In a Memorable Phrase, Henri Lefebvre Suggests That

Himanshu Burte The Space Of Challenge: Reflections Upon The Relationship Between Public Space And Social Conflict In Contemporary Mumbai It is a bit surprising even for old Mumbai dwellers to find out the origins of the open play grounds, or maidans, that cut a large swathe across the Fort district of downtown Mumbai. These grounds are the cradle of Mumbai’s cricketing tradition and also represent a welcome open space in a fairly dense urban fabric. Cricket, the colonial sport, incidentally appears to be the one truly national religion we do have in India. At any given time the maidans host a large number of cricket matches played and watched in right earnest, even as large numbers of people cut through these grounds to reach the other side of the district more quickly. It is therefore a bit surprising to discover that these open spaces were created by the British after a serious wave of insurgency to set up a free field of fire between the walled colonial city, or the Fort, and the native town beyond from which they feared attack. Today’s space of organized sport thus traces its roots back to a military strategy in anticipation of violence. Of course, signs of conflict are not immediately visible in Mumbai’s public space. However, many important spaces like the maidans of South Mumbai and spatial markers like the Martyr’s Memorial at Flora Fountain, which is the symbolic center of South Mumbai, have some historically significant link with the inevitable conflicts that mark any large city. In this paper I wish to examine the ways in which the phenomenon of social conflict and the material reality of public space are related. I choose the concept of conflict as my prism because in the last ten years or so, the city has had more and more of it its public space than in the decades before that. Moreover, Mumbai, like every big city with a history of international trade and of inward migration from different cultures, is marked by differences in wealth, social status, cultural values and access to political power. Conflicts are inevitable in this situation, especially when globalisation is further jacking up the inequalities, and the capacity of city governments as well as of civil society to understand how the space of the city is involved in these conflicts will decide how well society as a whole responds to them. This is among the greatest challenges that the life of public spaces in the city poses to the city at large. In a memorable phrase, Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher, suggests that each society “secretes” its own space.1 In Mumbai, I could modify that phrase to suggest that the conflicts at the heart of Mumbai’s public space, whether expressed as such or not, are very directly secreted by the city as a social system into its very physical fabric. Understanding the ways in which this osmosis between societal and physical spaces is enacted in public space is, I feel, very important for our understanding of the city at large. In what ways are public space and the phenomenon of social conflict related in Mumbai? From a review of a variety of situations of urban conflict between different social groups I propose the following as three significant ways in which space is involved in the story of urban conflict (and vice versa) in Mumbai. None of these different roles (or modes) need necessarily operate alone. In other words, these are not mutually exclusive categories of modes of interrelationship; particular situations may reveal more than one mode being in operation at the same time. Public space as the object of conflict Public space has always been first and foremost, the object of conflict over claims to its control and over the rights of occupation. These conflicts usually are about: a) what uses and activities are acceptable in public space; b) who (that is which sector of the “public”) has the greater right of occupation over different public spaces; c) who should control, or make decisions about (and on what basis) the fate of public spaces and access to them. Mumbai is a palimpsest of different cultures of producing city space, including ones which are pre- modern in origin. These cultures of producing space also harbour different protocols of imagining ownership of it, of occupying it and putting it to various uses, including economically productive ones. We thus have different visions of who public space belongs to and on what terms, that are often locked in conflict. As we shall see, the way different groups answer these questions decides how they answer the question “who is and is not a citizen?” Thus the first kind of low grade conflict ―which like low grade wars of attrition actually define the social climate of a space― has always been between the continuing culture of contingently regulated appropriation of public space for private and personal purposes which is as evident in the streets of Mumbai as of any other small town in India. This tradition encourages shopkeepers, householders and all other kind of space occupying interests to attempt to push the envelope of private space, just enough so that the bulge into the public space of the pavement does not bring the latter’s functioning to a complete halt. The state’s stated culture of spatial production, proceeds on a more modern and strict understanding of boundaries between private and public space. However, given the deeply entrenched nature of traditional attitudes towards occupying space, the breach of this vision of control is greater than compliance with it. This long standing stalemate at the scale of the street may encourage us to think of the city as having no single dominant power, a situation in which what Lefebvre has called the “domination” of space by the state is defused to some extent by the “appropriations” (Lefebvre’s term again) of street side actors. However, recent actions of the state reveal this stalemate to have been more a waiting game. Five years ago the state of Maharashtra (of which Mumbai is the capital), decided to build fifty flyovers (road over bridges flying over congested junctions) at different points in the city. This was ten times as many built in the previous fifty years and they were meant to be completed in five years. This project costing the equivalent of 300 million dollars, conceived as a major contribution to the transportation needs of a fast growing city, was wrongheaded for many reasons, especially in a cash strapped state. The main problem, of course, was that it encouraged private automobile ownership in a city where the majority commuted using a robust but unduly stretched public transport system. However, of greater interest here is what the flyovers did to the configuration of the city’s system of public space, as well as to the unacknowledged impact it had on many private spaces that happened to line the arterial roads. With efficiency that was simply shocking for an Indian city, major open spaces and gardens along the arterial roads had huge and ugly bridges going over them in no time. All of a sudden the remaining coherence of the urban form of the city was in the process of destruction. Moreover, across the city upper floor living spaces were, suddenly, exposed to the voyeurism of the fast lane passing sometimes only twenty feet away in the air. This event revealed very clearly that in the matter of control over public space, in fact of ownership of it, when the state is determined, any conflict of interest with the public (or significant parts of it) is really a mismatch. The public almost doesn’t have a chance in deciding the fate of what nominally is its space. But then, the “public” is itself not a unitary reality. The conflict over the right to public space is restaged within its own body among interest groups. In recent times, new citizens’ groups from the middle and upper classes of society have emerged in the city, effectively laying claim to public space as their space, and insisting on the removal of all those who would occupy it for functions which urban traditions in India have sanctioned but the law has not. This has usually meant the removal of the marginalized who, lacking access to expensive private spaces, need to use public space for private activities of dwelling, production and economic exchange. Thus, the argument against the street vendors, or hawkers, is that they encroach on public space for conducting private business. In essence, they are criticized for blocking access to public space, while pursuing private ends. Strangely, however, when public open spaces in the city are cordoned off to develop joggers’ parks or ticketed gardens, the quiet exclusion of large numbers of the underprivileged from these spaces is not seen to be a cornering of public spaces for inadequately public purposes. This “privatization” of entire public gardens ―where they become the preserve of those who can afford visiting them― is seen as a reasonable step by the state and the elite, even when it does not serve a life-and-death purpose. On the other hand the ephemeral occupation of small bits of pavements by hawkers who have only that space for earning their livelihood even as they provide a genuine service to the city at large, is considered deeply objectionable. Evidently, it is believed that some members of the public have a greater right to occupy public space for private ends than others. This has obvious implications for the imagination of citizenship.

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