Speaker
Description
Indian cities are transitioning towards more modernist, techno-managerial, and capital-intensive approaches to understanding and managing urban ecologies under national flagship programs such as the ‘Clean India Mission-Urban’ and the ‘Smart Cities Mission.’ While these transitions are deemed normative pathways for achieving ‘sustainable development’ and addressing the ‘polycrisis’ cities are facing, they often depoliticise urban environmentalism by reducing complex socio-ecological issues to mere technological fixes. These technocratic imaginaries and practices primarily cater to the normative imaginations of the urban bourgeoisie and, at times, become violent and exclusionary for the urban labouring poor (Baviskar, 2018; Sharma, 2022). One such intervention is formalising municipal solid waste management systems to eradicate manual waste handling and scientifically managing it instead. Despite informal waste workers’ crucial, effective and efficient contributions to waste metabolisms and reproducing the desired city(scapes), their knowledge, labour and socio-spatial practices are delegitimised, their questions, claims and contestations are rendered invisible from urban ecological imaginations, and they scarcely get featured in urban (environmental) planning scholarship.
My PhD project critically and carefully examines these infrastructural transitions and their implications on the labour, livelihoods, and lives of (in)formal waste workers in Patna, India. Theoretically grounding my research in the heterodox field of situated and embodied Urban Political Ecology (Truelove, 2011; Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver, 2014; Doshi, 2017), and drawing on the work of Simone (2004), Graham and McFarlane (2014), and Fredericks (2018), who approach and understand infrastructures as ‘peopled’, ‘lived’, and ‘(em)bodied’, I employed multi-sited ethnography of waste infrastructures as my methodology to engage with the lived realities of people, places, and practices examining how these ‘in-transition micro-geographies’ are embodied, contested, and navigated by the (in)formal workers in their everyday lives.
In this paper, I present my preliminary findings, arguing how informal waste workers are subject to elitist and casted urban sensibilities, imaginaries, infrastructures and practices, which, although fetishise and benefit from their cheap, dirty, exploitative, and precarious labour, continue to dispossess them of their labour and livelihoods and deny their claims to city-zenship. Foregrounding their everyday labour and lives, my research critically examines how informal waste workers embody, contest and navigate the changing waste infrastructures, drawing on their intersectional identities, social relations and subjectivities and using the precarious temporality of waste infrastructures to their advantage.
This research aims to contribute to the understanding of informality as a critical analytic site to understand better how, in this ‘polycrisis’, informal workers contest and navigate uneven, unjust, uncertain, and unfree urban ecologies in their everyday lives. These uneven embodiments, contestations and navigations of urban infrastructural transitions and their situated and relational understandings foregrounded in the everyday lived realities open new avenues for theorising diverse urbanisms of/from the Global South, which are socio-spatially rooted, ecologically aware, and politically engaged. These would also help raise and engage with wider political claims around urban inclusion, socio-ecological justice, city-zenship and ‘the right to city(life)’, which David Harvey (2003), Colin McFarlane (2024) and several others have convincingly argued for.
References
Baviskar, A. (2018). Between violence and desire: Space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi. International Social Science Journal, 68(227–228), 199–208
Doshi, S. (2017) ‘Embodied urban political ecology: five propositions’, Area, 49(1), pp. 125–128
Fredericks, R. (2018) Garbage citizenship : vital infrastructures of labor in Dakar, Senegal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Graham, S. and McFarlane, C. (2015) Infrastructural lives : urban infrastructure in context. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Harvey, D. (2003) ‘The right to the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(4), pp. 939–941
Lawhon, M., Ernstson, H. and Silver, J. (2014) ‘Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism: Provincialising Urban Political Ecology’, Antipode, 46(2), pp. 497–516
McFarlane, C. (2024). Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife.
Sharma, M. (2022) ‘Caste, Environment Justice, and Intersectionality of Dalit–Black Ecologies’, Environment and society, 13(1), pp. 78–97
Simone, A. (2004) ‘People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg’, Public culture, 16(3), pp. 407–429
Truelove, Y. (2011) ‘(Re-)Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework’, Geoforum, 42(2), pp. 143–152
| Keywords | Ethnography; Inclusive Planning; Informality; Infrastructures; Precarity; Urban Environmentalism; Political Ecology |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
