CityReads│Governing the Postcolonial Suburbs
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Governing the Postcolonial
Suburbs
The essay points to a theorization of postcolonial suburbs not as a historical condition in formerly colonized societies but instead as a critique of the stable categories of space, society, and state through which urbanism is understood and theorized.
Source: ROY, A.. (2015). Governing the Postcolonial Suburbs. In P. HAMEL & R. KEIL (Eds.), Suburban Governance: A Global View (pp. 337–348). University of Toronto Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt130jwct.22
Picture source: http://www.utppublishing.com/Suburban-Governance-A-Global-View.html
Introduction
Last month, on the edges of the Kolkata Metropolitan Region, several thousand squatters living in an informal settlement called Nonadanga were forcibly evicted from their homes. Displaced in 2009 from their villages by Cyclone Alia, these rural landless households had first squatted by the railway tracks at yet another peripheral site before being evicted and resettled at Nonadanga. Since then, their awkward shacks had hovered in the strip of land that separated a somewhat dilapidated middle-class housing cluster from the suburban highway. They were yet another cadre of construction laborers, domestic servants, and vegetable vendors. The eviction, a common routine in Indian cities, nevertheless came as a surprise. After all, these squatters were part of the massive body of rural-urban poor who had recently ousted the Left Front government and swept into power the populist party, Trinamul Congress. The displacement and dispossession of the poor, especially at the rural peripheries of the city, was a decisive issue in this political shake-up, with the Trinamul Congress pledging an end to land grabs by the state. Less than a year after these elections, the Nonadanga eviction suggests a new regime of land grabs. The Nonadanga squatters were evicted by the very political functionaries who had facilitated their resettlement at this site, by those who had regularly collected “taxes” and other paralegal payments. Having cleared the land, the metropolitan authorities are now considering a 99-year lease to a private developer for a luxury retail development. The eviction was speculative in that the bids for such a lease have yet to be initiated.
There is nothing spectacular or significant about Nonadanga. Yet, this is precisely why it deserves notice, for it highlights the mundane logics through which metropolitan space is being produced and restructured in cities like Kolkata. Three provocations come to mind.
First, Nonadanga is an instantiation of the variegated landscapes of slum and suburb that today characterize the metropolitan edges of Southern cities. Indeed, the rise of suburban poverty in America suggests that such variegation may also be present in the global North, although perhaps not with the intimate proximities evident in the global South. That these intimate proximities are increasingly managed through the creation of fortified enclaves is obvious.
Second, the Nonadanga eviction is an example of what, following Brenner (2004), can be understood as state space. Part of an iterative temporality of eviction and resettlement, populism and modernization, such spatial strategies of regulation indicate the territorialized flexibility of the state.
Finally, Nonadanga marks the fragility of such assemblages of suburban governance. On the one hand, the state’s plans for development created the urgent impetus for sudden eviction. On the other hand, many such emptied plots of land dot the edges of the Kolkata metropolitan region. Attached to each is a development plan, abandoned before completion – water parks, business parks, technology parks, ecological parks.
And of course at Nonadanga, the evicted and displaced continue to organize and mobilize with middle-class activists pledging solidarity with such struggles. Such mobilizations cannot be discounted for they indicate the contentious character of metropolitan expansion.
In this essay, I take up the question of suburban governance by examining each of the three provocations presented by Nonadanga. In particular, I seek to refine the analysis of governance by foregrounding specific modalities of regulation, namely distinction, informality, and political society.
Implicated in this task is the difficult question of whether such modalities of regulation are unique to cities of the global South, in other words, to postcolonial suburbs. This is the literal meaning of postcolonial suburb. But I also use the term to suggest that such types of analysis, forged in the crucible of the Southern urban experience, may engender a reconceptualization of suburbs in the global North. Indeed, if one is to consider imperial histories and racialized geographies, the North Atlantic suburbs are also (post)colonial.
The Suburban Enclave: A Spatial Strategy of Distinction
Ekers, Hamel, and Keil (2012) argue that “privatized authoritarian forms of governance” are on the rise. They note that gated communities are one manifestation of such proliferation and that gated landscapes are accordingly “a form of spatial governance.” Here, I seek to extend this argument by focusing on one specific modality of governance: distinction.
The gated enclave is an example of “residential private government” (McKenzie 2005). But it is also, as Low (2003) notes, a “new spatial governmentality.” McKenzie thus argues that what is at work is “the construction of a physical and institutional pomerium, or sanctified wall, around the affluent portions of an increasingly divided society”. Such fortified enclaves produce what Teresa Caldeira (2000) has described as a “city of walls,” “a space in which inequality is an organizing value.”
It is worth clarifying the use of the term “enclave.” In a seminal essay, Peter Marcuse (1997) defined three separate terms: ghetto, citadel, and enclave. Marcuse (1997) argued that the ghetto was the “result of the involuntary spatial segregation of a group that stands in a subordinate political and social relationship to its surrounding society”; the citadel “was created by a dominant group to protect or enhance its superior position”; and the enclave was “a voluntarily developed spatial concentration of a group for purposes of promoting the welfare of its members.”
In its more recent use, the term “enclave urbanism” has come to mean less the ethnic enclaves of which Marcuse writes and more the urban “citadel” first described by Friedmann and Wolff (1982). They introduced the term citadel to refer to spaces that served “the specific needs of the transnational elites and their immediate retinues who rule the city’s economic life.” But such “fortified communities” are widespread and thus no longer restricted to those “at the very top of the international hierarchy.” Building on Marcuse’s analytical definitions, I suggest that the term “enclave” is a useful designation for spaces of habitation that embody distinction.
The work of Pierre Bourdieu is particularly important in thinking about enclaves as spatial strategies of distinction. For Bourdieu (1979), distinction, as the “judgment of taste,” is the social practice of class power. It regulates the “economy of cultural goods” and produces an “aristocracy of culture”. Distinction makes possible the assertion of difference. “The system of class conditions is also a system of differences, differential positions, i.e. by everything which distinguishes it from what is not and especially from what it is opposed to; social identity is defined and asserted through difference”. In this sense, enclaves can be understood as a “space of life- styles” that in turn is homologous to the “social space” of differentiated classes.
Here I depart from recent efforts to broaden the analytical scope of gated communities. The aesthetic regulation of taste is central to Bourdieu’s formulation of distinction. In a series of essays, Pow (2009) analyzes the “aesthetic abundance” of residential gated enclaves in Shanghai. These types of aestheticization, “actively construct gated communities as emblematic of the urban good life” and thereby makes possible the “performance of elite middle-class identities…and social distinction.” The “aestheticized praxis of exclusion” enacts depoliticization by reducing class relations to “questions of lifestyle choices, consumption patterns, visual pleasures, and good taste.”
Such aesthetic praxis must also be understood as a form of rule, what Ghertner (2011) has titled “rule by aesthetics.” In his analysis of the production of space in Delhi, Ghertner (2010) argues that it is necessary 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.” He also, quite provocatively, argues that the urban poor take up such aesthetic norms “as a basis for both locating themselves in the changing city and for framing their own world-class aspirations.”
A glimpse of such desires is also provided by Pow (2009): What is also interesting is that while many of the urban poor I spoke to may ostensibly oppose the gated neighborhoods, they themselves harbor the desire to “live in one of these upscale gated estates” if they ever “strike it rich someday”. Among the urban poor interviewed, even though they may be critical of the inconvenience brought about by the presence of enclosed communities, there is also a general acceptance that rich people “who made it” are deserving of such a beautiful and exclusive living environment because they “can well afford it”.
It is in this sense that the postcolonial suburb is governed through the modality of distinction and its cultural economy of aesthetic normativity.
Informality: Between Slum and Suburb
In writing of the ghetto as a space of ethnoracial closure and control, Wacquant (2009) analyzes territorial stigma as an effect of the state. As spaces regulated by distinction, enclaves too must be understood as an effect of the state, produced by state strategies of territorial enablement or “deregulatory experimentation” – a phrase I borrow from Jamie Peck’s chapter in this book.
Here I pinpoint the role of the state through a specific modality of governance: informality. Although informality is often considered to be synonymous with poverty, I prefer to think about informality as a mode of the production of space.
Such a conceptualization is of considerable relevance to our understandings of postcolonial suburbs. The variegated landscape of the postcolonial suburb, those intimate proximities of slum and suburb, are landscapes of urban informality.
As the case of Nonadanga reveals, the edges of metropolitan regions are a patchwork of valorized and devalorized spaces that constitute a volatile frontier of accumulation, capitalist expansion, gentrification, and displacement. However, urban informality is internally differentiated. The splintering of urbanism does not take place at the fissure between formality and informality but rather, in fractal fashion, within the informalized production of space. Informal urbanization is as much the purview of wealthy urbanites and suburbanites as it is that of squatters and slum-dwellers. These forms of elite informality are no more legal than squatter settlements and shantytowns. But they are expressions of class power and can thus command infrastructure, services, and legitimacy in a way that marks them as substantially different from the landscape of slums.
To consider informality as a modality of governance is to thus consider how elite informalities are valorized and legalized while subaltern informalities are criminalized. Of course it is the state that often determines what is informal and what is not, thus allowing the elite “farm houses” on the edges of Delhi, or bourgeois “new towns” in Kolkata’s periphery, to function legally as appendages of the agrarian land laws while squatter settlements throughout the city are criminalized and violently demolished. The state itself can be conceptualized as an informalized entity. While it has often been assumed that the modern state governs its subjects through technologies of visibility, counting, mapping, and enumerating, in previous work I argue that regimes of rule also operate through an “unmapping” of cities. This is particularly evident on the periphery of Calcutta where the lack of centralized and certain knowledge about land allows the state the territorialized flexibility necessary for its dual imperatives of developmentalism (conversion of land to urban use) and populism (political ties to sharecroppers and squatters). Nonadanga simultaneously manifests both imperatives.
I am arguing then that it is territorialized flexibility, deployed via the modality of informality – deregulatory experimentation if you will – that makes possible the ambitious frontiers of speculative urbanism so brilliantly charted by Goldman (2011). In detailing how the speculative task of making world-class cities – often at the suburban edge – implicates a dense landscape of actors – from parastatal agencies and international finance institutions to investment capital and middle-class middlemen – Goldman reminds us that the suburb is a social construction, and a fragile one at that.
Political Society at the Edge
The fragility of suburban governance is evident in various ways: Goldman highlights the sheer bankruptcy of models of speculation; I have already made note of the illusory character of the plan, of that which is abandoned even before it has been initiated; Others highlight the struggle to maintain a territory of distinction. For example, Pow (2009) documents the “small acts of everyday resistance” by the urban poor that “destabilize the aesthetic boundaries” of Chinese fortified residential enclaves. These acts of “trespassing” include vandalism, graffiti, but also practices of everyday habitation such as the hanging of wet laundry by the poor on the ornamental gates of upscale gated communities or the spray-painting of advertisements for household services on the walls surrounding these estates. This “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” makes impossible the hermetic closure of the enclave.
How then do we view the politics of the periphery? In an influential treatise on postcolonial urban politics, Partha Chatterjee (2004) makes a distinction between “civil” and “political” societies. Civil society is bourgeois society and in the Indian context, an arena of institutions and practices inhabited by a relatively small section of people able to make claims as fully enfranchised citizens. By contrast, political society is the constellation of claims made by those who are only tenuously and ambiguously right-bearing citizens. Chatterjee writes that civil society, “restricted to a small section of culturally equipped citizens, represents in countries like India the high ground of modernity….But in actual practice, governmental agencies must descend from that high ground to the terrain of political society in order to renew their legitimacy as providers of well-being.” The “paralegal” practices and negotiations of this political society is for Chatterjee the politics of much of the people in most of the world:
The paralegal then, despite its ambiguous and supplementary status in relation to the legal, is not some pathological condition of retarded modernity, but rather part of the very process of the historical constitution of modernity in most of the world.
Following Chatterjee, one can suggest that the politics of the suburban periphery is the politics of political society. Yet, I have already noted that the very category of legality and formality on which Chatterjee’s distinction between civil and political society rests must be questioned. Thus, Holston (2008) notes that Brazilian cities are marked by an “unstable relationship between the legal and illegal.” While it may seem obvious and apparent that the urban poor are engaged in an informal and illegal occupation of land, much of the city itself is occupied through the “misrule of law”: “In both the wealthiest and the poorest of Brazilian families we find legal landholdings that are at base legalized usurpations”. The democratization of urban space in Brazil is a process by which the urban poor have learned to use the law and legitimize their own land claims; “they perpetuate the misrule of law but for their own purposes.” This is insurgent citizenship, or the politics of the periphery.
If we are to then think of political society as the politics of the postcolonial suburb then it is worth keeping in mind that such paralegal negotiations are a generalized condition. In the Brazilian case, this paralegality has been appropriated and transformed by the urban poor; in the Nonadanga case in Kolkata this paralegality reproduces the dependence of the urban poor on political regimes of populism and patronage. Each is a different conjuncture of postcolonial governance, but in each the suburban periphery is a vital site of the remaking of property, power, and the public interest.
Afterword: Postcolonial Suburbs
In this brief essay, I have used the term postcolonial suburbs to signify the suburbs of cities of the global South. This is the literal meaning of postcoloniality, as a historical condition in formerly colonized societies. But it is also possible to use the term postcolonial in a second sense, as a critique of stable categories of space, society, and state. It is in this sense that scholars have designated the suburbs of North Atlantic cities as postcolonial. Even more provocative is Nayak’s (2010) argument that to view the English suburbs as postcolonial is to turn “the geographies of racism ‘inside out’” – primarily by interrogating landscapes of whiteness. This is the task of decentering (sub)urban theory, of not only fostering a sense of global urbanism but also of attending to the geopolitics of such globality. This too is at stake in the charting of global suburbanisms.
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