Radical Territoriality and Temporality: Dilli Chalo and Roadway Occupations in India

Abstract

The politics of infrastructure lies at the influx of a range of interconnected, yet chasm-riddled  disciplinary silos. Thus, infrastructures take time to conceive, build, maintain and update. As such, infrastructures become long-standing relics in the built environment and witness socio-political, climatic and temporal change while remaining relatively frozen in their morphology. There is merit in considering how infrastructures of the future might learn from unprecedented occupation and civilian alteration - events that exceed the single-use capacities of network infrastructures - to become more informed and representative of past, current and future politics. In particular, there is merit in analysing recent shifts in contemporary politics that incited global instances of occupational dissent and civil mobilization by employing tactics and strategies to meet unforeseen needs.  Two urgent, contemporary examples of these infrastructural adjustments were the Dilli Chalo protests in North India in 2020-2021 and the pedestrian exodus of migrant workers at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Within the scope of these events, this essay seeks to explain some region-specific and contemporary revelations that can be drawn from the ways in which the protestors and occupants of these infrastructural artifacts informed creative street-centric dissent within the finite set of modelled scenarios as programmed and designed by architects and designers  This essay is bolstered by a central proposition: there are many instances where, in the South Asian context, the street has historically encapsulated demonstrative emerging political hegemonies, where the negotiation of existing infrastructures to support multiple functions - both spatial and social - was central to future political dialogue. The civil redesign of existing infrastructures in these contemporary scenarios came to alter the local, street-level exercise of autonomy. Both revolutions, the migrant exodus and the farmers’ protests, though differentiated by their initial reactions and causes, ultimately demonstrated the Indian public’s right to the city.