urB

Social structures
an

Space stories:Production of urban space

Written by: anand jha(2005 jds 6006)

guided by: Dr.Ravinder kaur
 01 Introduction

Imagine being born in limbs, in layers, imagine being born continuously Witness, as the dead
cells are scrapped away from the body ,hair turns white, or grows over your hand and legs. We
often wish this growth away, shave facial hair, often we keep it because we feel we look better
with it ,often we trim it.

It is not a perfect analogy ,cities aren't as algorithmic as this because each city
is unique in its history, context and location. And that probably is what makes them interesting.
An urban space is not just an aggregation of places and activities over them, its not just the
administrative city or the slum, the production center or the city market. An urban space is the
music of horns at the traffic jam, an urban space is also an unusual gathering of people at the
construction site to run away from the rain. More than the planned space, it's the produced and
actualized space that gives the city its character, its shape , its stories.
 02
Planned spaces

Before we talk about planned space in a city ,we have to find who plans it. What does this
planning symbolize, it also includes the debate on who owns the city, importantly so because
cities have often been inclusive, even if its been on fringes ;they are made by people who have
migrated and added value to the city, people who grew up as the city grew, who created systems
which needed more people to keep churning value, financial, industrial, political, educational
and religious . These parameters which called in new migrants also divided city :indigenous and
migrants, ethnically divided, divided by religion and faith, divided as rich and poor, as producer
and consumer ,as owner and worker , as institution and institutionalized. These divisions
produced structures, spaces with pre decided functions and also spaces which were reactions
revolts or just actualization of an attempt to fit in and exist. We take a closer look at forces
which plan the city.
Planned spaces

Manuel Castells, in his discussion on dependent urbanization critically looks at the theory of
underdeveloped nations and suggests a dominant -dominated relationship as a
foundation for this kind of relation. He points out the need for analyzing cities in
underdeveloped or the so called developing world from three perspectives.

. An analysis of the pre-existing social structure in the dependent society

. An analysis of the social structure of the dominant society
. An analysis of their mode of articulation, that to say ,of the type of domination

He then classifies this domination as

.colonial domination: a direct political and administrative take over ,which also leaves
changes in the way of living of the colonised, their occupation, their perception of themselves
and myriad other changes. It would be also interesting to note that there is a comparative
change in the influence that these changes have on the existing setup which could be
predominantly rural as in case of India or predominantly tribal as in case of central Africa.

.capitalist-commercial domination: with the changing rationale’ of control in global politics

ways of indirect control gained prominence, procuring raw material much below their value
cheaper labor and dumping back the finished product at prices much higher than their value
span off the second age of global control.

. Imperialist industrial and financial domination: has happened through speculative

investments ,institutional direct or through mergers. This is followed by creation of local
industries which control movement and delivery of services , products and value based on
strategy of profit.

What is interesting here is to see the spaces that these dominations have produced.
While the initial influx of manufactured textiles in calcutta and wiping out cottage handwoven
producers created cheap labours for city’s factories, it also created street dwellers,people
who transformed public spaces such as streets and railway stations into something as private
as a space to sleep (Sudipto kaviraj : filth and public sphere concepts and practices about
spaces in calcutta), while we take up production of spaces later ,it becomes clear that these
city spaces were as political and class centered as orthogenetic cities, just that it was the
control of a profit making imperialist coloniser and not a religious conquest. The citadels of
yesterday morphed into the walled sahib enclaves out of bounds to commons and the
garrison towns which could also be called exercises of fear post 1857. While these spaces
resulted out of a capitalist-commercial domination, similar to the spaces that dominating
Planned space

Countries create in their protectorates, different space was created in New Delhi, creating an
administrative structure around plantation bungalows, housing the colonial domination in its
celebrated jacket. Post Indian independence till pre-globalisation, administrative structures
created celebrated and reflected the legacy of direct colonial control. Post globalisation
the urban spaces created around the city of Delhi (Gurgaon and Noida predominently) are
the result of financial and industrial domination from new centers of global control (Noida
resembling the American city with sec-18/atta as the downtown with its swanky malls with other
sectors organised as suburbs, sector 15 as the upmarket and sector 12/22 as lower middle
class settlements, sector 58,59 and 60 as industrial estates. However such a planning has its
own classical situations such as villages of Harola and Barola trapped near sectors 10 and 49
creating which house the shrunked village and its original inhabitants and also the migrant
workers predominantly from western UP and Bihar gestating a future slum with its own ethnic
pockets ,situations of clash and solidarity creating spaces which are actualised in various hues
and shapes, breeding lovely stories).

Beyond this ,taking again a clue from Manuel Castell’s essay one could find production
of urban spaces as photocopies , so we have Bangalore, a city which now is the hub of
software based activities popularly called as silicon valley of Asia as a new harbinger of a new
colonial control as Kanpur once was (remember :the manchester of east, another harbinger).
During their initial phase of industrialization ,there was no grouping of similar industries (the
plan of lack of planning)which created spaces and activities which set foundation for these
cities to grow in patches and in filth .Beyond this idea of industrialization of convenience is the
idea of industrial area which was created by acquiring huge agricultural tracks from the
hinterland and converting it into an urban space creating new set of relationships and
dialogues between the city and it neighbour the gentrified village. Another thing of interest is
the urban growth between urban nodes which housed emerging middle class of the city who
couldnt manage to get into the government city around the administrative setup, and supplied
manpower to both the nodes (places like Sarita vihar and Lakshminagar came up as urban
patches to link urban nodes such as New Delhi and Noida.

Planned urban space as a reaction to an event is another important aspect of this discussion.
Various spaces allocated in New Delhi had been developed as punctuation in India’s political
history. While most of the sectors in Faridabad came up as a reaction to accommodate
migrated population post partition, C.R.Park was developed to house migrants from
East Pakistan post the independence of Bangladesh. Further still Pamposh Enclave was
developed as a settlement to accommodate people after Kashmir insurgency.
Planned space

While demographic pressure is often concluded as the fundamental reason for the expansion
of cities, a critical observation would tell us that this pressure is not generated on its own.it is
directed, designed and crafted at a macro level by the dependent -controlling urbanization
forces and at a micro level by ripples these forces create in terms of acquired tastes,
that the structure is supposed to reflect and the function that the structure is supposed to
perform.

Most of the cities created in layers show evidences of various defferent influences in planning
at various historical milestones ,influences that we discussed in this discourse.

And cities aren’t just planned in layers,they are produced in layers.

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 03
Produced space

Henri Lefebure in his essay , industrialization and urbanization connects the urban problematic
with the activities in the city. And these activities make the city, as a symbol, as a concept, as a
story with lots of metaphors thrown in. City is actualised by people who participate in it for
various reasons, so the first question that opens the discussion for us is, what is someone’s
reason to be in the city, and this question could further travel and sound as, whose city is one
living in, borders are dynamic, slums recess in and malls push up and then slums grow on
the roads and behind the apartments of gentry, in the act of offering their services they also
go about declaring their ubiquity. It is this reason to be in the city that manifests itself in
everyday version of city which Michael De Certeau captures in his set of essays in Practice of
Everyday Life. While he zooms out and talks about a panocular entity which watches the city,
it also creates the debate on whether this eye of the city god just witnesses. How much of a
stake holder is the urban god in manufacturing of reality. And who is this urban god, who does
it belong to. While everyone produces and consumes spaces for herself, an exchange in
these spaces create new set of realities for us. If we talk about the activities governing the
creation of this space, we could begin with the arrival in the city ,the act of someone’s history
copulating with the juggernaut of present and producing a space which belongs as much the
city as to the person who generates it. We could then move on to territorisation of a space,by
nodes at which we interact with the city, workplace, residence, market, hospital, meuseum....
We consume as we produce. We also consume religion and in India where this becomes an
important factor in deciding where people live and who they trade with, what kind of friendships
they have and how they include or exclude. While there is the politics of undercurrent( the
politics of religion, the politics of class creation, the politics of trade and business etc) there
is also the popular politics, the politics of affiliation and that again is instrumental in deciding
who belongs where in the city and what reality of city belongs to whom. The geography of the
city ( with the example of riverside factories of Manchester,as discussed by Frederick Engles)
also decides how city begins and how it takes itself from there.
 Produced space

There is the new geography of city after it begins ,and this fabricates new sets of realities.
Sudipto Kaviraj in his essay Concepts and practices about space in Calcutta talks
extensively about sidewalk sleepers and actualisation of a different space in parks marked
owned and protected by filth, sitting much in contrast with what was actually conceived
function of space. This new geography of the actualised ,also clearly reflects in the way
structures change in weekends or after the offices close down. Dariaganj in old Delhi
remains a business district on weekdays and morphs into a huge roadside book and
stationary mart in the weekends. Similarly the unwalled spaces beneath the offices at
REUTERS building in calcutta change into a rickshaw stand and shelter as the offices
close. One can also look at the notion panocularity behind high riser buildings as a symbol
of capitalist control of city and temples (Birla temple in Hyderabad ,Iskcon temple in
Bangalore ,Babulnath temple in Mumbai or any other city hill temples) as symbols of
religious control.

We would also like to look upon how city creates its citizens ,controls them mentally and
physically and aggregates them into an obedient mass. while we could have discussed
on the interactions and creation of space in transport system (right from the point of
a citizen’s arrival in the city) it probably would be interesting to look at how transport systems
control and un control the population. Issues like what time should people reach home in
the night to the issues of ‘my private space’ in a packed bus/train are where city regulates
and controls, scares and disciplines the citizen through the dynamics of spaces, and these
spaces have different dynamics for different people , a slum dweller might get scared at a
swanky mall, as much as a bungalow owner gets scared when his car stops accidently near a
slum in the middle of night, a city governs selectively through its structures and spaces, on
the lines of gender, ethnicity, class, occupation, language and various other parameters
generating a potpourri of emotions and these emotions, fear, comfort etc create stories that
make a city.

A city as an epitome of democracy is a myth and this myth is colorful with its own layers,
its own dynamics and its own ephemeral realities.
 references

04
Manuel castells: the urban question

Michael de carteau: the practice of everyday life

Lewis mumford: the slum its origins

Frederick engles: manchester in 1844

Sudipta kaviraj:filth and public sphere

Foucault reader: Paul rabinov

Henri Lefebure: Writings on city