Urban life beyond capture: Movement, time and subaltern politics in Mumbai’s peripheries

Abstract

The cover image of the book (Simone, 2022), a still from the media installation, Strikes at Time, by the Raqs Media Collective, conjures up the city in a play of shadows and light, nameless spirits and dreams, with the shadowy figure of the rebellious worker dominating the frame. It offers the appropriate atmospherics for a book that foregrounds a different kind of city – where nothing is what it seems. Workers are more than workers, inhabiting time and space differently to produce something undeniably urban but that is not anchored in the city form. AbdouMaliq is a master provocateur and, similar to his earlier works, this book succeeds eminently as a provocation to poke at that which we see as settled, tilt our angle of view and expand our appreciation of uncertainty. The concept of The Surrounds is at the heart of this book, one that Simone invokes as ‘simultaneously the spaces, times and practices within and beyond capture’ (ix). Variously described as ‘a mode of accompaniment’ (iv), ‘urban infrastructure’ (1) or a ‘kind of urbanization from below’ (9), the surrounds seems amorphous due to the many forms it assumes. But it is compelling precisely because its improvisational poetics so accurately encapsulates those aspects of urban life that we sense and experience but elude capture in conventional urban studies thought and language. Most evident at the extensions of urbanization, The Surrounds represent ‘a type of territorialization possible when extensive and extended urbanization is no longer rooted within the city form and thus dependent upon multiple articulations of different ways of doing things and different logics of settlement and production’ (ix). The surrounds then emerge as highly heterogenous spaces where disparate urban forms, tenure regimes, financing circuits, legalities and contested territories proliferate. Rather than being held together by some overarching, discernible logic, they operate as ‘strange accompaniments’ to each other (4). In the spaces of The Surrounds, things disappear and others take their place, provisional alliances bind, for a time, but then the rules shaping what is possible are remade. Time seems to be lived differently here. Residents deploy the gaps, interstices and disjunctures of these disparate and changing formations as openings, as infrastructure to generate new possibilities and create something unanticipated. The surrounds thus provide the space for grounding different kinds of rebellious practice through which ‘life can be enacted in ways beyond capture in oppressive situations’ (28). Simone’s meditations on time and formulation of itineraries have been tremendously insightful in explorations of my own city, Mumbai, where urbanization is being extended in unanticipated ways and forms. While emphasizing that the surrounds is that which eludes capture, Simone offers clues for urban researchers to cognize it – ‘a domain that exists by a different way of seeing the urban but also as one that exists through the enactment of circulation, repeated and recalibrated as itineraries’ (39). My deployment of itinerary as method has shed light on a way to see the urban that hinges on movement and temporality.