Public Spaces or Urban Commons?
By Sushmita Verma
25 April, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Memory works in funny ways. It was one of the usual train journeys to my field work in Kharghar when I saw her on the train. She was selling flowers and her back was towards me. I could not help but notice the bone of her neck and her slender and petite body. As she turned, I noticed something familiar, the same child like face, glowing with the sweat of her hard work. I was instantly attracted to her, again. My heart started behaving in a way I could not understand. I felt a surge of emotions. I was certainly not delighted seeing her still stuck in a life of hard labor, but I was happy to see her. She gave me a heartache. A flood of memories rushed through me. I remembered the time I interviewed her, on the station. She said to me, “ Mera husband kaam nahi karta, pasand nahi usko ( My husband does not work, he does not like it ). I asked her that why does not she ask him to work. She said, “Usko pasand nahi hai, bolta hai sath me rehne ka ( He does not like it, he just wants to be with me ). So he ties the bunches of flowers and she sells them. Survival is a daily affair.
Many like her travel through these spaces everyday for work, from where they are pushed out, resisted. But they manage. A city like Bombay has no place for them. They are constantly displaced from one place to the other which makes one wonder, whose city is it, anyway ? Today, the so called public spaces are not for the public anymore. Public is a juridical category showing a contrast to private property. This means that a public space will be under the ambit of punishable laws. The state has an authority over such spaces. On the other hand, the historical conception of commons says that it lies on the frontiers and lies within the grid of law. However, it is a more dynamic and collective resource which can be used by a much larger community. Commons are accessed by all classes of the society and unlike private property which is essentially to protect the class interests of a few , or public property which is exclusionary, are mostly seen as accepted and accessible by the entire communities surrounding that area. Here it would not be futile to discuss the conception of private property as discussed by Malthus. Malthus essentially through his writings says that private property needs to be protected for capitalist interests to flourish.
At the same time, in the name of public space State deliberately excludes certain classes of people but pretends to be working in the interest of all . Castells argues that the state performs its regulatory function by a. Organizing and unifying the divergent interests of different fractions of capitalist class under the hegemony of dominant fractions ( Monopoly capital ) . It acts to pretend as if it represents all sections of the society, however in the long term remains a representation of dominant bourgeois class and b. Fragmenting the dominated class where the legal system, the electoral system and so on produce and sustain ideology of an individual.
Commons becoming Exclusionary: Exclusions occur on a very deliberate basis. Such exclusion adds to the layers of deprivation that people face. It is a result of a well thought of programme to reduce the undesirables of the society by promoting a deliberate agenda for privatization, commercialization, in the name of historic preservation and other specific strategies of design and plan .
This ensures that the vitality and vibrancy of places are reduced. While the upcoming projects of the state ensure that communities are divided and too much stress is emphasised on individualization and separation of communities . Residential apartments are coming up which are located far from markets etc. and the entry of local vendors etc is generally restricted in such places. This apart from adding to the fact that the vibrancy and liveliness of the area is compromised ensures that safety also is compromised at many levels. In many studies done on street vendors and pheriwalas it has been proven quite clearly that women like to walk on such streets which are vibrant and hustling bustling with life. In many cases it was also found that in the instances of probability of sexual harassment on streets the people who were present there , like the autowallahs etc. helped in preventing such incidents by intervening at the right moment.
By restricting the usage of public spaces to specific sets of people it is ensured that only a certain class namely the middle class or the tourists or so feel welcomed. Loss of commonalities is a result of these restrictions in such places and due to excessive spatial control, surveillance and police interventions.
Politics of Space:
To claim these urban commons the common people have to negotiate everyday, at various levels. Right from the instance of paying fines to policemen on local trains which bags them a certain kind of legitimacy over the space to paying pauti in the case of street hawkers. This constitutes interaction with state at many levels. This interaction does not necessarily have to be smooth, on many occasions it also means violence perpetrated by the state at different levels. These negotiations reveal the limitations of normative notions of urban governance. In these circumstances the experience of state by different people is different, where it is viewed less as an extension of disciplinary power than as a locus for negotiations and legitimizations of spatial claims . These claims often do not have the legal legitimacy in formal institutions.
Indian cities are finally becoming a bourgeoisie affair with little space for poor as Partha Chatterjee claimed in an essay few years back. The rise of elitist NGOs and acceptance of development in the name of exploitation of many and benefit of a few has led to the strengthening of residents' associations etc, many of whom claim their rights on public space and commons and ensure that certain sections of society become more excluded than ever in the name of promoting aesthetic sense.
A way forward:
Philip Cryans on a report on the Urban Commons talks about the six policy level strategies that may work for the urban commons. These include a. Local production of needs, b. Green economy that works for all, c. The Right to Housing, d. Community land Trusts, e. Metropolitan Democracy, f. New kind of Governance. Broadly these include the needs that communities should have a say on their resources and that families should not be rendered homeless in sudden events like building of malls. There could be possibility of co-operatives which define property ownerships on common principles and grounds by taking land out of real estate market, making housing more affordable for people who need it. There should be a level playing field for paying taxes, especially when it comes to communities of lower strata. Also a transcendental political alignment is necessary which cuts across class, caste, geography, gender and other factors that divide communities. Not that it is very easily conceived, but it certainly is not impossible to achieve.
A city that liberates
Walter Benjamin, seeking to redeem the liberating potential of the modern city, developed the idea of the threshold as a revealing spatiotemporal experience. For him, the flaneur is a connoisseur of thresholds: someone who knows how to discover the city as the locus of unexpected new comparisons and encounters. ( Stavrides 2010 ) This awareness can finally bring some clarity to the urban phantasmagoria which has reduced modernity to a misfired dream of few and which makes the city exclusionary. An emancipating city should rather, says Angelis, look like a city of thresholds, it is not an agglomerate of liberated spaces but a network of passages, as a network of spaces belonging to nobody, but everybody at the same time, which are not defined by a fixed-power geometry but are open to a constant process of (re)definition. This also concerns Lefebvre's notion of the right to the city , which is by creating a higher level of commons and not just a matter of access of spaces, or being able to have one's own house. Certainly this idea includes all that , but it also goes much beyond. This idea talks of the city as a collective work of art which makes room for new meanings, new values, new dreams, new collective experiences and which is the way, and may be the only one, to transcend pure utility, a way to see commons beyond the utilitarian horizons
Sushmita Verma is a student of Masters in Social Work, TISS, Mumbai
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