cities
struggles
ideas
always... →
one journal ↴
city: issue 28.1-2
founding editor: bob caterrall
editor: city editors
editorial: erased city
Ammar Azzouz
If it was not Palestine, it would have been different. But it is Palestine. Silence.
Everyone is watching. From their tiny mobile screens, in their doomscrolling, they watch what Palestinians are showing us, risking their lives to make the world see, in case the world cares. They show a life under siege and occupation that manifests itself through everyday layers of suffering, trauma, and pain—all accumulating for decades. Everyone is watching, from their TV screens, from the comfort of their homes, the mass destruction of Palestinians’ homes. Many remain silent. Because it’s Palestine. They turn off the TV, whilst the people of Palestine remain in collective shelters, in the cold, hungry, thirsty, dying slowly.
No one could say they haven’t seen the drone footage of mass destruction of architecture, with broken minarets and domes, with homes razed to the ground. No one could say they haven’t seen the videos of displaced Palestinians fleeing their homes walking the same walks their parents and grandparents had done in the Nakba—many people in Gaza have been displaced before. No one could say they haven’t heard the voice of a trapped child in a car calling for rescue, but even when the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance went to rescue her, they were targeted by Israel. No one could say they have not seen how schools and universities have been damaged and destroyed in processes that have been termed educide. But sssshhhhh, keep silent. Because it’s Palestine.
If it was another geography, then flags would be raised on campuses in universities, scholarships and funds would be established so quickly, campaigns would be made to open homes for the displaced, and well-established media platforms that have millions of readers would be provided for impacted communities to write, narrate, and publish their own story rather than talking on behalf of vulnerable and injured communities. Solidarity is selective. It’s all different today. Because it’s Palestine.
In Palestine, in Gaza, Al-Israa University was turned into a military base by the Israeli forces for several weeks. Then in January 2024, a video was released showing the moment it was blown up. In the wars of our time, destroyers not only have destroyed, but also released films of destruction to send symbolic messages to the oppressed and the world that there are no limits.
Whilst the destruction of Al-Israa University is a symbol of the destruction of the academy, it must be seen as part of a system of violence. In a report published by Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Citation2024), it is noted that ‘Israel systematically destroyed every university in the Gaza Strip in stages over the course of the more than 100-day attack.’ As of 4 February 2024, the United Nations reported the damage of 14 campuses belonging to the 12 higher education institutions. They also added that 386 schools have sustained damage, ‘including 138 schools that sustained major damage or were fully destroyed’ (UNESCO Citation2024). A school is not only a building, but rather a place of knowledge production, the site where the future is built, where the next generation will learn. Destroying a school is also destroying the future. Over 4327 students, 231 teachers, and 94 professors have been killed by Israel (Desai Citation2024). Where is the global solidarity with Palestinian academics?
editorial
abstract / preview
Abstract
Erased city
If it was not Palestine, it would have been different. But it is Palestine. Silence. Everyone is watching. From their tiny mobile screens, in their doomscrolling, they watch what Palestinians are showing us, risking their lives to make the world see, in case the world cares. They show a life under siege and occupation that manifests itself through everyday layers of suffering, trauma, and pain—all accumulating for decades. Everyone is watching, from their TV screens, from the comfort of their homes, the mass destruction of Palestinians’ homes. Many remain silent. Because it’s Palestine. They turn off the TV, whilst the people of Palestine remain in collective shelters, in the cold, hungry, thirsty, dying slowly. No one could say they haven’t seen the drone footage of mass destruction of architecture, with broken minarets and domes, with homes razed to the ground. No one could say they haven’t seen the videos of displaced Palestinians fleeing their homes walking the same walks their parents and grandparents had done in the Nakba—many people in Gaza have been displaced before. No one could say they haven’t heard the voice of a trapped child in a car calling for rescue, but even when the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance went to rescue her, they were targeted by Israel. No one could say they have not seen how schools and universities have been damaged and destroyed in processes that have been termed educide. But sssshhhhh, keep silent. Because it’s Palestine. If it was another geography, then flags would be raised on campuses in universities, scholarships and funds would be established so quickly, campaigns would be made to open homes for the displaced, and well-established media platforms that have millions of readers would be provided for impacted communities to write, narrate, and publish their own story rather than talking on behalf of vulnerable and injured communities. Solidarity is selective. It’s all different today. Because it’s Palestine. In Palestine, in Gaza, Al-Israa University was turned into a military base by the Israeli forces for several weeks. Then in January 2024, a video was released showing the moment it was blown up. In the wars of our time, destroyers not only have destroyed, but also released films of destruction to send symbolic messages to the oppressed and the world that there are no limits. Whilst the destruction of Al-Israa University is a symbol of the destruction of the academy, it must be seen as part of a system of violence. In a report published by Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Citation2024), it is noted that ‘Israel systematically destroyed every university in the Gaza Strip in stages over the course of the more than 100-day attack.’ As of 4 February 2024, the United Nations reported the damage of 14 campuses belonging to the 12 higher education institutions. They also added that 386 schools have sustained damage, ‘including 138 schools that sustained major damage or were fully destroyed’ (UNESCO Citation2024). A school is not only a building, but rather a place of knowledge production, the site where the future is built, where the next generation will learn. Destroying a school is also destroying the future. Over 4327 students, 231 teachers, and 94 professors have been killed by Israel (Desai Citation2024). Where is the global solidarity with Palestinian academics? But it’s not only the university or the school that has been destroyed. Gaza is the target. Erasure of Gaza’s architecture includes both the destruction of everyday places and the targeting of historical cultural heritage sites. It is difficult to see the destruction of cities without understanding the message that it is a destruction of a people. Wissam Nassar, a photographer who studied journalism at the Islamic University in Gaza, noted that: Israel destroyed everything beautiful in Gaza. Israel aimed to destroy not only people but also stones, infrastructure and historical buildings, wanting to eradicate human life and cultural heritage. (Ahmed Citation2024) Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed 1200 Israelis, Israel has damaged thousands of buildings (UNCTAD Citation2024). A major investigation by the Guardian has detailed the destruction in three neighbourhoods in Gaza, which ‘found damage to more than 250 residential buildings, 17 schools and universities, 16 mosques, three hospitals, three cemeteries and 150 agricultural greenhouses’ (de Hoog et al. Citation2024). An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson told the Guardian in their investigation that: Hamas operates nearby, underneath, and within densely populated areas as a matter of routine operational practice. As part of the IDF’s operations, it [has] been carrying out strikes on military targets, as well as locating and destroying infrastructure when imperatively required to achieve the goals of the war. What does achieving the goals of war look like in Gaza? What does the full victory that Israel is calling for mean? Where does this victory end? What is its shape? How many Palestinians need to be killed to achieve this victory? How much destruction is needed to ‘win’? We live in a time where one city after another is being destroyed. Architecture is not any longer seen as part of the ‘collateral damage’ or on the side of the changing dynamics of wars, but rather it is the target. For many scholars studying the built environment and violence, there is increasing research on the different forms of erasure that communities suffer from during times of occupation, wars, and dictatorships. From burning of books and libraries, to destruction of museums and theatres, from bombing bridges to razing homes to the ground, erasure has become a weaponised tool to collectively punish people. In these processes of punishment, cities become the battlefields; tanks cut through peoples’ streets and orchards to make space for invasions and destructions, shops are vandalised by soldiers who want to destroy something more than a tiny shop. It is a destruction of a people, their livelihoods, their economy, their sense of identity and belonging. The city is erased. In my research on destruction of cities, I utilised the concept of domicide. This was the focus of my academic book Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Azzouz Citation2023). In the book I argue that civilians are not only forcibly displaced, but that their material culture is being erased to cause deep suffering, ethnically cleanse them, and erase them from their lands. Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, wrote the foreword of my book, where she noted in 2022: Wars of our time, sometimes fought in our name, are not in the trenches; they’re fought street-to-street, house-to-house, one home after another. Why does a hospital, a kindergarten, always seem to be hit in every outbreak of hostilities? After nearly four decades of reporting on conflict, I now often say: civilians are not close to the front lines; they are the front line. (Azzouz Citation2023, xiii) Destroyers often give labels to make their wars sound legitimate, sometimes it is the wars on terror or terrorists, and other times it is ‘defeating the enemy’. Thousands of civilians are killed in what is called ‘precise wars’. In the case of Gaza, Omer Tischler, the Israeli Air Force’s (IAF) Chief of Staff, said in a video statement that ‘since the October 7 massacre, the IAF has been conducting a precise, focused and process-based campaign’ (Israel Defence Forces Citation2024). Imagine what Gaza would look like if IAF wasn’t precise?
special feature: city drafting
city drafting: property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in south asia
keywords: southern urbanism, bureaucracy, brokers, planning, property, real estate, south asia, unsettlement
abstract / preview
Abstract
City drafting: property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia
This Special Feature explores the negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia. City drafting refers to the flexible and contextual practices, procedures and policies required to haul diverse property regimes into order and provisionally render urban land clear and settled. The drafted city, we argue, is necessarily provisional and uneven, left open to politicised remapping, redrafting and resettlement by a host of institutionally embedded brokers, bureaucrats, clerks and surveyors each wielding their own political and socio-technical vision of land. These drafting practices, not only shape a politics of uneven urbanisation in South Asian cities, but also help to explain the persistent fractal morphology of urban property in South Asia; spanning categories of public, private, non-private, commons, unauthorised, regularised, agrarian, urban and so on. While the South Asian city is commonly understood through the high-resolution imagery of masterplanners, policymakers and investors, city drafting methodologically focuses on the grounded bureaucratic struggles of the map, plot, record and title, through which claims to property rights, exclusions and access are shaped.
fixing bhim nagar: a new metonym for subaltern urbanism
keywords: slum demolition, brokerage, subaltern urbanism
abstract / preview
Abstract
Fixing Bhim Nagar: a new metonym for subaltern urbanism
This article investigates the processes and politics of slum demolitions in the megacity of Mumbai. Scholars of subaltern urbanism have celebrated the political agency and entrepreneurial ability of the metonymic slums in Mumbai. This article argues instead that paying close attention to the dynamics of the lived realities within informal settlements directs us to the limits of ethnographic and archival imagination where fixers operating within the ‘para-legal’ are practicing a new subaltern urbanism, one that is attentive to the complexity of community within the metonymic slum. Through a detailed analysis of the practices of two fixers, this article shows how, by placing themselves at crucial nodes in the demolition and rehabilitation process, the fixers, on the one hand, were able to delay the displacement of residents; on the other, they created hierarchies in the distribution of resettlement benefits. Focusing on the quotidian practices of fixers operating within the demolished informal settlement brings forth a complicated and contradictory politics that ensure the existence of diverse non-privatized land tenures in the city.
categorizing land: an account of leftover land in patna
keywords: housing, land acquisition, bureaucracy, caste politics
abstract / preview
Abstract
Categorizing land: an account of leftover land in Patna
This paper is an account of Bihar State Housing Board (BSHB) and its role in allocating housing and land from the 1970s onwards in Patna. The housing board typifies the bureaucratic practices of property-making at its best and demonstrates how the bureaucracy strategically aligned itself with caste-driven state politics. The unstable nature of forward–backward caste-based partisan politics meant politicians made unceasing efforts to garner support to stay in power including that of the bureaucrats who had far more control and knowledge about administration rules. By creating the discretionary category of chit-put land, loosely translated as leftover or not useful for anyone, an elaborate rationale was created for land allocation. This flexibility was used for carving out new land parcels for the high-income and middle-income category in Patna. The board dexterously encroached on the land allocated for the urban poor in whose name the land acquisition was undertaken at the outset. Using minutes of the meetings of BSHB, the paper also argues for alternative approaches for drafting and mapping the spatial history of a non-metropolitan city without a master plan and maps.
property-work, work of property: figuring land and caste in an urbanizing frontier
keywords: property, property-making, agrarian-urbanism, caste, class, gurgaon, india
abstract / preview
Abstract
Property-work, work of property: figuring land and caste in an urbanizing frontier
Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices in India’s agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird property-work.
from bureaucratic practice to competing policy: examining the durable and redistributive nature of land regularization politics in bangalore
keywords: informality, land regularization, bureaucracy, property, bangalore, southern urbanism
abstract / preview
Abstract
From bureaucratic practice to competing policy: examining the durable and redistributive nature of land regularization politics in Bangalore
This article examines the politics of land regularization pushed for by lower and middle-income groups across various sites post the expansion of Bangalore in 2006, which has created numerous non-master planned settlements, especially in peri-urban areas. I argue for a rethinking of the debates on urban informality in Global South urbanisms through a focus on this politics. I describe the production of the urban through an ethnography of land’s social and administrative embeddings, which pays close attention to the historical and competing claims on land and the institutional complexity of bureaucracy. I also foreground the interpretative frames of residents, rather than planning codes. This methodological approach reveals how non-plan actors channelize various bureaucratic modalities, including higher state spaces, in order to negotiate and co-produce land policy. In sum, the article reveals how this mode of urbanization arises due to the state’s need to navigate complex rival claims on land and residents’ push for more equitable redistribution. This contests the sweeping diagnosis of land grab, failures of Master Planning, and the reckless extension of free markets on land, which usually frame analyses of urban informality.
shaky ground: the fraud of property in lahore
keywords: corruption, fraud, bureaucracy, documents, land, financialization, south asia, pakistan
abstract / preview
Abstract
Shaky ground: the fraud of property in Lahore
The city of Lahore, Pakistan inherited a colonial land bureaucracy in which land is owned according ‘rights in land’ rather than ‘rights to land’. Unlike the absolute ownership provided by state-backed titles, rights in land is merely a presumption of ownership until proven otherwise, creating a permanent gap between ownership and property. These gaps are investigated by patwaris, or lower-level bureaucrats who confirm rights in land before property is sold. Against the backdrop of Pakistan’s booming real estate market, however, land has become Lahore’s most profitable financial asset, and the gap between ownership and property is increasingly exploited to wrangle control over land from others. In this context, ‘fraud’ has become a constant point of concern for both patwaris and residents, each of whom use fraud at various times to negotiate Lahore’s colonial-era bureaucracy with the present-day demands of living in the city. In this article, I argue that fraud mediates property relations in Lahore. In the city, all property is potentially fraudulent, and all fraud can potentially become property. Rather than a fixed relationship between ownership and property, Lahore’s land bureaucracy is characterized by continuously unfolding property relations as new loops of fraud are opened and old ones close.
scripts, scribes and scribbles: notes on drafting the south asian city
keywords: bureaucracy, property, postcolonial city, state theory, urban governance
abstract / preview
Abstract
Scripts, scribes and scribbles: notes on drafting the South Asian city
This paper explores the framework of ‘city drafting’ used in this Special Feature to highlight the inscriptive and documentary processes underpinning property making in South Asia. It considers two senses of drafting: as provisional and iterative writing process that sees texts as objects in motion, and as the technical art of drawing, notation, and inscriptional verification. It argues that the papers in this Special Feature, through their focus on city drafting, demonstrate the continuity of what Raman [2012. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] calls ‘document raj,’ or a colonial bureaucratic system that grounds the logic of property in documentary possession and that administers property through specific dispositions to writing. How property is known and hence possessed rests on a certain grammatology of the state, which can be understood through three ethnographic objects: scripts, or the historically specific orthographic and inscriptive rules for how property is written; scribes, or the bureaucrats and associated technical experts whose graphical and grammatalogical knowledges shape how property is made and unmade; and scribbles, or the notations, jottings, and markings that indexically draw land and documents into different relations. This Special Feature’s ethnographic focus on these three objects reveals the embeddedness of contemporary property and city making mechanisms in colonial documentary practices, thereby showing the epistemological limits of private property both in global metropolitan theory and as fungible economic form.
original articles
towards an insurgent urbanism: collaborative counter-hegemonic practices of inhabiting and transforming the cities
keywords: insurgent urbanism, collaborative practices, social learning, insurgent planning, subaltern urbanism
abstract / preview
Abstract
Towards an insurgent urbanism: collaborative counter-hegemonic practices of inhabiting and transforming the cities
This article proposes a debate anchored in a dialogue between concepts of insurgent planning and humane urbanism and the idea of a subaltern urbanism through the lens of a critical reflection on the role of city-building professionals. The paper explores the idea of an insurgent urbanism as a collaborative praxis of city design and development that arises from the protagonism of marginalised communities and the accumulative knowledge of social movements, activists and scholars. It focuses on three different learning dimensions based on the experience of teaching/research actions developed at a self-organised squat in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 2018 and 2022. Dialoguing with ideas of social learning, it shows that these practices have created a relevant exchange of different types of knowledge and have contributed to the development of other solutions that challenge the hegemonic and neoliberal city production and can therefore be seen as alternatives for the development of more egalitarian and imaginative futures that expand beyond the context of squats in Brazil.
geography of police repression and regulation of street based khwaja sira sex workers in lahore
keywords: police repression, sex workers, transgender, violence, pakistan
abstract / preview
Abstract
Geography of police repression and regulation of street based khwaja sira sex workers in Lahore
This paper looks at street-level strategies employed by the police in their everyday interactions with khwaja sira sex workers using the lens of peripheralization. The findings of this study, based on 35 in-depth interviews with street-based khwaja sira sex workers in Lahore, suggest three important strategies of police repression. These include territorialization; securitization and manipulation of violence across urban centers and peripheries. The paper argues that police repression of khwaja sira sex workers serves to disconnect them from urban centers, key social ties and safety nets, and socio-economic resources critical for their respectful survival in the city. The result is the peripheralization of khwaja sira individuals and their communities, increased dependence on precarious/traditional forms of khwaja sira livelihoods including sex work, and production of difference and marginality.
special feature: putting displacement in its place
special feature: putting urban displacement in its place
keywords: demolition, displacement, evictions, gentrification, mega-events, post-displacement experiences, regeneration, resettlement, resistance, social housing
abstract / preview
Abstract
Special Feature: Putting urban displacement in its place
This paper offers a critical analysis of urban displacement and acts as an introduction to the Special Feature: ‘Putting urban displacement in its place’. It begins by noting the magnitude and significance of displacement, and summarises its constituent components. Drawing upon the work of Hirsh, Eizenberg and Jabareen [2020. “A New Conceptual Framework for Understanding Displacement: Bridging the Gaps in Displacement Literature between the Global South and the Global North.” Journal of Planning Literature 35 (4): 391–407], the paper then outlines four kinds of urban displacement processes which span cities in the Global South and North: development-induced displacement, slum clearance, eviction, and gentrification. Brief consideration is also given to the significance of studentification, touristification, and austerity for driving urban displacement. Next the paper explores three crucial issues regarding the conceptualisation of urban displacement: temporality, vulnerability to displacement, and its emotional impacts. The following section discusses rehousing/resettlement and post-displacement experiences. We then examine the contested relationship between displacement and gentrification. The penultimate section outlines some of the methodological challenges in undertaking research on displacement, and also returns to the theme of placing urban displacement via a discussion of urban politics. The final section summarises the four papers in the Special Feature.
assessing displacement in a tight housing market: findings from berlin
keywords: survey, housing market, housing policy, berlin, (notion and conceptualisation of) displacement
abstract / preview
Abstract
Assessing displacement in a tight housing market: findings from Berlin
Displacement from one’s home is a contested issue, not only in actual urban politics but also in urban research. Empirical studies rely on rather different notions of displacement, which makes a coherent picture of the phenomenon difficult to obtain. In this article, we first deal with the conceptual ambiguities in the debate on displacement so as to carve out an empirically viable definition of direct displacement that focuses on the decision-making process before a relocation. We then present and discuss our own empirical findings on displacement. Finally, we reflect on possible conclusions one could draw from these findings in relation to housing policy. Our empirical results come from a survey we conducted of more than 2,000 tenants who had recently moved from their homes in Berlin, Germany. We found that more than 15% of the respondents had experienced direct displacement. A rent increase after refurbishment or the selling of the property proved to be the most common triggers of displacement. Addressing these particular issues therefore appears to be critical to curbing displacement in tight housing markets.
displaced but happy? making sense of shantytown dwellers’ divergent views and experiences of resettlement in casablanca
keywords: displacement, adequate housing, affordable housing, residential trajectories, displaceability, informal settlement
abstract / preview
Abstract
Displaced but happy? Making sense of shantytown dwellers’ divergent views and experiences of resettlement in Casablanca
While researchers have observed a global rise in displacement, many countries in the Global South have set up large-scale housing programmes, aiming to ensure access for all to ‘affordable’ and ‘adequate’ housing. For residents of Casablanca’s shantytowns, this has created a paradoxical situation—enhanced displacement threats and hopes to be soon moving into a higher-quality home. The situation challenges common conceptualisations of displacement seeing it as a merely negative, forced moving. Therefore, this paper opens up the debate on how to account for heterogeneous or even contradictory experiences of displacement. Through the example of shantytown resettlement in Casablanca, it calls for more people-centred empirical research that explicitly acknowledges internal neighbourhood diversity and difference. Promising approaches may focus on displaceability, the analysis of people’s residential trajectories, and heterogeneity within post-displacement perspectives.
the making of a peripheral town in delhi metropolis through the displacement of basti dwellers
keywords: basti, displacement, delhi, resettlement, place
abstract / preview
Abstract
The making of a peripheral town in Delhi Metropolis through the displacement of Basti dwellers
This paper reflects upon the aftermath of the eviction of working-class communities from the core locations of Delhi to Narela, over 42 kilometres from Delhi’s centre. The evictees were previously residing in ‘informal settlements’, which are colloquially known as bastis or labelled as ‘slums’ in policy documents. Drawing on interviews and focused group discussions, the paper examines the impact of displacement as experienced by the basti residents. I highlight the struggles that residents faced while making ‘home’ in their new area. Familiarity, repetition, networks, and safety are the few aspects I engage with to explain the process of placemaking in the city. I argue that displacement should be understood beyond the idea of physical dislocation. It should be seen through the lens of ‘place’ and how a place is constructed over a period of time against the larger spatial order that is produced in the cities. The paper contributes to academic understanding of the varying experiences of displacement within the affected communities and the contestations which produce spaces on the margins of cities in the Global South.
the political use of informal settlements as a reserve of undesirability: displacement, confinement and informality in madrid
keywords: informal settlements, displacement, confinement, informality, reserve of undesirability, clearance programmes, rehousing policies, eviction, madrid
abstract / preview
Abstract
The political use of informal settlements as a reserve of undesirability: displacement, confinement and informality in Madrid
In the 2010s, more than 10,000 people were still living in informal settlements in Madrid while clearance and rehousing policies had been implemented since the 1960s. This persistence is due to the fact that the policies have always been selective, combining instruments for filtering the populations accepted for rehousing and evicting those considered unsuitable. This article shows that informal settlements have been made governable by (re)creating and (re)shaping zones of informality which ensure a role of reserve of undesirability through displacement, confinement and informalization of informal settlements dwellers: to make rehousing and social policies viable in the city centre, regional policies have relied on spaces of confinement at the margins of the city which have ensured the role of hosting, channelling and controlling the most marginal population built as a ‘surplus’. The article combines a historical political sociology perspective using archives and statistical analysis to explain the institutionalization of the policies and their socio-spatial effects on the long term. A multi-situated ethnography is also used to investigate the governance of informal settlements policies and their socio-spatial effects in the 2010s.
scenes sounds action
women protestors from the islands in kochi: environmental justice in south asia
keywords: protests, seashores, women, development, marine ecology, environmental injustice, caste-oppressed communities
abstract / preview
Abstract
Women protestors from the islands in Kochi: environmental justice in South Asia
The island cluster in the South Indian port city of Kochi has been the site of immense development activities since the 2000s. Thickly populated by shore communities and other caste-oppressed groups, the islanders struggled and mobilised themselves against development projects which threatened their livelihood and marine ecology. One such protest against the Liquefied Petroleum Gas terminal of the Indian Oil Corporation in Puthuvype, a scenic island off the Arabian sea, went on for over a decade. The protestors, including large numbers of women, sustained their struggle despite the state repression in various forms and thereby inserted the need for environmentally and locally conscious development as a necessary step towards social justice. An analysis of this protest signposts the need to acknowledge environmental injustice towards marginalised communities, including shore communities, to deliberate about locally nuanced and relevant development for sustainable eco-futures in South Asia.
reviews
abstract / preview
Abstract
A more-than-human grammar of the urban
No abstract available yet for this article.
abstract / preview
Abstract
Designing justice in the city
No abstract available yet for this article.
