The ordinariness of struggle and exclusion: a view from across the north–south urban ‘divide’

Abstract

Comparative literature on subaltern urbanism neglects inequalities among the poor that mimic exclusionary processes to which they have been subjected, what we call ‘scalar imitation’. Using Robinson’s ‘launching’ tactic towards ‘generative comparison’, we identify and explain the evolution of class differentiation within a resettlement colony in Delhi’s periphery, reference ‘glimpses’ of similar processes in literature on subaltern urbanism, and discuss epistemological underpinnings of our analysis. We revise ‘local uniqueness’, which Massey developed early in her career, and adhere to her later topological sensibilities and Foucault’s ‘ascending analysis’. We conclude by highlighting the blurring of worlding and place making processes.

Towards ‘a progressive sense of thick time’ and the future of geographical thinking

“…Lastly, such work can pave the way for a productive comparative research agenda that challenges binary accounting of regional categories such as Global North/South, western/oriental, and so forth. Instead, it may reveal new forms of 'scalar imitation' understood as inequalities and differentiation among subalterns that mimic exclusionary practices to which they have been subjected (Ettlinger and Bose, 2020). Towards this end, geographers need to connect lived experiences and memories of dispossession, struggles, and resistance across and within diverse timescapes to visibilise the invisible stories and voices of the marginalised.…”

CITY OF NON‐EQUIVALENTS: Making, Maintaining and Disrupting Customary Attachments to Land in Port Vila, Vanuatu

“…Various urban scholars describe class formation and the creation of permanent underclasses through property (de Neve, 2015) and class struggle against capital accumulations in the contemporary global city (Kaika and Ruggiero, 2015). Class relations have been useful in explaining the evolution of class distinctions in a New Delhi informal settlement (Ettlinger and Bose, 2020) and race and class intersections in Detroit (Montgomery, 2016). Ranganathan (2018) identifies how ‘improvement’ is mobilized to become a multivalent term to encompass class, caste, race and other modes of social differentiation in urban settings.…”

“…State‐driven processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003a; 2005) are identifiable across cultures, from the English state's dispossession of working‐class people from right‐to‐buy housing blocks (Cooper et al ., 2020) to state processes of seizing, grabbing or expropriating land in Dhaka (Mondal, 2023). Other scholars have turned their attention to highly localized class and power differentiations among the poor and displaced that Ettlinger and Bose (2020) label ‘scalar imitation’ of power and class differentiations to which they have been subjected. The influence of the international development apparatus has been pronounced in the Pacific.…”