INTRODUCTION
Perhaps because this seminar is limited to a Western treatment of the concept of bottom-up urbanism, I decided to look homewards, to Bombay and urban India, to see whether ideas about the right to the city and tactical urbanism have different catalysts, methods, and goals. While what I found was interesting in its contextual specificity, many of the ideas discussed below can be translated back to the United States, specifically in consideration of how certain marginalised people—in particular, the African American community and people of colour—are shut out of the urban public space through a set of practices enacted and engrained into daily life by hegemonic sub-groups.
The gender ratio in urban India is highly skewed, such that clusters of men loitering in public space is a startling but inescapable reality of the city. My project studies recent attempts by women to reclaim the spaces of the city that have been rendered unsafe to them by the ubiquity of the male gaze. Specifically, it explores attempts that are not contestative in nature, but instead focus on performances of pleasure as a means of protesting the status quo.
The proponents of the main campaign that I study pose the question, Why Loiter? From this we can first backtrack: how effective (or not) is the current strategy of civic officials, who have sought to fix the issue by creating segregated spaces like “women’s compartments” in public transport systems? And then we can move forward: what does the capacity for fun mean in terms of one's claim to space? How does loitering redefine our understanding of the way in which the urban environment should be constructed? How do the virtual instruments of these campaigns extend this re-imagined urban space to a dialectical online realm? |
The images and texts below attempt to untangle these questions, and further contextual readings are provided at the end in case this project has made you curious about the idiosyncratic urban practices of contemporary India.
#WHYLOITER
RECLAIMING PUBLIC space through performances of pleasure
This social media campaign, which was started by three sociologists, Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade, and Sameera Khan, is simple in its execution but bold in its intent: it invites women to go out into the city, hang out, take a picture, and upload it to social media along with the hashtag #whyloiter. The results (see examples below) vary from women actively inserting themselves into male-coded spaces like the chai stall or paan shop, women enjoying the built environment as its meant to be, and women turning the camera towards themselves in order to record their presence (and right to be present) in the city.
Here is an essay by the creators of the Why Loiter campaign, Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade, and Sameera Khan, entitled Why Loiter: Radical Possibilities for Gendered Dissent:
#MEETTOSLEEP
A campaign by the Blank Noise Project that invites women to meet in parks and take naps, as men often are found doing, and use the hashtag #meettosleep. This takes the intent of #whyloiter a step further, arguing that the test of true agency in the city is the ability to be unconscious in it, thereby denying any need to worry about one’s safety or permission to be in that space.
Images via The Blank Noise Project
Images via The Blank Noise Project
THE POLITICS OF FUN
These campaigns revolve around the idea of having fun and casually protesting the problem of male-dominated cities. Phadke, Ranade, and Khan argue that this reframing of the question of gender-based violence in the city negates the ‘us vs. them’ binary that perpetuates the idea of a female victim against a male aggressor. Instead of challenging this aggressor and thereby further cementing his violent identity, the campaigns propose an inclusive approach to public space, arguing that anyone should be able to be in public space with complete freedom. The campaign can thus apply to any marginalized community that has been shut out of the city, in its insistence on dismantling the intersecting hierarchies that currently dictate who has the greatest right to public space.
the right to the city
The focus on loitering asks us to shift our understanding of the city from a static entity defined by preexisting categories and identities to one that is constantly in flux and shaped by the everyday practices of its users. As a blatantly non-productive performance—where simply standing around has no obvious goal—loitering protests the current reality of the city as one that is driven by, as David Harvey argues, consumption-driven spaces and an incessant capitalist surplus system. It cuts across the strict programming that has been inscribed on the city from above, reminding us that the right to the city is something that is not preordained, but earned through active and meaningful participation with the urban environment.
|
Under the right to the city, membership in the community of enfranchised people is not an accident of nationality or ethnicity or birth; rather it is earned by living out the routines of everyday life in the spaces of the city. |
the virtual commons
The success of these campaigns hinges on their virtual tools—in particular, the hashtag and the selfie. As Iveson argues that “such a politics will only emerge to the extent that participants can find ways to make connections with each other across their diversity,” the hashtag literally brings together individual acts—images, videos, tweets—into a shared screen space. Using defined tags like #whyloiter and #meettosleep empower people to plug into a movement that is larger than their personal moment of transgression, and the whole thus becomes bigger than the sum of its parts. The hashtag, in its mobility as it trends across space, mirrors the urban wanderer as she moves through the city.
The egocentricity of the selfie similarly helps to expand the urban world to a complementary online world, serving as digital testimonies of one’s existence in the city. By holding these moments of urban exploration static in the virtual realm, the selfie actually frees up the human to keep drifting across space and enjoying the city as it should be. In the context of women and urban India, the selfie takes on a more profound role: it directly challenges the voyeuristic practices of men in the city, who often whip out their camera phones and blatantly begin photographing the women who dare to walk on the street. The selfie mocks the male gaze, saying: I will be the both viewer and viewed, photographer and subject. I will get to decide when I want to be seen, and by whom.
The egocentricity of the selfie similarly helps to expand the urban world to a complementary online world, serving as digital testimonies of one’s existence in the city. By holding these moments of urban exploration static in the virtual realm, the selfie actually frees up the human to keep drifting across space and enjoying the city as it should be. In the context of women and urban India, the selfie takes on a more profound role: it directly challenges the voyeuristic practices of men in the city, who often whip out their camera phones and blatantly begin photographing the women who dare to walk on the street. The selfie mocks the male gaze, saying: I will be the both viewer and viewed, photographer and subject. I will get to decide when I want to be seen, and by whom.
contextual + further reading
Here are some links to articles that expand on the discussion of the women's safety and urban space in India.
+ Some statistical background on Indian women in the workforce (Quartz)
+ A consideration of the implications of this skewed sex ratio (The Atlantic CityLab)
+ An earlier campaign focused on violence against women called #safecitypledge (Blank Noise)
+ An interview with one of the #whyloiter campaign founders, Sameera Khan, on the role of urban planning in making cities safer for women (Firstpost)
+ Below, an article by architect/urban designer Rahul Mehrotra, on the ephemeral, movement-oriented urbanism that defines the indian city.
+ Some statistical background on Indian women in the workforce (Quartz)
+ A consideration of the implications of this skewed sex ratio (The Atlantic CityLab)
+ An earlier campaign focused on violence against women called #safecitypledge (Blank Noise)
+ An interview with one of the #whyloiter campaign founders, Sameera Khan, on the role of urban planning in making cities safer for women (Firstpost)
+ Below, an article by architect/urban designer Rahul Mehrotra, on the ephemeral, movement-oriented urbanism that defines the indian city.
Comments and questions on this project are always welcome and can be sent to [email protected]