City Space

My Number 3 New Neighbours have moved in upstairs this weekend, sequentially representing the dilemma of contemporary urban living ... navigating diverse spaces crowded with bodies and noise, not only 'out there' in London streets, but in here, my home, my sanctuary. It's always a period of trepidation ... will they be 'nice', will they be quiet, will they not leave furniture in the front yard, will they recycle, will they not kick footballs into the fresh washing on the line, will they not hold religious ceremonies including singing, chanting, clapping and/or speaking in tongues before 10am on a Sunday morning. Please, we pray silently to whichever goddess we choose to believe in, let me not have to go through the endless rounds of negotiation and outright bribery ('chocolate cake in return for good behaviour') again; please, we pray, let them be just like me.

Utopia: a city created in our own likeness.
Boredom: a city created in our own likeness.

A Tale of Two Cities

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.

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 is being gentrified through state, and the ubiquitous 'public/private partnership', intervention that is building new infrastructure and designating others as ‘illegal’, fragmenting the city into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ localities. 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.

On Dogs and Women

Out for a morning jog around the colony of East Nizamuddin in New Delhi, I was suddenly aware that I’d trespassed into the territory of some fairly angry looking stray dogs. ‘Stray dog’ is a bit of misnomer in India. They’re not really stray. They know exactly where home is. And this lot weren’t going to have foreigners in it, especially running foreigners dressed all in black wearing a hot pink cap with a bit of mould on it.

Chased into a corner I held my ground against bared fangs and barked outrage, thinking ‘damn you Pamela Anderson for your sentimental interference in India’s dog curtailment programme, I’d like to see you jog around East Nizamuddin in your cossie facing this lot of rabid mange encrusted flea bags’. I was also reminded of other spaces that create such fang bearing moral outrage. While I’m sure the dogs of East Nizamuddin don’t care what my gender is, it seems members of India’s various Hindu cultural nationalist organisations still find it unacceptable that women should loiter in places they deem as places they shouldn’t be hanging about in.

Last week, for example, a group of women were beaten and thrown out of a pub in Mangalore by members of the Sri Rama Sene (SRS), the militant outfit of the Rashtriya Hindu Sena (National Hindu Army), panting and barking about ‘un-Indian’ behaviour. Why does what women do, say or wear still cause so much anxiety for some men? And why do women still have to bear the burdens of morality and tradition? And that’s not just in India. Europe’s in no position to be casting aspersions on the rest of the world. Please note the infamous arse slapping incident in 21st Century Dublin noted in the first posting on this blog. And English men seem obsessed with staring at the tits of Page Three Girls (oh sorry, that should be ‘glamour models’). Why did Karen Matthews become the pin up girl for male commentators who saw her as representative of the downfall of the UK (let’s not mention the myriad of men who control government and financial institutions and the mistakes they’ve made … instead it’s women who are to blame who have too much sex with too many men who end up fathering children they refuse to take any responsibility for). I’ve always been fascinated as to how George Bush Jnr reconciled his remarks justifying his invasion of Iraq to the Australian Parliament by stating that the United States was saving Iraqi women from the ‘rape rooms’ of Saddam Hussein, with killing tens of thousands of them in his military operations.

And what’s with the name calling? Apparently the SRS were throwing around invectives such as ‘prostitute’ and ‘whore’. I remember once walking down a street of Delhi respectably decked out in my usual salwar qamiz when, after refusing the advances of a group of well educated young men, I was called ‘a strumpet’ and ‘a harlot’. Clearly they were studying Shakespeare in the final year of high school. In a pub with a group of friends in Sydney, when we politely rejected the advances of a young man, his parting shot was ‘lesbians!’

Why all this acid throwing when a man, and by extension his sense of order and place in the world, gets rejected? In fact I think I’ll be so bold as to suggest that if we were to look at much ‘cultural’ conflict in our complex, diverse cities, we might find that it’s not always as much about ethnic difference as about gender, power and keeping sex in the family despite incest being our biggest taboo (‘family’ used loosely here to define a group of people with reasonably similar practices and values that tend to panic when someone transgresses the boundaries of expectations, like hoisting a dress too high, because that extra inch of skin on display challenges their authority over someone else’s body and mind, emasculating them in the process – I’m not referring to the genetic kind of family, I’m not that sort of girl!).

All this snarling and yapping and ogling and slapping. Time to do something about the dogs snapping at our heels, ladies. I say politely, pedicured with decorum, show them the underside of your joggers, your six inch stilletos, your doc martins, your loafers, whatever your footwear of preference!

London: In Progress

I live in a council block which, despite an apparent egalitarian upbringing, took a while to get used to, especially its trademark smell of forty years worth of ciggie smoke and cat pee that now impossibly infiltrates the concrete. But my little council block is a mirror of this city. There is a Somali family upstairs, a single mum and a pensioner downstairs. B. & M. across the landing have been here forty years and J., who I swap morning coffee, haberdashery and cherry tomatos with, lives below them. S. on the bottom floor lives with his wife and three young kids in the same space I do. There’s a quiet man on the top floor who’s name I don’t know.

From the window I see red roof tiles, chimney pots and the Heathrow flight path. The neighbours across the way have a roof terrace with a gentrifying water feature and a Buddha bust among the pot plants. In the street there are three dry cleaners, a chemist, an off-license, two corner stores without corners, a restaurant, a pizza take-away and a greasy spoon. I think they are all owned by one man who parks his Porsche outside the greasy spoon each day.

My neighbourhood is wedged between Holland Park, Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush with its rapidly rising mega-mall. Cross one street to the right and I’m in Holland Park; one stop from Kensington and some of the most expensive real estate in the city. Cross another street and I’m in social housing estates, high rises and dross-scapes. My block, street, neighbourhood reeks of the juxtapositions of wealth and cat piss; the contradictions of a global city marked by the ebb and flow of human movement. The heritage of Caribbean to Iranian to Somali to Punjabi to Arabic all embedded in faded, painted over, signage.

London is a dense city, shifting its identity from one street to the next, and you need all your senses to navigate across it. You need to bend with the buffeting of rush hour commuters and high street shoppers. You need to hear how close the buses and taxis are to your cycle lane. You need to smell the sweet apple tobacco in shishas to know when you’re on Edgeware Road. You need to make sense of the flicker of hoardings, departures and arrivals boards. You need to remember to never confuse a Scot for an Englishperson even if they have an English accent (although I'm not sure why someone at a Buddhist retreat would be so worried about identity). At another time, so relieved to get a call centre in ‘England’ I expressed my gratitude to the operator who then pointed out he was in Wales. Identity politics is virulent in this United Kingdom.

Unexpected things happen in this city. Oblivious, on the bridge from Embankment tube station to Southbank, headphones on, two couples tango, silently, deeply, intently and completely engrossed in the movement of a toe, a hand, a neck. A silent disco also involves headphones plus two DJs. Unexpectedly, I realise that dancing is actually a very communal, visual act and if your dancing partner suddenly switches to the other channel with a completely different beat then you experience instant arrhythmia. It’s also very difficult to snog someone when you’re both wearing industrial sized head sets.

Only in London would World Wide Knit in Public Day coincide with International Naked Cycle Day AND the Queen’s Birthday. Only in London could I row across the top of a building into the sunset. This ‘demented playground’, this ‘wanton happening’ created by the Austrian art collective Gelitin (Psycho Buildings, Hayward Gallery, London, July 2008). Only in London would I get a ticket for cycling in Holland Park by the Parks Police. What anti-social behaviour are they expecting in Holland Park that they need two parks police on patrol one superb summer’s morning – someone popping their champagne cork too loudly? Or worse, putting their champagne in the wrong glass? Unexpectedly, far from the madding crowd of Kensington and Chelsea, in the middle of the dross industrial landscapes of north London are a series of canals lined by wild flowers, herons, cyclists, joggers, fish, plastic bags and barges.

And you need all your senses to make sense of things like Piccadilly Circus with faux New York Times Square neon signs now surrounding the statue of Eros, and where Macdonald’s proudly announced ‘Coming soon: a new sign from MacDonalds’ (22 July 08). Is that a piece of post-modern simulacra I see before me?

I spend quite a few days engaging in psycho-geography, or putting it another way, wandering around the city. It’s for research, okay! For example, Saturday mornings I cycle to Borough Market through Hyde Park, past Buckingham Palace, Westminster and the London Eye, then into back streets along Southbank until hitting the cobble stones behind Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. And somehow I know all these places from every nursery rhyme, post card, BBC serial shown on the ABC that I’ve absorbed since the time I could read, or be propped up in front of the television. Borough Market has become the end goal because it has some of the best food in London although the best brownies EVER are to be found at East Dulwich Deli (because a girl cannot live by bread alone, even when it’s hand made by artisans and sold at Borough Market). The best greasy spoon in the world is E. Pellici in Bethnal Green. Not for the faint hearted or light weight. Disengage all sense when you enter and allow your senses to take over.