THEORETICAL
BACKGROUND Much of the Habermas-inspired
public sphere literature presumes a citizen-subject wedded to a
specific geographical articulation of the Enlightenment project
(i.e. European). Hence, in the Middle East/North Africa, for example,
the masculinization of contemporary public spheres are generally
perceived to be expressions of incomplete modernity projects. In
her work on the Islamic public sphere Göle (1996) has consciously
sought to break away from these derivative understandings instead
focusing on ways in which a specific local articulation of the Enlightenment
project animates urban citizen-subjects in the contemporary Turkish
public sphere. Given such readings of the modern in Middle Eastern
cities, the problem of the location from which to begin to formulate
questions regarding the public sphere - and the subjectivity that
can be enunciated within it - constitutes a serious challenge to
our understanding of the making of modern urban projects and citizenship
in the region.
To get at some of these problems we draw on Taylor’s notion
of the social imaginary, which he defines as that which “enables,
through making sense of, the practices of a society.” (2002:91).
According to Taylor, the historical articulation of European modernity
was “a new conception of the moral order of society.”
He argues that “the mutation of this moral order into our
social imaginary is the development of certain social forms that
characterize Western modernity: the market economy, the public sphere,
the self-governing people, among others” (ibid). Taylor’s
insistence that our modern political conceptual world is grounded
in a moral economy that has been mutated (transferred) or naturalized,
into particular social imaginaries (and their concomitant truth-effects)
provides a productive framework within which to critically engage
with the making and unmaking of urban projects in the Middle East/North
Africa and South Asia. It suggests that in order for the questions
we put to the study of urban social practices to be productive,
they need to be carefully formulated within the history of local
social frameworks that articulate forms of modernist social imaginaries.
This we argue allows for a deeper understanding of non-Western social
histories within particular and comparative urban projects.
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ALTERNATIVE
HISTORIES
The negotiation of the conceptual-spatial boundaries of the urban
modern, the city as the space of the production of the modern citizen-subject,
constitutes a major preoccupation of much 20th century social thought
(Rabinow 1989; Çelik 1997). The concomitant problem bodies
and problem categories (e.g. rural migrants; tradition) that such
discussion has produced critically inform our contemporary conceptual
grammars. The spatiality of modernities and their public spheres
accounts for the implosion of interest in urban studies in the last
few years. In the Middle East/North Africa scholarship on the urban
sphere has particularly focused on three areas: governance (e.g.
Kazemi & Wolff 1997; Shami 2001, Bayat 1997); the globalizing
metropolis (e.g. Keydar 1999; Öncu 1997); and urban popular
neighborhoods (e.g. Hoodfar 1997; Singerman 1995; Vaisile1997, Ghannam
2002). Similarly there has been a an urban turn in the scholarship
of South Asia where Indian scholars in particular have in the recent
past edited volumes on histories of particular cities like Calcutta
and Mumbai (e.g. Chaudhuri 1995 and Thorner and Patel 1997). The
emerging new wave of writing on Indian urban space shows much promise
in addressing an earlier lack of attention to such issues (see Appadurai
2000, 2002, Dupont and Vidal 2000, Hansen 2001, Nandy 2001, Roy
2003). As much as this scholarship is dominated by accounts of a
few mega-cities particularly in North India (however, see Srinivas
2001), it has contributed to a serious engagement with the urban
phenomena in the form of the SARAI project based in India. This
emergent agenda over shadows the urban research being conducted
in other South Asian societies. In Pakistan, for example, there
are very few texts that broadly discuss the urban milieu. Two recent
volumes on Karachi (The Journal, City (Karachi: 2002) and Hassan
2002) are beginning to partially address this lack. Other research
remains confined within a small community of planners and policy
oriented development circles. Similar trends are visible in the
scholarship on cities in other South Asian societies like Sri-Lanka
and Bangladesh. Although appreciative of the recent interest in
urban experience in the scholarship on both these regions, we hold
the opinion that a persistent gap in the existing literature on
urban space in the region is the lack of a social historical understanding
of cities. We argue that for the study of urban social practices
to be productive, there needs to be a deeper understanding of subaltern
social histories within particular and comparative urban projects.
Building
on the above argument we believe that understanding the particular
social histories of cities in the Middle East and South Asia also
requires an interrogation of the assumptions underlying current
understandings of modernity. For example, the privileging of modern
urban tropes such as mobility, speed and rationalized spatiality
forecloses certain critical questions that examine ways in which
the multitude of, for example, poor women in the Middle East and
in South Asia negotiate urban space in conditions of declining public
transportation infrastructure.
Given
such readings of the modern, this initiative provides a forum that
seriously investigates and rethinks the gendered dimension of public
spaces in these regions. In addition, the initiative seeks to animate
scholarly discussion that takes into account ways in which larger
structural changes in South Asia, the Middle East/North Africa have
influenced the practices and experiences of people. This focus addresses
the lack of social histories that explore urban life-worlds in an
era of de-industrialization and major structural changes such as
are available for many cities in the Euro/American context and even
for cities like Mumbai (Appadurai 2002) and Beijing (Zhang 2002).
To be precise, there is minimal research on understanding how real
estate speculation in Beirut, the decrease in state sponsored employment
in Cairo and the rapid urbanization of Dhaka affect the lived experiences
of the citizens of these cities. Also, very few studies
are available on rural-urban migration in these regions. We need
ethnographies that, echoing research on Latin American and African
cities, could add to our understanding of how people transform themselves
from rural migrants into urban actors.
Continuing
on the theme of spatial and social stratification this initiative
endeavours to seriously engage with histories that detail how urban
life has been effected by the collapse of regional populisms as
viable ideologies (e.g. Arab nationalism, Nehruvian nationalism),
the rise of religious nationalism whether in South Asia or the Middle
East and the systemic erosion of the welfare state and state socialist
programs. Such an engagement shall further entail the understanding
of the response of sections of the middle strata to the unraveling
of the postcolonial nationalist project with its promise of modern,
educated, productive citizen-subjects. There has been very little
work on how the new middle class executes its private life projects
in increasingly commoditized urban spaces where quality education,
globally marketable skills, taste and refinement, self-improvement,
and entertainment are sought with singular drivenness and determination;
similarly, we know little about the various strategies middle class
individuals deploy to distance themselves from their sometimes quite
recent peasant, bedouin, tribal, or lower middle class urban origins.
To
close, it is these changes in contemporary cities that are at the
core of this initiative. We need histories that inform us about
how transnational flows of ideas and resources shape certain responses
to deprivation and marginality, yet also encourage political passivity
and inaction. To further elaborate on this point, we need social
histories that provide an understanding of how the process of globalization
decreases employment opportunities in the formal sector, increases
the numbers of non-organized female labor in entire sectors of the
economy, increases piece rate work, elevates the percentage of non-contractual
industrial labor and decreases state sponsored employment in places
like Karachi, Cairo or Mumbai. Further, in a region marked by conflict,
we need to ask how new forms of public spaces and subjectivities
are produced in societies that are the site of incessant violence.
We argue that raising such questions in
a comparative context is essential to refocus research agendas and
to inspire new studies. In doing so we seek to also place the field
of urban studies within the two regions in a dialogue with each
other and with similar efforts across the globe.
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REFERENCES
CITED
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Bayat, Asef. 1997. Street Politics: Poor People’s
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Chaudhuri, Sukanta, ed. 1995 Calcutta, the Living
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Dupont, Veronique, Emma Tarlo and Denis Vidal, eds.
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Hansen, Thomas Blom. 1999. The Saffron Wave. Princeton:
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