Mumbai's Urban Form and Security in the Vernacular
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by IDS OpenDocs Title: ‘These streets are ours’: Mumbai’s urban form and security in the vernacular Citation: Gupte, J. (2017) '‘These streets are ours’: Mumbai’s urban form and security in the vernacular', Peacebuilding 5.2: 203-217 https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2016.1277022 Official url: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21647259.2016.1277022 More details/abstract: This article contributes to the growing literature on the spatial dynamics of urban violence in the developing world. It highlights the dialectic between urban form, violence and security provision as vernacular in nature, shaped by hyperlocal processes and actors. And yet, this dialectic is dominated by state and military-centred terminology, and continually underpinned by the state’s imposition of order to constitute the city as a site for legitimate control. This materialises as the often arbitrary recognition of one area as ‘at the margins’, and not another, as the recognition of one group of people as ‘slum dwellers’ or illegal residents, and not others, or as the recognition of some individuals as criminal, and not others. Using detailed case study material from a group of inner-city neighbourhoods in Mumbai, India, the article suggests that urban form in its physical, political and historical characterisations not only influences how vigilante protection operates, but also interacts in a non-benign manner with the mechanics by which the state endeavours to control violence. As such, it shapes who is vulnerable to violence, how vulnerable they are, and why. This speaks directly to the nature of security provision witnessed across the cities of the developing world. Version of record: © 2017 The author(s). Published by Informa UK limited, trading as Taylor & Francis group. This is an Open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. This is a download from OpenDocs at the Institute of Development Studies Peacebuilding ISSN: 2164-7259 (Print) 2164-7267 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpcb20 ‘These streets are ours’: Mumbai’s urban form and security in the vernacular Jaideep Gupte To cite this article: Jaideep Gupte (2017) ‘These streets are ours’: Mumbai’s urban form and security in the vernacular, Peacebuilding, 5:2, 203-217, DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2016.1277022 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2016.1277022 © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 16 Feb 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1489 View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpcb20 PEACEBUILDING, 2017 VOL. 5, NO. 2, 203–217 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2016.1277022 OPEN ACCESS ‘These streets are ours’: Mumbai’s urban form and security in the vernacular Jaideep Gupte Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article contributes to the growing literature on the spatial Received 13 December 2016 dynamics of urban violence in the developing world. It highlights Accepted 13 February 2017 the dialectic between urban form, violence and security provision as vernacular in nature, shaped by hyperlocal processes and actors. KEYWORDS Mumbai; India; urban And yet, this dialectic is dominated by state and military-centred violence; security provision; terminology, and continually underpinned by the state’s imposition cities and development of order to constitute the city as a site for legitimate control. This materialises as the often arbitrary recognition of one area as ‘at the margins’, and not another, as the recognition of one group of people as ‘slum dwellers’ or illegal residents, and not others, or as the recognition of some individuals as criminal, and not others. Using detailed case study material from a group of inner-city neighbourhoods in Mumbai, India, the article suggests that urban form in its physical, political and historical characterisations not only influences how vigilante protection operates, but also interacts in a non-benign manner with the mechanics by which the state endeavours to control violence. As such, it shapes who is vulnerable to violence, how vulnerable they are, and why. This speaks directly to the nature of security provision witnessed across the cities of the developing world. 1. Introduction The geographies of violence are urbanising.1 Cities are becoming the locations where a range of criminal violence, homicide in particular, is becoming concentrated.2 The violence of war also has an increasingly urban dimension, evidenced by the changing nature of con- temporary military doctrine, in which cities are viewed as a legitimate ‘battlespace’,3 while urban inhabitants are viewed as targets that need to be continually tracked and controlled.4 Violence against civilians during and after civil wars now occurs predominantly in urban CONTACT Jaideep Gupte [email protected] 1Dennis Rodgers, ‘Slum Wars of the 21st Century: Gangs, Mano Dura and the New Urban Geography of Conflict in Central America’, Development and Change 40, no. 5 (September 2009): 949–76. 2UNDOC, ‘Global Study on Homicide 2013: Trends/Context/Data. Research and Trend Analysis Branch (RAB), Division of Policy Analysis and Public Affairs (DPA), UNODC’, 2013. 3Stephen Graham, ‘Cities as Battlespace: The New Military Urbanism’, City 13, no. 4 (December 2009): 383–402. 4Stephen Graham, Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London; New York: Verso, 2011). © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. J. GUPTE 204 areas.5 Further, even if cities and towns are not the actual locations of war, control over them is often the central objective.6 At the same time, security provision in many cities across the developing world is fluid, and involves complex and hybrid arrangements consisting of multiple actors. These range from vigilantes7 to collective action8 for example, and involve formal, informal and extra- legal actors alike. At risk groups such as urban youth, even children, are just as involved in providing security as they are vulnerable to the impacts of violence.9 Lived experiences of violence and insecurity in cities mirror the hybridity of security provision. These are increas- ingly recognised as formulated out of highly localised processes, that are at times confined to specific spaces, and driven by local actors that operate in those processes and spaces.10 It is therefore imperative that understandings of security provision in cities privilege the perspectives of the end-users of the security arrangements, and describe security in the ‘vernacular’.11 That is, describe security as a basic entitlement of those who are supposed to be protected, and contrasts with understandings of security as the creation and maintenance of authoritative social orders. This article argues that the physical nature of urban spaces, including the historical and the political processes that produce and shape them, contributes significantly to the experience of violence as well as the supply and demand for security. The experience of large-scale public violence in the city of Mumbai, India, shows that the built environment can at once become the symbol of an imposed state-centric infrastructural order, and a key enabler for non-state actors. The highly irregular nature of Mumbai’s built environment, characteristic of cities across the developing world, arises in part due to the insurgent practices by which city dwellers themselves produce and appropriate spaces,12 and interacts with state and non-state providers of security differently. Finally, the article makes the case that it is the hyperlocal nature of these interactions that adds to the granularity in security outcomes in cities. Though state and municipal authorities in Mumbai are only able to actively police certain sections of the city, they continually endeavour to impose ‘legibility’ on how the entire city is planned and ordered.13 Intriguingly, both these practices create space for local non-state actors to provide security. On the one hand, piecemeal policing by the state is the more obvious reason for the growing reliance on non-state security providers. On the other hand, however, the manner in which the city enforces its infrastructural regime far too 5Clionadh Raleigh, ‘Violence against Civilians: A Disaggregated Analysis’, International Interactions 38, no. 4 (September 2012): 462–81. 6J. Beall, T. Goodfellow, and D. Rodgers, ‘Cities and Conflict in Fragile States in the Developing World’, Urban Studies 50, no. 15 (November 1, 2013): 3065–83. 7Pratten David and Atryee Sen, Global Vigilantes. (Place of publication not identified: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8Roy, A. N., A. Jockin, and Ahmad Javed, ‘Community police stations in Mumbai’s slums’, Environment & Urbanisation 16, no. 2 (2004): 135–8. 9A. Sen, ‘“Exist, Endure, Erase the City” (Sheher Mein Jiye, Is Ko Sahe, Ya Ise Mitaye?): Child Vigilantes and Micro-Cultures of Urban Violence in a Riot-Affected Hyderabad Slum’, Ethnography 13, no. 1 (March 1, 2012): 71–86. 10J. Gupte, P. Justino, and J.-P. Tranchant, ‘Households amid Urban Riots: The Economic Consequences of Civil Violence in India’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 58, no.