underwriting not only a non-specific techno-scientific approach but also perpetuates a politicisation of risk that shows little promise of accommodating new epistemologies that are socio-ecologically progressive.

A Review of "Urban theory beyond the West: a world of cities", Edited by Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne

ars thinking for some time! In a round up of the best of housing studies, you would expect to find a constructive critique of, and perhaps some firm recommendations relating to, policy. And this book ends with just that perspective, in a balanced and important set of essays on homelessness, subsidies and affordability, on one hand, and on social housing and residential segregation, on the other. These chapters are all worth reading; the policy community should certainly do so, taking notice of key findings and their implications. Nevertheless, by the time I had finished combing through them, I wondered whether there was perhaps one gap worth highlighting. Might there be space for one more chapter tackling the much bigger picture: housing as an intervention in the wider economy; housing wealth as a solution to inequality, whether within or between generations; the achievement of tenure neutrality, and so on? To be fair, such themes are woven through parts of the book and Clapham’s conclusion forces ‘futures thinking’ too. That is why, in the end, I challenge anyone to dip into this text without taking something new and important away. It is a ‘state-of-the-art’ collection, which offers an interdisciplinary even transdisciplinary perspective on the most important themes in the field; it is a fine, thought-provoking read. So, perhaps I am old fashioned if I ask whether, at the very end of a project like this, we might dare to use housing studies to transcend the (postmodern) world of meticulous small stories essential though these are in exposing the limitations of housing policy and practice today and embrace a new era of much grander thinking? This housing studies handbook tells us today something important about what tomorrow could, perhaps should, become; that’s why the broad normative implications of a book like this deserve a chapter of their own.