Abstract
Creating living spaces
At the heart of Professor of Urban Planning Nihal Perera’s book People’s Spaces: Coping, Familiarizing, Creating are the following questions: how do ‘ordinary people produce living spaces for and through their everyday activities and cultural practices’? How do they negotiate and transform ‘abstract space’ – established through the institutional processes of housing, planning and development – into meaningful ‘people’s spaces’? ‘Contemporary social space’, asserts Perera, is largely defined by the conflict between (abstract) spaces created by powerful actors […] and (lived) spaces that ordinary people opt to create for their livelihoods’ (p. 217). French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s (1996 [1968]) theory of the production of space forms the main conceptual framework for Perera’s questions and how he answers them, and for the overall objective of the book. Drawing on Lefebvre’s triad of spatial concepts – ‘perceived space’ (physical space as perceived by the senses), ‘conceived space’ (spaces conceptualised by professionals of urban planning) and ‘lived space’ (everyday spaces created and made meaningful by ordinary people who inhabit space), the book presents its answers through a series of case studies from South and Central Asia. They illustrate the tension between ‘abstract’ spaces produced by planners and the ‘lived’ spaces created by ordinary people. Echoing Lefebvre’s criticism of planning as an instrument of state control in collusion with capital, Perera’s main critique is directed towards professionals from the spatial disciplines of architecture, design, planning and construction. Their top-down approaches, he argues, ‘conceive’ space for residential, employment and recreational use without taking into consideration how people transform these ‘abstract spaces’ into ‘lived places’. People’s Spaces is about homes, neighbourhoods and communities; the social relations that define them, and the particular socio-cultural meanings that people attach to them.
Advocating for ‘grounded, bottom-up, community-based’ approaches to planning is meaningless without knowledge of how ‘lived spaces’ are created. The main objective of People’s Spaces is, therefore, to illustrate how people, through ‘coping, familiarizing, and creating’, transform abstract spaces into lived spaces even in the most constrained environments and restrictive regulatory frameworks. The book presents eight case studies – some of which are collaboratively written with students – from: Sri Lanka (living spaces created in the war-torn Northern province; the restoration of the world heritage city of Galle; the rebuilding of a southern fishing village after the tsunami; and a dynamic marketplace in the suburbs of Colombo); India (the complex socio-economic spaces of the ‘slums’ of Dharavi in Mumbai; and how the middle class in Gangtok, Sikkim, pit their aspirations against building regulations); Nepal (the tension between tradition and modernity in the Himalayan village of Daanchi) and Uzbekistan (young people coping with the dearth of housing in Tashkent). The case studies demonstrate how ordinary people contend with indifferent institutions, corrupt regulators and well-meaning but misguided international donors in their claim to space. Many of the examples of individual people’s stories are intriguing. The case study of the Galle Fort is a fascinating example of contradictory and corrupt processes that disregarded ordinary people’s needs after Galle was declared a UNESCO ‘World Heritage City’. However, a more descriptive and linear narrative would have contributed to an in-depth understanding of how exactly negotiations between people and institutions take place. Overall, the chapters are, sometimes, unevenly structured. Switching between the first-person narrative of the author, individual stories of interlocutors and third-person description and analysis of events has, in some instances, undermined the narrative coherence of the case studies.
Perera’s zealous commitment to ‘ordinary people’ and the ‘everyday spaces’ they create is demonstrated in the way the case studies are presented as a testament to the human spirit for ‘survival’ and to what Perera identifies as people’s ‘natural urge to build’ (p. 130). Hence, it is neither mass movements nor organised political protest against institutional authorities that the case studies illustrate. Rather, invoking James Scott’s ‘everyday forms of resistance’, they exemplify how people transform abstract space into meaningful lived spaces through their daily activities. One of Perera’s most compelling arguments is how people transform abstract spaces even when they are ‘coping’ rather than resisting or actively negotiating. This is illustrated effectively in the case study from Tashkent. The chapter shows how the lack of housing stock is forcing young people to compromise on their independence and rely on kinship networks to house themselves if they are to access the services and opportunities in the capital city. This has resulted in families remodelling their homes to accommodate them.
Despite Perera’s stance on ‘urban planning’ as a form social control, the case study of the village of Kalametiya in southern Sri Lanka, rebuilt after the December 2004 tsunami, illustrates some of the positive consequences of relocation. Despite fundamental errors in design – such as the location of the toilet and imagining communal spaces, as well as the distance that fishers had to walk to get to the beach – the chapter discusses how relocating the community has transformed gender and caste relations. Because men spend more time on the beach, women have been freed from their husband’s routines and play a more independent and assertive role in the community. In addition, better access to schools has meant that children are being encouraged to complete their formal education and aspire to a life beyond fishing. The changes in social relations illustrate how social spaces are never a neutral backdrop against which social relations are enacted, but that gender relations are constituted, or re-constituted in the case of Kalametiya, by socio-spatial constructs (Massey, 2004).
The most compelling chapters are the two that invert the central questions of the book. The chapters on Dharavi – one of the biggest slums in Mumbai – and handiya in Sri Lanka – a neighbourhood centre ‘formed around the intersection of streets’ (p. 195) – are not case studies of ‘abstract spaces’ transformed into ‘lived spaces’. Rather, they are examples of dynamic and thriving ‘indigenous spaces’ created through the everyday actions and needs of ordinary people. The chapters describe the ‘offensive slum’ and the ‘mundane handiya’ in great detail in order to demonstrate how these seemingly ‘chaotic’ spaces are in fact places where economic activity thrives and social relations flourish. These chapters ask: how does capital try to appropriate spontaneous spaces created by people? And how do people resist and negotiate with planners, intent on taking control of these spaces? In the context of the ‘global south’ these questions become salient because, according to Perera, ‘most places […] are developed by people’ (p. 219). These case studies are powerful examples of how ‘people’s spaces’ are unintelligible to planners in particular and the middle class in general. They illustrate how Dharavi and the Moratumulla handiya have withstood the inexorable force of ‘urban planning’ because of the failure of planners to understand the meaning of these spaces.
We are then left with two questions. The first is: for how long will illegibility ‘remain a reliable resource of the powerless for political autonomy?’ (p. 143). Even the inhabitants of these spaces realise that their living and working conditions must change to ensure a better quality of life for their community. The second is: are planners, influenced by capital, capable of not just listening, but, more importantly, understanding and designing spaces that reproduce the meaning and value of these indigenous places? Perera’s answer is equivocal. He argues that in ordering space, planners often attribute people’s ‘misappropriation’ of space to their ‘lack of knowledge’. By focusing on educating people on the ‘right’ use of space, planners demonstrate their lack of commitment to learn from the people who inhabit or will inhabit these spaces. People’s Spaces, however, attests to the power ordinary people have to ‘disrupt’ even the most rigorously planned spaces by ‘simple occupation’ (p. 219).