For those of you who wrote your final exam essay on Mumbai, or have a general interest in the city, I thought I’d post this lucid account of the attacks from one of India’s greatest contemporary writers, Arundhati Roy. She alerts us to the dangers in allowing for decontextualized readings of these attacks. In a recent article in the Guardian, she writes:

We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11″. Like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “Bad Guys” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.

But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

Read the full essay here

Today’s New York Times ran a story of an ‘extraordinary’ lawsuit being filed against the Indian government on behalf of the country’s elite.  In the wake of the Mumbai attacks, investment bankers, corporate lawyers and their ilk charge that the state has ‘lagged in its constitutional duty’ to protect citizens’ right to life.  India’s elite, who inhabit a world far removed from the insecurity and precariousness that defines everyday life for the nation’s urban poor, have been ‘politicized’:

Since the attacks, which killed 163 people, plus nine gunmen, there has been an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of urban, English-speaking, tank-top-wearing citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages.

An Indian actor, writing in The Hindustan Times in Mumbai, exposes the paradox confronting Indians today: “we overlook for now your neglect of the city. Its floods, its traffic, its filth, its pollution. Just deliver to us a world-standard antiterrorism plan.” Read the full article from the Hindustan Times here. The link to the New York Times piece is here.

The BBC box. A GPS device tracks its movement around the globe in real time

Its been a while since we’ve discussed ‘globalization’ as a concept in and of itself, but Nate Millington sent in this link that is hard to ignore given its relevance to much that we’ve covered this term. In mid-September the BBC embarked on a year long project to track the journey of a container as it travels around the globe, from port to port, carrying the goods and services that sustain the network of international trade that we now call ‘globalization’. Follow the container’s journey journey around the world here

Nikki Hilsenhoff, a student of 101, probed theories of states and nations through the case of Basque Country, an area that borders France and Spain, and home to the Basque population. She writes:

The Basque community crosses over the political boarder dividing France and Spain.The Basque population is approximately 3 million; 92% of which are within Spanish borders. With their distinct ethnic identity and language, members of the Basque Community have fought for independence and autonomy. While the Basques in Spain are offered more freedom, in terms of language and education than in France, neither France nor Spain has ever granted political independence.

As a stateless nation the Basque have been struggling, often violently, for sovereignty for years. This example illustrates how nations, and nationalism can exist without exclusively being associated with a state, or an independent political unit with officially recognized geographic boundaries.

Shepard Simpson from our class provides a lucid account of an aspect of gentrification and re-urbanization that we didn’t touch on in lecture. Its not just young professionals who are moving back to the city to take advantage of its new creative enterprises, but also the ‘baby boomers’. As Shepard notes below, many of these ‘empty nesters’ like those of her parents generation, are also returning to the city, contributing to its rapid transformation:

The first picture is from the balcony of my parents’ apartment, taken about a year ago when I was home for winter break. My parents live in Melbourne, Australia and had just recently moved from a suburb of Melbourne to a place which is a ten minute walk to downtown (the beauty of being empty nesters). The following picture depicts an office complex that has been built during the past year right next door. These pictures made me think about the process of urbanization we have been discussing in class, and the idea of an “aging population” resulting from the approaching retirement of the baby boomer generation which we discussed in discussion sections during our second round of debates.

The area which my parents moved to used to be the industrial sector made up of strings of warehouses that lined the Yarra River. Over the past few decades, these warehouses have been either torn down and/or renovated into new modern apartment complexes and huge infrastructure projects. More and more people are relocating to the area because of its proximity to downtown and its location on the river. In my opinion this is a prime example of Gentrification and “Re-urbanization”. The picture also made me start thinking about how the restructuring of cities and the outmoded concept of “Levittown” is in large part connected to the “soon to come” retiring group of baby boomers. I think it is going to be interesting to observe over the next couple decades how urban geographies continue to evolve and in turn what affects this will have on suburban life. 

Lauren Hsiao-Ling Nowak from our class presented an acute example of how nationalism, under perceived crisis, structures social relations at the scale of the workplace. Workers for the MTA who practice Sikhism wore their turbans to work for several years without incident. Following September 11th, 2001, the MTA began ‘cracking down’ on Sikhs wearing their turbans while working, stating that it was against ‘company policy’. Lauren writes:

The video clip below is about employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) for the state of New York who practice Sikhism. Many times, those who have heard of Sikhism confuse it with hinduism or Islam, but it is neither. It is a religion from Punjab India, and believes in the equality of all humans and rejects discrimination on the basis of caste, creed and gender. Sikhism requires you to wear a turban and never cut your hair.

Sikh workers were threatened with being terminated from their jobs if they continued to wear their turbans, targeted on the basis of their appearance. MTA officials determined their headdress was not part of the uniform, even though they were not the only people wearing something ‘unofficial’ on their head (other workers wore Russian winter hats, or baseball caps supporting the Mets & the Yankess ).

Many of you may be thinking, “why didn’t they just take their turbans off?” but like I said earlier, Sikhism is the only religion that REQUIRES you to wear a turban. Although nationalism is often said to be diverse and bring sense of commonality and belonging, in this example, we can see this idea can be greatly infringed upon in a smaller scale, within the workplace of subway stations in New York.

Levitt and Sons filed for bankruptcy in 2007

An op-ed piece in today’s New York Times notes that in Levittown, empty houses and for sale signs are shattering enduring images of the post-war suburban dream. In Long Island, the home of Levittown, about 1 in 3 mortgages were sub-prime:

“[Foreclosures] may seem to be a problem for overbuilt exurbs, go-go condo zones and McMansion sprawl — not tidy, solid communities like Levittown, where the American Dream was invented.”

Levitt and his sons revolutionized homebuilding over 50 years ago through a combination of technological innovations and mass production. Levittown became the pinnacle of a society driven by middle class consumption. As the largest all-white community in the nation in 1960 (today it’s 94 % white), it also speaks volumes to the social geographies produced through the federally administered race-restricted mortgages of that era. Last year, Levitt and Sons filled for bankruptcy protection after its investments in Florida’s housing markets collapsed. Read the full story from the New York Times here

Robert Fishman, influential urban historian, conducted a survey at the end of the last millennium of members of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) to compile a list of the top ten influences on America cities over the past 50 years. The list (on the far left) begins with the 1956 Interstate Highway Act and ends with the urban riots of the 1960s. On the column to the right, the Society’s predicts the biggest influences on cities in the coming 50 years. They predict growing polarization, the internet and the decline of the post-war suburbs will be among the major influences on cities in the new millennium. The report was written in 1999. Nearly ten years into this new age, how accurate have their predictions been? What is missing from the list? How has 9/11 influenced urban life? Read the full report here

A report released by the United Nations last month suggests that inequality in New York, Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans rivals that of some cities in Africa. The report, which reviewed economic inequality in cities around the world says that in both Canada and the US, a key factor determining poverty levels is race. According a review of the report in the International Herald Tribune, 

[t]he life expectancy of African Americans in the United States is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India, despite the fact that the United States is far richer than the other two countries.

Read about the UN report State of the World’s Cities 2008/2009 here

A recent essay by Anand Giridharadas speaks volumes to the contradictions of Mumbai in the face of urbanization and globalization. This is a city where “luscious skyscrapers sprout beside mosquito-prone shantytowns”; where Bollywood–India’s answer to Hollywood–meets Dharavi, a slum where one million people inhabit one square mile. Giridharadas remarks that “these dueling claims on Mumbai explain its mongrel look: like a duty-free mall in parts, in parts like a refugee camp.”

What does it mean to be an emerging global city and home to one of the largest slums in Asia? What do plans for Dharavi’s redevelopment have to do with the need for cities to compete in an increasingly globalized marketplace? Processes of displacement within the context of urban redevelopment are not confined to places like Mumbai. As we begin our discussion of urbanization and gentrification we’ll begin to see similarities between what’s happening in Mumbai and Dharavi and cities in the western world. Read Giridharadas’ story, published along with a slide show, in the New York Times here