Travelling through Delhi is a reminder of the transience of power. From a rickshaw or the new Metro, rapidly becoming one of the largest public transport networks in the world, reminders of various rulers that the city has outlasted flash by; from crumbling walls of Turkish sultanates to the white columns of the British Empire. The layering of history over the some 2600 years that this place has been settled has led to the development of contradictions that Delhi’s residents absorb on a daily basis. And none are more obvious than the division between the north and south of the city, between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Delhi.

In Old Delhi I am penned in on all sides by rickshaws and honking, narrow laneways of bangles, wedding haberdashery, stationary and books, the smells of kebabs, parathas, sweets in clay pots, the smoke from barbeques, and tables piled with calendars and plastic monuments. The sweet seller remembers me from my last visit 18 months ago. He has been there almost every night for as long as he can remember. This is Chandni Chowk, with the mighty, flood-lit Jama Masjid at its heart. Chaotic cables and electricity wires are as entangled overhead as its laneways and knotted communities.

Delhi
[image by wili_hybrid, some rights reserved]

Across the round-about at Delhi Gate is New Delhi, with its Barista and Costa Coffee café chains, hip clubs, neon signs, mega-malls with premium high-street brands at European prices, wider roads, greener spaces and construction sites. Next to the broken walls and parapets of history are other buildings being broken, a new one built, another storey added. Metro and Bus Rapid Transit corridors divert traffic, including almost 300 000 new cars added to the roads in recent years. Traffic is now a constant crawl, giving commuters time to read the billboards that line the flyovers, promising ‘world class lifestyles’ in satellite cities that are green oases on the outskirts of this megalopolis of almost fourteen million. Newspaper advertising highlights the ‘global experience’ of living in these enclaves.

Delhi has followed a pattern of redevelopment that concentrates investment in gentrification enclaves; intensifies state intervention, for example, building new infrastructure and designating others as ‘illegal’; and fragmenting the city into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ terrains, with those areas marked as undeserving also marked for demolition. Boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn and there is the physical removal of those that don’t fit within Delhi’s 2021 Master Plan for urban development.

Edge cities have been created to cater for the flow of transnational corporations and transnational professionals as well as a burgeoning middle class. If you get a call from an Indian call centre chances are they are in Noida or Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi. These edge cities are marked by new condominiums, villas, proximity to malls and multiplexes, and facilities such as health, education and leisure centres, crèches, lawns and landscaped gardens, yoga centres and spas, with clearly delineated boundaries and internal homogeneity maintained by gated surrounds.

But there are other types of edge cities being created as well. ‘Cleaning up’ Delhi to achieve global city status required the removal of shanty towns, jhuggis, the closure of small traders, and whole neighbourhoods of what were predominantly resettlement areas of rural migrants and socio-economically marginalised populations being demolished and their inhabitants forced to move to outlying areas of the city.

At this moment in Delhi, a locality, a slum to use the more familiar word, is being surveyed for demolition. This community has ‘illegally’ and organically established itself since 1969 at the crossroads between Old and New Delhi. I have driven past this place dozens of times and not realised that some 15000 people live behind the crowded, jumbled shop-fronts. Officials will ask each household in the locality to prove, via a ration or voter registration card, that they have lived here prior to 1998. If you can prove this, and you can pay Rs 7000 (approx. £100), you can be given a plot of land approximately 12.5 square metres in a new resettlement area called Ghevra; perhaps a larger plot up to 18 square metres if you can prove you lived here before 1990. Your home will be marked with a cross and it will be demolished. You will then have to move your family to Ghevra, live in temporary shelter, under plastic or metal sheeting or thatch, in blistering summers, pouring monsoons and bitterly cold winters, until you can afford to pay for a new home to be built. If you can’t prove you lived in the locality before 1998 then you have no options; you must simply move into another crevice in the city.

Ghevra is some 50km from the city centre and will reportedly become one of the largest resettlement colonies in Asia once the planned demolitions and forced displacements have occurred. During a visit to Ghevra in March 2007, there was little infrastructure in place: water was trucked in, there was yet to be a school built, and latrines were portable, made of metal, shimmering in forty degrees of early summer heat. Most of the inhabitants were unemployed, removed from informal employment networks when they were moved out of the city and away from trading centres such as Old Delhi. Returning on this trip, two years later, little has changed. There are more pucca, brick houses, but there are still thatch shanties and there are still people living in tents waiting for their legal status, their entitlement to a plot of land here, to be sorted out in the never-ending bureaucracy. Most of the houses have metred electricity now and there are cement latrines and washing areas but there is still no running water. Meanwhile, an apartment built for the Commonwealth Games athlete’s village, built on land from which people were displaced, can be bought for Rs 2 crore (£284 000) to Rs 3.5 crore (£497 000). The viewing apartment contains a flat screen television which can be viewed from the bath. Saskia Sassen’s geographies of margins and centres are clearly played out in Delhi in this spatial relegation of those already at the social and economic periphery of the city.

Power is explicit in this process, in both the hegemonic acceptance of a particular aesthetic in urban planning, and, as we are seeing in other cities throughout Asia and Europe, the removal of increasingly invisible people. There is little consultation with those about to be displaced and little debate in the media about the violation of the right to secure housing. There is hope, however, in the creation of new social spaces, including cyberspace, in which dominant political, economic and cultural systems can be challenged by everyday experience and learning processes that can shape interpretations of the environment. Consequently, protest becomes centred on other fragments of the city being no longer able to ignore the presence of its peripheries. The urban landscape of Delhi, marked by the fragility of power in its historical landmarks, is a daily reminder of the possibilities of such new alliances in the city.

Find out more

Slum demolitions in Delhi since the 1990s: An appraisal

'City Transformation and the Global Trope: Indianapolis and Cleveland'
by David Wilson
in Globalisations no. 4

‘Economic Restructuring, Urban Change and Regeneration: the Case of Dublin’
by Michael Punch and P.J. Drudy
in Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Vol. 29

Open University courses such as Understanding Cities.

About the author

Melissa Butcher is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University. Her research and teaching focuses on managing change in culturally diverse urban spaces.

Subscribe to Melissa Butcher's posts

 

Who would have thought? The three big Detroit automakers (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) and European carmakers are on the brink and need billions of dollars and euros to stay afloat. The debate in America and Europe is massive and divisive. There are as many people who think these companies should be rescued as those who think it is a bad idea to bail them out. The numbers mobilized for or against these arguments are so big that they (numbers) are barely comprehensible. The number of workers who would be made redundant is talked about in millions (of people). The money that would be required to keep them afloat is talked about in billions (of dollars). Yet, the automobile is so entrenched in global culture that it is impossible to measure the impact of what’s happening in quantitative terms alone.

Model T Ford.
[image by me'nthedogs, some rights reserved]

Between the time when Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 and Jack Kerouac wrote his classic On the Road in 1951 (published in 1957) the automobile became the most ubiquitous technology that affected every aspect of American and European cultures in the twentieth century. While the computer and Internet generation may not see it that way, the automobile is the technology that had the biggest impact on the twentieth century. (Perhaps nuclear fission and the moving image are the other two.) Again, the numbers that one can cite about this impact are mind numbing: annual road deaths (thousands), average commute times (hours), carbon dioxide emissions (tonnes), suburban sprawl (acres), oil dependency (barrels), and social isolation (priceless). The automobile has altered the character of the city in the twentieth century like no other technology and like no other time. The walkable city has now either disappeared or is consigned to the central areas of a few cities with outrageous house prices (since there is so little left of it) that persist despite the credit crunch. As both Steffen Böhm and Brian Ladd argue in their recently published books even for those who’d rather not drive to work there is very little choice left. Has this all been worth it?

I think not. The automobile has been amongst the most destructive technologies deployed to remake the modern city and its countryside. There was nothing inexorable about the rise of the automobile and the way in which it destroyed the city. Automakers aggressively pushed train companies out the market and bullied governments into building roads rather than investing in green public transportation systems. Generations of people have been saying these things since at least the 1920s with much more eloquence and knowledge than I can here. But automakers (just like tobacco companies) have invested billions of dollars in marketing and advertising to seduce people into thinking that the automobile and driving are ‘cool’ and ‘fun’. By changing the city and countryside so radically the automakers made the automobile necessary — at an enourmous cost.

Perhaps we should shed no tears for automakers (at least no more than we shed for bankers) if not for the workers and their families. Could we not find a way to employ all those workers in productive (rather than destructive) industries? Can we not invest all those bailout billions in rebuilding cities and creating new public transportation systems? It is conceivable that one day automakers (if they survive) will be treated like tobacco companies. If there is a clever lawyer out there who wants to get the ball rolling with a class-action lawsuit against all automakers (for all the destruction they have caused), I am sure there are people who are ready to sign up. Given that oil production has reached its peak, the break in oil prices is only fleeting and is estimated to dramatically increase. Will we then see the automobile off the road?

Find out More

• Against Automobility. By Steffen Böhm. Published by Blackwell.
• Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. By Brian Ladd. Published by University of Chicago Press.
• Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. By Cotton Seiler. Published by University of Chicago Press.
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). By Tom Vanderbilt. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.

About the author

Engin F Isin is professor in politics and international studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

Subscribe to Engin Isin's posts

 

It was the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk who introduced his non-Turkish readers to the Turkish word hüzün. In his book Istanbul he suggested that hüzün is a peculiarly Turkish word that is untranslatable to any other language. It does not exactly match the meaning of words such as melancholy, nostalgia, somberness, sadness or even blues, which comes closest to it. While referring in part to all of these words hüzün still maintains a distinct feature by identifying an emotional state or mood where one withdraws into oneself but without necessarily feeling down. It is a kind of longing that makes one feel okay about longing. It is perhaps longing to long. It is not surprising then that Leonard Cohen comes closest to hüzün in his Book of Longing. Nor is it a surprise that hüzün makes its appearance in Istanbul. Pamuk tries to explain the peculiarity of this word through its particular association with the city of Istanbul. Being the capital of a disappeared empire, if not culture, Istanbul, or so Pamuk makes us think, is rife with symbols and images of longing. Istanbul, it appears, is a city of longing.

This is rather, well, hüzünlü, if not sad. It gives an image of the city that withdraws into itself longing for its future to come or for its past that’s gone. Istanbul and hüzün are perhaps closely associated. But this city is so vibrant, so creative and so energetic that I feel hüzün is only one of its moods.

Hüzünlü Bosphorus
[image by Engin Isin © copyright Engin Isin]

Another of its moods that I find so seductive is keyif. Like hüzün this Turkish word is untranslatable into at least English. Also like hüzün it shares meanings with various words such as enjoyment, delight, and pleasure and yet it is not captured fully by any of them. Unlike hüzün, which reaches to the past or future or both, keyif is about the present. It is about being suspended in the present and its intoxicating nothingness. I say ‘intoxicating’ for a reason. One of its meanings is being high. The French word jouissance (enjoyment) especially known for its usage by Jacques Lacan comes closest to keyif. But Lacan associated jouissance with sexual pleasure while keyif is really not about sex. Keyif is sensual but not necessarily sexual. What keyif shares with jouissance is that emotional state or mood as a suspension in the present.

Keyifli Bosphorus
[image by Engin Isin © copyright Engin Isin]

Like hüzün, I think keyif is peculiarly associated with Istanbul. This city is a city of spaces of keyif. These spaces manage to put you in the mood of keyif. That’s why this blog is called şehrin keyfi, which means the city of jouissance. But now that I disassociated keyif from sexual pleasure you should not think of spaces of keyif as including spaces of sexual creativity! Yes, there are plenty of those in Istanbul (as I am writing this I can look out my window to see a transgendered person across the street offering his/her services for the libidinal economy) but the spaces of keyif I have in mind are those spaces of the city that invite its inhabitants to suspend themselves in the present if only for a moment. In a city of intense vitality and energy, this not only means seeking relief from that intensity but also managing it by enjoying it.

There are many spaces of keyif but I think one of their shared orientations is either catching a view of the Bosphorus or being on it. It seems for centuries mosques, churches, synagogs, fountains, parks, cafes, and many other public spaces have had this orientation. It seems every architect and builder in the city has been in competition to catch a view of the Bosphorus (often with disastrous consequences especially in recent decades). Every building, it seems, tries so hard to orient itself to the Bosphorus in order to catch a glimpse of its glorious glisten and glitter. Sipping coffee or tea and catching the view (with a delicious desert) is an indispensable keyif that suspends you in time. It is almost as if when you catch that view you feel you are spared the hustle and bustle of the city and while you are of it you are not in the city just for a moment.

To have keyif means to lose oneself not only in time but space and to catch a view only to find that we are all thrown together in this madness called the city and then say ‘I might as well enjoy it’. Rather than being its opposite perhaps keyif is another side of hüzün.

About the author

Engin F Isin is professor in politics and international studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

Subscribe to Engin Isin's posts