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Ananya Roy City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley 5 5 April 14, 2011 Ananya Roy City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley Ananya Roy teaches in the fields of urban studies and international development. She also serves as Educa- tion Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and as co-Director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center. From 2005 to 2009 Roy served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies. Roy holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America. Her most recent book is Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Location: The Campanile (Sather Tower) Books: Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development by Ananya Roy, 2010 The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time by Karl Polanyi, 1944 Journals: Time Magazine Feb 14, 2011 Time Magazine December 26, 2005 “Persons of the Year” (Bill and Melinda Gates, Bono) Food: -Wholefoods crakers -Black Tea -Sugar Raw/ Unedited Transcription of Picnic Discussion with Ananya Roy at the base of the Campanile Clock Tower 1015 Ananya Roy: I’m a professor in the department of City and Regional Planning here at Berkeley. And I also chair the Global Poverty and Practice minor. 1016 Amy: We have aligned your research with ten to the fifth power. InThe Powers of Ten, this frame is the first time you get a glimpse of the city of Chicago as it is growing out into the greater landscape and region of Illinois and the Great Lakes. Can you describe your field of research as aligned with this frame? Ananya: I grew up in the city of Kolkata in India and I think growing up in Kolkata made me very interested in cities and how the world’s megacities were growing and in the 21st century were going to house much of the worlds population. And would those cities provide better futures for the people who moved to these cities with such great aspirations. Some of my early research was with very poor women working in Kolkata often commuting in on local trains and their struggle’s to make a better life for themselves. But more recently, I’ve also been very interested in research at a global scale, really thinking about global flows of capital and global flows of “truth” and expertise. And so after the Kolkata work I turned to look at the study of poverty and I’d spent a lot of time studying very poor communities and their struggles and aspirations, but I wanted to zoom out and really think about what it meant to study poverty from the Birdseye view of something like the World Bank for example, and what would it mean to come to terms with that sort of institu- tion. So the book “Poverty Capital” which I think we have somewhere (here on the blanket) is in fact an attempt to come to terms with this new global order. 1017 Ananya: So in the mid 1990’s poverty became really fashionable as a global issue, a new global conscience emerged about poverty. And I see that particularly in the generation of “millennial’s”, the undergraduates in my class, that they are very taken by the idea that they can make social change and that they can alleviate poverty if not eliminate it. So I was interested in studying this global order and which is why we have this “Persons of the Year” Time magazine issue right, The Gates, Bono, these global celebrities who have been leading these global poverty campaigns. I wanted to understand this in a way, inspired by Kandinsky, as a composition, as these col- liding worlds. He talks about the compositions as this thundering collision of worlds, but this composition in particular is called Small Worlds. So I’m interested in how this global order also makes for small worlds, and these strange interactions. So one of the reasons why we have a lot of Whole Foods on the blanket is because this book starts with an image .. 1018 of a woman I’ve never met, or rather I met her, only in one of these small worlds, Felicita... And I tell the story in the book of how one evening shopping at Whole Foods, I came across this flyer, a really colorful flyer with Felicita’s image on it and she was portrayed as the microfinance client of the month, one of the many microfinance programs in South America sponsored by the Whole Plant Foundation which is the philanthropic arm of Whole Foods. So when one was buying groceries at Whole Foods one could add a dollar or 5 dollars as one checked out, and the idea was that that money would go to poor women like Felicita- far away. So I think its an example of these small worlds of globalization that have been created, that also tie in with how we think of ourselves in the world; these practices of phi- lanthropy, a way of thinking about...I guess what we would call spatially distant neighbors- that we don’t know Felicita and yet we think we know her. And in fact, I also in the book I tell the story of how as I tried to get the permission to reproduce Felicita’s photograph in this book, I contacted Whole Planet Foundation and usually its really hard to get this permission, but it turned out the photograph had been taken by a young man named Alex Crane who’d spent the summer interning in Guatemala, and who was in my class that semester. Alex wrote to me saying “yes, of course you can have the photograph!”, I took it and I actually wrote up that little flyer telling Felicita’s story. So that was a wonderful example for me of these “small worlds”. 1019 Michael: I love this idea of the Birdseye view. One bit of information that we found out in the research of this Eames film is that the picnic was actually staged in LA where their offices were, but then when they are zooming out they’ve picked Chicago. They’ve decided to reconstruct the picnic sight slightly and pick Chicago, and I’m thinking of the Chicago school as this interesting starting place for Americas view of poor people and how that effected this frame of urban planning. And I don’t know if you could speak a little bit about the American view. Society has been framed with this European American view for a long time and there’s pitfalls in that. Ananya: Sure. Well you know I’m trained as an urbanist and the Chicago school for almost a century was so influential in shaping how academics, scholars and policy makers thought about cities and thought about poverty. And one of the key aspects of the Chicago school was that they really struggled to come to terms with the persistence of poverty in American cities. The most traditional Chicago school theorists thought that immigrants moved to the city and were assimilated into this great American urban fabric, and as their lot in life impproved, they moved out into better parts of the city. And of course, that’s not how it worked, and one of my favorite texts from the Chicago school and on Chicago, something I teach about, actually comes from a critique from within the Chicago school. It’s a book by Drake and Cayton called Black Metropolis and it takes on the idea that Chicago has this ghetto that has never gone away, and how do we explain this ghetto if not through racial red lining, through policies of segregation, through this long history of exclusion. So I am very interested as an urbanist in trying to retell the story of our cities and to rethink the legacy of the Chicago school. It is a legacy, but how else can we talk about our cities, so of course I am interested in cities in the global south and in the 21st century much of the urban growth will take place in these cities. So cities like Chicago, New York and L.A. will not be the important cities of the 21st century. So how do we better understand those cities in the global south. But I’m also interested in how understanding cities in the global south may better allow us to understand cities here. And one of the things I’ve been very interested in is understanding the histories of colo- nialism and imperialism. Be it internal colonialism here, or globally. So one of the reasons I wanted tea and sugar is perhaps my favorite post colonial theorist is someone called Stuart Hall who writes in the British context and the has this lovely line about how English identity is so anchored by certain rituals like drinking tea. And having grown up in India it’s also a legacy that I’ve inherited. 1020 Ananya: I have to have my cup of tea at four in the afternoon, and it has to be done in a certain way. But he makes the point that there isn’t a single tea plantation in great Britain. Their tea comes from elsewhere. It comes from the former colonies. It comes from Sri Lan- ka it comes from India.
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