Negotiating the Inside/Outside, Generating Gaps

Public Space Seen through Bombay Flats and Civic Activism

Abstract

This paper discusses ongoing changes in Indian public space, focusing on Bombay flats as a particular type of urban living space, as well as on civic activities based on groupings of those flats. Critics have argued that urban public space has been privatized and divided due to globalization and neoliberalization, with the consequence that the public space available for communication between diverse people has been lost. Behind this critique looms the Habermasian idea of the civic public sphere, in which the public can freely discuss political issues outside the influence of state power. For Habermas, however, that public sphere collapsed with the gradual expansion of the welfare state and the culture industry. Subsequently, public space came to be discussed not as a sphere of rational deliberation among citizens, but rather as a realm of bio-power that creates disciplined individuals or transforms them into fragmented “dividuals.” Accordingly, contemporary societies challenge not only the earlier framework of public and private but also, increasingly, the notion of a modern Western citizen/person. Yet, many critiques as well as practitioners still rely on those distinctions, reflecting an enduring hope in the public coexistence of diverse others. With a view to developing an alternative to that ideal, this paper examines cases in India, a context in which people have been engaged in public-private reconfigurations since the colonial period. Moreover, new forms of urban activism have recently given rise to heated controversy.

Since economic liberalization and the subsequent rapid globalization in India in the 1990s, a new type of civic activism, including an anti-corruption movement and the cleaning up of the urban space, has drawn considerable academic and journalistic attention. Contrary to “older” pro-poor social movements, the new trend has been criticized as a “new middle-class” activism that facilitates increased control over the city’s “public space.” This criticism resonates with the global issues of privatization and the decline of the public in the neoliberal era. This paper, however, elicits a multi-dimensional reality that cannot be reduced to the proliferation of neoliberalism. It does this by examining how the public-private framework is used to grasp and intervene in those contexts, and by attending to how the framework is also creating slippages or gaps while being articulated with local norms of space and the self.

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