Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa PDF
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Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East,South Asia,and Africa This page intentionally left blank Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East,South Asia,and Africa Edited by Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali GENDERINGURBANSPACEINTHEMIDDLEEAST, SOUTHASIA, ANDAFRICA Copyright © Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali, 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-1-4039-7523-2 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan®is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53586-6 ISBN 978-0-230-61247-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230612471 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gendering urban space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa / edited by Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sociology, Urban—Developing countries—Case studies. 2. Sex role— Developing countries—Case studies. 3. Political participation—Developing countries—Case studies. I. Rieker, Martina. II. Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961– HT149.5.G46 2008 307.7609172'4—dc22 2007047249 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First Edition: June 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Gendering Urban Space 1 Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker 1 Gendering Urban Colonial Casablanca: The Case of the Quartier Réservé of Bousbir 17 Driss Maghraoui 2 Morphologies of Social Flows: Segregation, Time, and the Public Sphere 45 Susanne Dahlgren 3 Pulp Fictions: Reading Pakistani Domesticity 71 Kamran Asdar Ali 4 Race, Security, and Spatial Anxieties in the Postapartheid City 101 Thomas Blom Hansen 5 Remaking Urban Socialities: The Intersection of the Virtual and the Vulnerable in Inner-city Johannesburg 135 AbdouMaliq Simone 6 Thin Lines on the Pavement: The Racialization and Spatialization of Violence in Postcolonial (Sub)Urban France 169 Paul A. Silverstein vi Contents 7 Cosmopolistan: Culture, Cosmopolitanism, and Gender in Karachi, Pakistan 207 Oskar Verkaaik Author Biographies 229 Index 231 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank the educational institutions and funding agen- cies that made it possible for us to assemble groups of excellent schol- ars at various sites to share their work. These papers represent some of the intellectual outcomes of those workshops. We especially thank the Social Science Research Council (New York); SEPHIS (the South- South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development); the Population Council (Cairo); the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at the American University in Cairo; the Institute for Women, Gender, and Development Studies at Ahfad University (Khartoum); Sabanci University (Istanbul); the University of Texas at Austin; and the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) for their support and encouragement. We also thank all the participants in our workshops who, by their presence and enthusiasm for the project, made the effort worthwhile. The Shehr network that we both coordinate could not have moved forward with- out the initial and continuing encouragement of friends like Lisa Taraki, Ayse Oncu, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ann Lesch, Asef Bayat, and Maureen O’Malley; to them we owe our gratitude. The article, “Pulp Fictions: Reading Pakistani Domesticity,” by Kamran Asdar Ali, first appeared in Social Text (2004, issue 78, pp.123–45). It is reprinted here with the kind permission of Duke University Press. We are indeed grateful to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their faith in this project from the very beginning and for helping us in seeing it through. Finally, both of us thank our respective families for their kindness and understanding. 4 I N T R O D U C T I O N GENDERING URBAN SPACE Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker I n his recent novel, Knots (2007), the Somali author Nuruddin Farah situates the story in contemporary Mogadishu, a city run by warlords and drug barons in an increasingly assertive Islamic cultural milieu. The female protagonist, Cambara, returns from exile and through her ability to move around in the city, finds possibilities of connecting with other women activists to work toward reconciliation and peace. A tale of hope and female strength, the novel depicts the emergence of new kinds of urban spaces in the global south where, despite frictions, violence, and conflict, varied actors—male and female—create opportunities to coexist and prosper. Farah’s portrayal reminds us of Elizabeth Wilson’s (1991) discus- sion of the emergence of the modern Western city and its relationship with women. Wilson too, as subtly hinted by Farah for an African city, characterizes the urban as a space of opportunity and abandon for women. Notwithstanding its difficulties, Wilson argues, the city eman- cipates women far more than rural life or suburban domesticity (10). However, despite promises of egalitarian freedoms, the disciplinary nature of “liberal”1 modernity has seldom allowed the urban to be a space of such complete abandon for the working poor. Modern urban representational tropes like mobility, speed, and rationalized spatiality also foreclose critical questions that examine ways in which, for example, 2 KAMRANASDARALIANDMARTINARIEKER the multitude of poor women negotiate urban space in conditions of declining public transportation infrastructure. The control of urban crowds, the management of the working poor, the harnessing of female sexuality, and the issues of vagrancy and unattached children have been the historical dilemma faced by those—administrators and academics alike—who seek to control the city and make it “safe.”2 This said, it still needs to be emphasized that although women, the poor, children, and minorities in most cities have not been granted full and free access to the streets—they are not complete citizens—indus- trial life has brought them into public life. Women (and men) may use the urban space for mobility, transgression, and different pleasures that they seek, in the process navigating the everyday in favorable and unfavorable terms (Ali n.d.). Hence they survive and flourish in the interstices of the city and “negotiate” its contradictions in their own particular way (Wilson 1991, 8). How people survive in their private and work life in expanding cities in the global south are stories and histories that are yet to be told or written. The chapters in this book emerge out of a long-term dia- logue initiated by the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes Network (http://www.shehr.org/), an academic initiative that seeks to further a social-historical and critical understanding of contemporary cities and urban practices in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. It examines the efficacy of the category of the city in modernist dis- course and seeks to chart this spatial imagination and its effects through an exploration of the complex processes in which gendered, classed, and raced citizen-subjects have negotiated and been the object of urban projects in these regions. Attuned to both the legacy of modernist conceptual grammars and their inadequacy for under- standing the remaking of space and place in the neoliberal present, the purpose of the network is to open up an arena in which to address the particular positioning(s) of contemporary urban landscapes and urban practices. Following this lead, the chapters in this volume discuss the life worlds of the men and women in multiple geographic spaces in the larger global south, focusing specifically on how they exist in multi- ethnic and economically uncertain urban milieus. The comparative framework builds partly on a shared history of the colonial encounter, modernity, nationalism, and urbanity and is deepened by the larger cultural framework that influences social life in these spaces. In doing this we remind ourselves of the complex history of the Western Indian
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