Not Just Roads

El-Husseiny, Momen; Simone, AbdouMaliq; Searle, Llerena Guiu; Ghertner, D. Asher; Jasper, Sandra

doi:10.1080/2325548x.2021.1960094

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Without a focus on embodied experience, prognostications about the city yet to come risk missing out on the psychic forces driving speculative enclaves and fortified futures. Offering three ethnographic scenes from our ongoing research in contemporary Delhi, we have tried to show how new, or newly intensifying, crises of personhood framed around metabolic illness, environmental catastrophe, and resurgent ethno-nationalism are animating new experiments in enclave urbanism at the precise moment when large-scale speculative projects seem to have run their course otherwise (El-Husseiny et al, 2021; Goldman and Narayan, 2021). In these formulations, the enclave is positioned as a positive solution to embodied anxieties concerning an urban body reaching its absorptive limits, an urban lung facing the suffocating effects of over-urbanization, and heightened communal and majoritarian violence in the face of a hollowed out urban public.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

Waldman

Ghertner

2023

Progress in Human Geography

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This essay analyzes embodied experiences of enclaving. It argues that by tracking revolutions in built form that gating enacts, urban geography has simultaneously tracked revolutions in urban subjectivity. It highlights three enclaved “body types” within existing literature: securitized bodies in fortressed cities, performative bodies in consumptive enclaves, and hygienic bodies in purified zones. It then offers three ethnographic scenes of gating related to new crises of personhood: metabolic illness, atmospheric breakdown, and resurgent ethno-nationalism. Attention to the psychic forces behind gating, it finally argues, can further show the gender, class, and ethnic underpinnings of what appear as generic architectural zones.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

Waldman

Ghertner

2023

Progress in Human Geography

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“…Lastly, I closely followed the communities and families caught on the either side of the uncertainty around the Expressway in an attempt to understand how they mobilise politically to manage and navigate uncertainty in everyday life. In these explorations, ethnographic film served as an important tool and method (Bathla & Papanicolaou, 2021) and led to the production of a feature-length ethnographic documentary 'Not Just Roads' (Bathla & Papanicolaou, 2020; see also El-Husseiny et al, 2021), which explores the prolonged uncertainty around the Expressway discussed in this paper. In the following section, I will attempt to review literature on urban uncertainty and F I G U R E 1 An orientation map of Dwarka Expressway corridor, which bypasses the existing land corridor along the NH48 Source: Delhi Decongestion Plan (MoRTH & NHAI, 2018, p. 23) the politics of uncertainty, following which I will explore how the state, powerful actors and communities entangled with the Expressway interrupt, contest and facilitate its eventualities (Simone, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extended urbanisation and the politics of uncertainty: The contested pathways of highway corridors in India

Bathla

2022

Geographical Journal

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This paper explores how uncertainty has become a central constitutive feature under the ongoing attempts at rapid extension of highway corridors across India. Contrary to the terra nullius assumption that India's highway programmes operate under, the pathways to accumulation they seek to open present a palimpsest of pre‐existing claims, occupancies and forms of dwelling that come into conflict with the attempts to extend urban space. The paper specifically follows the prolonged uncertainty surrounding a regional highway corridor between the cities of Delhi and Gurgaon, the Dwarka Expressway, which underwent multiple legal contestations over evictions and land disputes. In doing so, it analyses how managing uncertainty in the production of highway corridors becomes profitable for the state, powerful corporate actors and middle‐class homebuyer‐investors, presenting a form of value that can be commodified and exchanged. However, on the other hand, owing to its double‐edged nature, uncertainty also becomes productive for the urban majority in laying claims to urban space. As rapid extended urbanisation increasingly disrupts the lifeworlds of marginal communities, this paper calls for embracing the politics and practices of uncertainty in the continued efforts to push ex‐centric urban analysis beyond the narrow focus on state processes and commodification.

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Inhabiting the extensions

Simone

Somda

Torino

et al. 2023

Dialogues in Human Geography

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Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities at increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logics of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, of movement and settlement, of centre and periphery, of time and space.

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Not Just Roads

Cited by 3 publications

References 17 publications

The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

Extended urbanisation and the politics of uncertainty: The contested pathways of highway corridors in India

Inhabiting the extensions

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