Abstract
Questions and debates around political and public engagement, deepening democracy and the notion of ‘development’ seem to be even more relevant and resonate across geographical and sociopolitical contexts than they have before. As a society, we face some of the most severe environmental, economic and social justice challenges with a changing climate and growing inequality. However, while urban regions across the world present some of the most complex challenges with regard to environmental, economic and social sustainability, they also offer some of the greatest opportunities. In recent years, global policy processes have also recognised the role that cities must play—the New Urban Agenda from Habitat III, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the IPCC 1.5°C Special Report, the U-20 development agenda have all acknowledged the necessity for cities and urban regions to play a stronger role in tackling environmental, social and economic challenges.
This issue of Urbanisation brings together writing that reflects on these larger themes. The opening piece by Colleen Brady examines the efforts of the Ministry of Inner City and Zongo Development (MICZD) in Ghana to engage socio-spatially marginalised populations left behind by urban development. The MICZD’s objective is to improve the social and infrastructural development of zongos, or ‘stranger’s quarters’, which have historically housed Hausa migrants and are associated with slum-like conditions. Through interviews with a range of stakeholders, Brady’s research proposes lessons from the MICZD’s experience that can inform engagement with marginalised populations more broadly.
Arjun Appadurai’s article, a reprint from 2001, focusses on an alliance formed by three civic organisations in Mumbai to address poverty and mentions the key features of their work. It highlights to local, regional and national governments that the urban poor can and must be involved in the process of urban poverty reduction. They can be instruments of deep democracy that are rooted in the local context and able to mediate global forces in ways that could benefit the urban poor. This argument is no less relevant today than it was when the article was first written. As urban inequality persists, this article encourages us to think of different ways of using the strength of local communities and their networks to rethink what governance and governability mean.
The two review pieces focus on different ways of thinking about and engaging with the idea of ‘urban development’. AbdouMaliq Simone reviews Hiba Bou Akar’s For the War Yet to Come that looks at how urban development in Beirut has become a tool for anticipating a future of ‘protracted armed conflict’. The article looks at how, in Beirut, the residual spatial demarcations of civil war, the post-war restructuring of the built environment and governance institutions, resistance to Israeli incursions, the regional rise of Hezbollah’s military power, along with skyrocketing costs of land and housing in the city’s urban core have combined to shape the peripheries in a manner that anticipates the implications of future internecine conflict, but in ways that maintain distinct confessional communities within ‘view’ of each other, both socially and materially.
Pranav Kuttaiah reviews two mainstream contemporary Indian films, Kaala (2018) and Raees (2017), which offer different lenses to see the idea of ‘settlement’ in Indian cities—defending and improving existing spaces on the one hand and creating new, autonomous, safe spaces of self-sufficiency on the other. His review looks at the films as commentaries on the relationships of marginalised communities with the law and the state apparatus, as well as their strategies of resistance.