Pastoralists in dry areas of the Afro-Eurasian continent have developed a form of subsistence largely dependent on milk and milk products. It is no exaggeration to say that livestock is being raised there for the supply of milk, with the accompanying culture (milking, milk processing, and the various uses of milk products) becoming a very important subsistence activity. On the other hand, Quechua pastoralists in the Andean highland of South America maintain their subsistence by raising herds of llamas and alpacas, some four thousand meters above sea level, without obtaining any milk from them. In March 2016, a field survey was conducted of the pastoralists’ management of llama-alpaca herds there to determine the factors leading them not to collect milk from their livestock. In particular, field observations and interviews were used to study the size of grazing areas, the structure of camping places, the management of day-trip herding, the number of livestock, the delivery of crias (juvenile llamas/alpacas), and pastoralists’ intervention between mothers and their crias.

The area surveyed was within the Huaylla Huaylla Community in the Chumbivilcas Province of the Department of Cusco, located in southern Peru in the Andean highland. The “E” household there was raising fifty-two llamas, 348 alpacas, about one hundred sheep, five cows and two horses. Their grazing land was divided into four areas, three of which were currently being used. Since the actual linear distance for day-trip herding was around one kilometer in each grazing area, the total area was rather small, and the grazing distance rather short. At night, the family kept their animals inside an enclosure located within the camping place, measuring 130 meters wide and 150 meters long. Since each animal in the enclosure had twenty-four square meters of space apiece, equivalent to a circular area of some seven meters around a mother with a cria, the density of animals was rather sparse.

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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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The issue of street traders chaotically occupying African urban public spaces has drawn increasing attention by researchers as well as urban planning policymakers and citizens. Round-ups of street traders, aimed at moving them to public markets constructed in suburban areas, have incited riots that have been identified as visible manifestations of the latent friction between the state and the informal sector.

In the context of urban Africa, “informality” has been discussed as a particular economic activity, with little attention being paid to the relationships between informal economic activities themselves and the informality determined by the urban space management policy. That informality has also been created by an urban space management policy that has—ever since the colonial era—removed certain activities from the city and certain other urban areas due to their “undesirability.” As gentrification progresses and gated communities expand owing to the globalization and modernization of African cities, the size of the spaces freely available there for economic use has dwindled, with a drastic increase in activities deemed “informal.”

On account of such circumstances, street traders have come to be regarded not only as symbols of the conflict between the central government, the city authorities, and the ordinary people, but also as symbols of the conflict over urban public space. Research in recent years has positioned the issue of street businesses as the battle between the state, street vendors and civil society for street resources relating to such rights as the right to work, the right to fair labor, passage and transport rights, standard transfer and renting rights, and management rights, with discussions of the formal unionization of street traders within the framework of civil society theory.

However, previous studies have neglected to sufficiently discuss the logic behind such everyday practices as an informal sector, including the fluid and flexible creation of people’s livelihoods in uncertain urban spaces, as well as the continuation of formal unionization within a nationally planned economy. Political economists in the 1990’s—who focused on the conflict between the urban informal sector and national or city authorities—evaluated amorphous everyday practices and the improvisational cooperation of an informal economy as political actions, and were skeptical about the sustainability of the organization of the informal sector. What explanation can be made of the formation of static formal organizations to continue amorphous everyday economic practices, which occupy the street in a chaotic fashion?

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Underground shopping areas are distinctive environments built in many of Japan’s major cities in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This article seeks to delineate the logic and principles underlying the spatial formations of those facilities. A model description can be found in Rem Koolhaas’ famous book, Delirious New York, in which he retroactively reconstructed ‘Manhattanism’ by focusing on how a set of systematic principles work within the seemingly chaotic conditions of skyscrapers. Such principles are derived from the ‘culture of congestion’ of Manhattan, which were also observable in Japanese urban conditions in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Following Koolhaas’ reconstruction, this article introduces the concept of ‘undergroundism’ and reconsiders Marc Augé’s concept of ‘non-place,’ which is widely referred to in the context of how globalization has transformed the urban space. The concept of ‘non-place’ is convincing when it describes the spatial quality of shopping malls, airports and motorways, which are all spaces dealing with the flow of people and things. However, the concept’s limitations are revealed when one considers how it relies on the narrative of globalization. It can be demonstrated that there were spaces before the age of globalization that shared qualities in common with those described by Augé as non- place; one of those is the Japanese underground shopping mall.

The first Japanese underground shopping facility was built in 1930. It is crucial to note that the facility was annexed to a subway station, which meant that it targeted the flow of people using the subway to attract potential customers. That fact captures the essence of the facility: namely, as an apparatus to transform the flow of traffic into one of consumption.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, when Japan experienced rapid economic growth, the underground shopping facility was incorporated into the basic scheme of urban redevelopment. During the days of urban redevelopment, major cities were suffering from the problem of congestion and permanent traffic jams. It was determined that the solution would be to develop underground spaces, which would not only realize the separation of pedestrians from vehicles, but also create an ideal vehicle-free shopping area in the city center. A paradigm was invented for that, enabling the scheme of building underground shopping facilities to spread rapidly throughout the country.

An analysis of the underground shopping facility identifies the following characteristics: that they 1)are parasitic, 2)multiply themselves, 3)are self-confined artificial spaces, 4)rely on the digital order of urban space, 5)are apparatuses for transforming flows and 6)are ruled by the principle of probability. Those are the principles that constitute undergroundism, which can suspend the narrative of globalization underpinning Augé’s use of the term of non-place. They also enable us to reconsider the continuity and transformation of non-place-like spaces within the history of urban space.

This article illuminates the generative features of public space within globalization by shedding light on the ow of used clothes (junā kapaḍā) traded on streets in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in India. In previous studies on public space in India, the dominant points of discussion focused on the Indian concept of “public” as distinct from the Western concept, including those who represent “the public.” In those discussions, public space in India has been depicted as multi-layered, and includes the Western concept of “public,” or where the interests of various social actors are contested. This article poses a question related to whether such a picture of counter or contested public space is valid in India that is globalizing. In people’s everyday lives in India, how does the concept of “public,” and the interests of different social actors, intertwine with each other to generate public space?

This article examines that question by comparing two different spaces in Ahmedabad: the Gujari Bazar, and the street market for used clothes. It scrutinizes the ow of goods that converges at those locations and gives rise to michi (a Japanese word meaning “way” or “path,” both literally and metaphorically)as a means to understand their particular sociability. “Michi,” in the Buddhist sense, derives from Sanskrit gati, which means “place”(where people go after death), and is nominalized from the verb, “go” or “move.” It connotes the process of becoming something di erent. With that understanding, the various functions and meanings of Indian streets (rasto in Gujarati)share the same generative and semantic aspect of michi. It is through the exploration of the social and commercial networks found along Ahmedabad’s streetscapes that this article identifies the social processes of generating public space. This article does not regard different Indian spaces as contested, nor does it suggest that the public character has waned due to processes of globalization. Instead, those spaces can be viewed as connected by giving rise to different types of michi.

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