Transformative urbanism refers to the popular consciousness that finds a basis in materiality, which is both celebratory and radical, shaped by commonplace day-to-day acts of city building: witness the hawker markets that appropriate streetscapes, and factories that play both the branded and un-branded. Elsewhere, I point to a mainstream but radical politics that re-constitutes “property” via self-organizing urbanisms.1 If this were the case, would the rise of ethnic enclaves and transformation of city centers in Europe and some North American cities than pose an equally radical re-constitution? Do the variety of cases seen here in Post-it City. Occasional Urbanities herald a much wider transformation to unsettle imperial capital that assumes it is the main driving force and hegemonic narrative underlying the contemporary cityscape?

Transformative urbanism subverted the old-style elitist master planning. Now, it moves to unsettle imperial (globalized) capital: mega projects promoted by international financial institutions like the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation in partnership with very large real-estate developers.2 Transformative urbanisms also disrupt several common narratives across ideological extremes, even seemingly progressive ones, pointing to their tacit acceptance of imperial capital and place on the political margins. Materially and perhaps where it hurts the most, transformative urbanism disrupts the neo-liberal project: “competitive cities” built to engender the “creative class”! In effect its political substance disrupts the assumed smooth flow of capital within the commodity process via an anarchic and, as we shall see, “porous” street-level capitalism – as noted by Jeebesh Bagchi of Sarai, Delhi. Such a view of power and politics is not new. Foucault helps, in the fluidity of material processes implicated in transformative urbanism. But if we enter into the life stage of complex, uncertain, and often dialectical excitement, and even day-to-day consumerist rituals, we discover Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis on Naples to reveal a particularly visionary appeal.3 If Benjamin had woken half a century later (like a Rip van Winkle) in the metro centers of the Global South, and in the emigrant quarters of North European or American Cities, we would be likely to see extensions of his essay on its vibrant porosity. We could also speculate that he would have been particularly excited to visit the Post-it City. Occasional Urbanities exhibition whose presentations and vibrant sprit move beyond centralized control. And perhaps, most importantly, in these times of perpetuated fear and phantoms, “Naples” would come alive to expose these ghosts.

Transformative urbanism counters “planning fear”
Poetry and imagination is important in this age of obsessive planning and through it, the control and subversion of human sprit. Not surprisingly, urban planners view such dynamics negatively as “demographic growth”, and the rise of “slums” with great dread.4 This only feeds contemporary imperial capital’s propaganda: the specter of fear, doomsday, and the future Al Qaeda manifest in “unplanned slums”, and “informal” economies.5 Together, these fuel a regressive politics where “policy” is in effect “policing”.6 Not surprisingly, in times when cities either have to carry the burden of being “globally competitive” or perish, such fears are used to justify a dirigisme: on the one hand, that of neo-liberal regulation pointing to a trajectory leading to a homogenized “free” (and global) market, and on the other a repressive nation-state that now uses state powers (in the name of public purpose) to reinforce the power of corporate might. What we see in these exhibits of Post-it City. Occasional Urbanities is a stringent counter to such ideological terrorism. Witness the overarching evidence that cities are self-organizing, incremental, and perhaps, in time will show how corrosive they are to the “grand plan” or mega-infrastructure.

Transformative urbanism as mainstream (and not “marginal”)
Some parts of progressive thought, drawing from Michael De Certeau, view such urbanisms as “tactics” to counter hegemonic “strategy”.7 Such a view, accurate only at its surface, poses two serious problems. The first is a conceptual one: posing city spaces as a binary dilutes the possibility of the politics. Such a binary also underpins a colonial developmentalism to set relationships on a development trajectory where a macro-metaprocess would over time, transform “violent eastern tribalism” into “western democracy” – underpinnings of a paternalistic “neo-patrimonialism”. The second problem is empirical. Transformative urbanism as economy is hardly “marginal”. Recent studies (from India's most conservative economic institute) showed that such economies (that they term as the “un-organized” sector), generated 67% of economic value addition, and 95% of city employment. This is reinforced when satellite images routinely show how transformative urbanism overlays 85% of city terrain where only 15% is “master planned”. Rather than fall into the planners’ trap of economic productivity and quantum, let us focus on transformative urbanism as it represents a mainstream political consciousness rather than an “alternative”. Economy and the occupancy of space reflected from ordinary day-to-day acts by ordinary people. Detailed ethnographic and reflective studies of such urbanisms embed such invisibility of politics into locality.8 It is hardly surprising that the commonplace institutions – the municipal council, and, where extensive political consciousness is not an ideology but an embedded materialism, supportive councillors – help occupants to “work the system” in seeking infrastructure and services, not just for housing, but also for small factories and manufacturing units, and commerce. The materialism of land and economy (a livelihood that is immediate) is highly politicizing. Even children know of their politicians, who their families confront with polite yet certain force on their weekly visits, and with them influence the lower- and middle-level bureaucrats opening up administrative procedures and, if need be, loopholes to subvert evictions, and actions to strengthen de-facto land tenure.9 Such embedded porosity of institutions opens up porous streets, refreshing open-ended legalities, and economy.10 Perhaps most significantly, transformative urbanism poses a merger of economy and politics. This merger is different from the conventional political economy, which in its linearity of development shaped by technological progress, stages political consciousness to a distant future. Instead, transformative urbanism suggests that we value the fluidity and perhaps uncertainty of space that binds economy and politics in an immediate materiality. Is this materiality a false consciousness? Or, is the process the substance in an “occupancy-based” transformative urbanism, which radicalizes property to return us to Walter Benjamin’s Naples in a sharper tropical light?

Transformative urbanism permeates the city
Visuals from “Bhogal”, a refugee housing area located in central Delhi, India, highlight the metaphor of such porosity (figure 1). Materialized in its physical transformation from a sterile mass-housing block in 1952, to having residents build more than 160% over the original block via extensions into the street front, on the roof, and into the back courtyard. These were not “informal” but negotiated with the government department and the municipal body! It was these same extensions, initially intended to accommodate family growth, that also allowed small shops, workshops and spurred a substantive local economy. The structure seems like a porous ever-evolving sponge – part of a coral reef supporting life-energies of various forms. This is indeed a tapestry of many parts of Delhi. No two histories are the same, but they share and constitute complex localities of economy and politics. Most importantly, they represent a popular energy that, in its porosity, subverts centralized control. Perhaps city terrains are a stage for animated theaters staging complex political plays!

Porosity results not only from the indolence of the southern artisan, but also, above all, from the passion for improvisation, which demands that space and opportunity be at any price preserved. … Similarly dispersed, porous, and commingled is private life: ... each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life. To exist, for the Northern European the most private of affairs, is here, as in the kraal, a collective affair. ... Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theaters. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes.11

As Walter Benjamin meanders in Naples, politics is in the celebratory ritual! In the case of Bhogal, this occurs weekly in the “Tuesday traveling markets”. Porosity opens up the economy with the neighborhood’s main streets extending into private and community space. Figure 2 shows the market street with residents intermixed with traveling traders, city appropriated, encroached, and property re-configured. It’s an economy that started with the poor migrants, but has expanded rather than gone away with the malls that appear in other parts of the capital.

Porosity is the inexhaustible law of the life of this city, reappearing everywhere. A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday, and how much weekday in this Sunday! Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, so, only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room. Even the poorest one is as full of wax candles, biscuit saints, sheaves of photos on the wall, and iron bedstands, as the street is full of carts, people, and lights. Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought. There is no hour, often no place, for sleeping and eating. … This sleep which the men and women also snatch in shady corners, is therefore not the protected northern sleep. Here, too, there is interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace, outer light and inner darkness, street and home.12

Transformative urbanism poses a magical bureaucracy
“Master planning” – the darling of the corporate business! To replace unplanned development subverts imperial globalization. It is also attractive to the classical leftist and many progressive activists who assume the plan will ensure “social justice”, and organize social movements. However, transformative urbanism renders master planning ineffective by the very regulation that forms it raison d’être. Here is the magic of the lower- and middle-level bureaucrats, loud-mouthed, corrupt and scruffy, and their brothers-in-arms (and business): the small time politicians. All focus attention on the center of this grand subversion: the municipal council. Rather than dispose off the falsities of social justice in the “the master plan” via “progressive planning” and “alternatives”, the magical apparatus simply overlaps, stalls, and overlays via new administrative procedures, expanding loopholes to allow the intermixing of land use (to allow for home based commerce, manufacturing), the extension of infrastructure and services into “illegal” areas (in effect strengthening their “de-facto” tenure) and both to realize the real estate surpluses so sought after by the World Bank and its partners of the new imperial globalization. This re-appropriation of mainstream political and administrative institutions happens in a cross- causality of land being claimed and its transformation as an economy setting within the commodity process. Thus, the issue is not the creation of an “alternative”. But rather, a disruption when the magical bureaucracy re-constitutes its administrative politics. No greater fear of the centralized planner and the global capital is that of lower level murky stealth-like bureaucracy and local politics that bog down their dreams of smooth capital flows.

Such celebration is legal too. Here, consider figure 3 of the street-side bureaucracy, working law into processes embedded and responsive to an underlying radicalism. Lawyers and petty bureaucrats, retired or stepping away from their official jobs, work a parking garage into a porous public space. This terrain of vital stealth-like politics is deeply threatening to those who plan India’s globalized future via mega narratives. Not surprising, it is so often lost to progressive activists who, in seeking an esoteric so distanced, miss such immediate materialities.

… True laboratories of this great process of intermingling are the cafes. Life is unable to sit down and stagnate in them. They are sober, open rooms resembling the political people’s café, and the opposite of everything Viennese, of the confined bourgeois, literary world. Neapolitan cafés are bluntly to the point. A prolonged stay is scarcely possible. A cup of excessively hot espresso – in hot drinks this city is as unrivaled as in sherbets, spumoni, and ice cream – ushers the visitors out. … Only a few people sit down briefly here. There are quick movements of the hand, and they have placed their orders. The language of gestures goes further here than anywhere else in Italy. The conversation is impenetrable to anyone from outside. Ears, nose, eyes, breast, and shoulders are signaling stations activated by fingers. Yes, here his cause would be hopefully lost, but the Neapolitan benevolently sends him away a few kilometers on to Mori: “Vedere Napoli e poi Mori.”13

 

1. Benjamin, Solomon, “Occupancy Urbanism - A thesis on Radical Space”, forthcoming in Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers (via link to publications >readers at website: www.sarai.net). This radicalization happens via de-facto “occupancy” in the economy of small firms interconnecting their production (without IPR), and a mostly municipal politics emphasizing varied (de-facto) tenure regimes.

2. Benjamin, Solomon, “Analogue to Digital: Re-Living Big Business's Nightmare in New Hydras”, http://world-information.org/wio/readme/992006691/1154964925.

3. Benjamin, Walter and Lacis, Asja, “Naples”, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Schocken Books, New York 1986, pp. 162-173.

4. Davis, Mike, Planet of the Slums, Verso, London, New York 2006.

5. For an amazing work promoted by the Canadian Government’s security and trade establishment on this, see Liotta, P. H., “Human security and cities in the Greater Near East”, in Human Security for an Urban Century at http://humansecurity-cities.org//sites/hscities/files/Human_Security_for_an_Urban_Century.pdf, pp. 12-13.

6. Dikec, Mustafa, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford 2007.

7. Certeau, Michael, “General Introduction”, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley 1988, pp. xi-xxiv, 6-7.

8. See: Singerman, Diane, “Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo”, Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics, Princeton University Press, 1995; Simone, AbdouMaliq, “Pirate Towns: Reworking social and symbolic infrastructure in Johannesburg and Douala”, Urban Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, February 2006, pp. 357-370; Benjamin, Solomon and Bhuvaneswari , R., “Democracy, Inclusive Governance, and Poverty in Bangalore”, working paper # 26 at:
http://www.idd.bham.ac.uk/research/Projects/urban-governance/resource_papers/stage2_casestudies/wp26_Bangalore.pdf

9. Benjamin, Solomon, “Touts, Pirates and Ghosts”, in Sarai reader 05 “Bare Acts”, February 2005, http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/05-bare-acts/01_solly.pdf.

10. Liang, Lawrence, “Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation”, at http://www.altlawforum.org/PUBLICATIONS/document.2004-12-18.6873027732.

11 benjaMin, Walter i lacis, asja, «naples», op. cit., pp. 166-167, 171.

12 Íbid, pp. 168-172.

13 Íbid, p. 173.