Urbanism is a way of life; or rather transcends that, as a phenomenon, place, and space so enmeshed within our lives, it shapes who we are as individuals and as collectives in society. From the Bollywood hub of Mumbai to the street foods of Delhi, each city has a distinct culture of its own. At the very outset, a place is a physical area we inhabit, marked and bound by a concrete territory, while a space is a perceived area around us that is dynamic, based on where we are and who we are with. Places are tangible, while spaces are not. How then, do we understand cities, in an abstract sense, beyond the boundaries of what the physical infrastructure has to offer to us?
Cities are undoubtedly characterised and distinguished from rural spaces on the basis of their dense population, sophisticated housing and transport systems, availability of services and amenities, and so on. However, more importantly, cities are sites of simultaneous production and consumption, which essentially sustain our ever-growing economy and interconnected lives. The physical and social components work in tandem to create what we consider as “home”. Cities are places where the lives of people from varying social backgrounds converge into one shared space for a variety of reasons. The physical structures are all around us, yet we choose to turn selectively blind when faced with them. Service lifts– lifts constructed specifically for service providers such as domestic workers or delivery persons, are an excellent example of a material exclusionary tool that divides people not only on a physical basis, but also on an emotional and social level. They work in a paradoxical manner– to recognise and highlight the caste, class, income and occupational differences between people, but also to shove them under the carpet under a pretence of inclusion when in actuality, they are exclusionary and ‘othering’ in nature. Such measures only work to foster the already existing social inequalities. This further extends to cultural gatekeeping of who gets to live where. Incomes certainly are reflective of where a person can afford to live, but where a person ‘should’ and ‘could’ live do not align for a variety of reasons ranging from affordability to desire for communal homogeneity.
Slums are yet another example of how social identities intersect at particular places to create ‘spaces’. Slums are an interesting phenomenon to explore, especially since they are specifically an urban ‘problem’. No one ever really mentions rural slums now, do they? Slums manifest the characteristics of both urban as well as rural spaces. They have poor infrastructure and a lack of amenities like rural areas, but also a large population densely packed into one little area. The lives of those coming from such unstructured residential areas and those of us who live in methodically planned apartment buildings and colonies converge and intermingle in urban workplaces. Offices are the simplest example to illustrate this in more relatable terms. Offices and the workforce are hierarchised and divided into those who work for a fixed salary, sit at desks in air-conditioned rooms, and those who work for wages, such as janitors, construction and repair workers, and the peons.
At the end of the day, it is the slum dwellers who run our cities, doing the work that no one else wants to do, but the work that is essential for our collective and efficient survival. Taking our domestic help as an example, a lot of them live in slums and travel to the most posh parts of the city to earn their daily wages. When the pandemic struck and brought everything to a standstill, we struggled to keep up with the demands of ‘outside work’ and ‘house work’ or chores, which were previously handled by the domestic help. The very slum dwellers we want to ‘cleanse’ and ‘remove’ from our sight are the ones who take care of our menial work so that we can go on to sustain ourselves and focus entirely on our ‘outside work’ that is more ‘dignified’. Unfortunately, these are not the kind of cities one gets to see in Bollywood movies, that only sell us a lopsided, elite-catering view of the cities in question.
One of the most fetishised aspects of cities is the leisure opportunities they provide us with. The fancy malls, parks, disco clubs and restaurants we all look forward to visiting on weekends are a byproduct of the hyper bureaucratisation of cities designed to provide leisure, in as regulated a fashion as any of the other services we opt for. We know for a fact that not every locality is the same, and hence we must also take into account what kinds of services are available in what part of a city. The shops, residential apartments, type of roads built and ease of access to resources are all influenced by the purchasing power of the local residents, which is essentially what sustains businesses in the particular area. Surely, people wouldn’t expect to find Nature’s Basket or H&M in a slum area, would they?
Considering another example of pets and pet owners, one is more likely to see dog walkers in South Mumbai, than say, Central or Navi Mumbai. Caring for a pet is no joke as we all might be aware, but simply being able to afford pets and the monetary demands of maintaining one, is reflective of the owner’s socio-economic status. Hence, it is also reflective of consumption patterns of particular neighbourhoods in a city, based on which areas see more incidence of pet owners and pet resource shops. Purchasing land in a city is exorbitant, and even more so if it is for a business venture. The space constraints in cities call for constant negotiations of land, and the kinds of shops, products and services available in one neighbourhood or locality is another physical marker suggestive of what kinds of social identities or communities inhabit that particular niche.
The social ripples of historical events have greatly contributed to the development of the culture of each city. For example, the socio-religious ripples of Ganesh Chaturthi over the past decades have compounded to create the ‘Ganpati Spirit of Mumbai’ or the socio-political ripples of the Shiv Sena. Ripples like these shape the physical and social reorganisation of a city and unite people from different segments of our diverse society into co-existing and co-working with each other to produce complex urban spaces.
Yashee Jha, a multi-faceted student, is an avid commentator on various topical issues. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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