This article exposes practices of informal, everyday resistance by slum dwellers against the implementation of large-scale public housing projects in India. During the last few decades, various large-scale urban projects have been implemented in order to redevelop Indian cities. In these projects, the emphasis is on community participation. By focusing on the local level, we scrutinize how these projects are put into practice. Specifically, we look at how two slum communities react, contest and protest against the implementation of a large-scale public housing project. Using two case studies in Nagpur under the Basic Services to the Urban Poor-an overarching, nation-wide slum upgrading scheme-this article explores how standardized, participatory large-scale housing projects often clash with social realities on the ground, which results in various forms of everyday resistance and protest.
He graduated in 2012 with a master dissertation on the origin and development of the Kenya-neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, DR Congo, based on extensive archival research as well as extensive fieldork. Apart from his experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he has also participated in a heritage listing project in Nawalgarh and in research on slum rehabilitation projects in Nagpur, in 2013 in India. Before starting his PhD, he worked one year as a research fellow at the University of Antwerp. His current PhD-research concerns the architecture and urban planning of colonial and post-colonial hospital infrastructure in the DRC.
This article deals with the way urban planning during colonial times affects the mobility of pedestrians today. In Kinshasa, a green belt cuts the oldest part of the city right in two, and this hinders a smooth traffic flow. The belt is what remains of the neutral zone the colonial authorities implemented to separate the European from the African neighborhoods; it consisted of several large walled-off facilities, such as a zoo, a park, and a hospital. In this article, we explore how pedestrians in Kinshasa deal with these obstructions to their mobility. We show that they forge their pedestrian itineraries through walls designed to be impermeable, in particular by shortcutting through a hospital. These alternative itineraries have solidified through time, revealing the effectiveness of their persistent daily walks. As we argue, the pedestrians actively redefine the mobility patterns of their city.
Zooming in on the urban history of the Kenya neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, this article deals with the relation between urban space, colonial policing and African unrest. Colonial policy-makers feared the populous neighbourhood and its African masses, and deployed urban planning to materialize an ambiguous agenda of ‘welfare colonialism’ and discipline. The implementation of these planning projects was incomplete, and a spatial analysis of subsequent African local unrest, everyday colonial policing and military schemes sheds additional light on how colonial forces and Africans utilized urban space as a resource for protest and control. As such, the article aims to contribute to the academic debate on colonial policing, in which spatiality has been lacking.
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