Transnational Techniques of Analysis

– By Ananya Roy:

[Abstract]

The American paradigm of propertied citizenship has far-reaching consequences for the propertyless, as in the brutal criminalization of the homeless. Activist groups, such as the anarchist squatter organization Homes Not Jails, have sought to challenge this paradigm through innovative techniques of property takeovers, invocations of American traditions of homesteading, and Third World tactics of self-help and informality. This study trains a transnational lens on both the paradigm and its subversions. Posing Third World questions of the First World, the author seeks to unsettle the normalized hierarchy of development and underdevelopment and explores lessons that can be learned from different modes of shelter struggles.

[Excerpts]

PARADIGMS AND TECHNIQUES

In recent years, two other forms of transnationalism have been gaining ascendancy. These are of particular relevance to this study and its domain of investigation. First, transnationalism can be an interrogative technique that reworks the interface of First and Third Worlds. Unlike comparative methodologies, which search for similarities and differences between two mutually exclusive contexts, transnational examinations can use one site to pose questions of another. For example, in studying informal housing settlements in Texas,Ward (1999) looks across the border and asks why similar settlements in Mexico enable higher standards of living. He poses Third World questions of the First World, thereby unsettling the normalized hierarchy of development and underdevelopment. Such uses of transnationalism as an epistemological method have great potential, as in Fraser and Gordon’s (1994) exploration of internationalist meanings of “dependency” in their discussion of welfare reform, Wacquant’s (1997) analysis of ghetto studies in the postcolonial sense of a “new urban Orientalism,” and Davis’s (1990) use of the provocative apartheid metaphor of bantustans to map sociospatial segregation in contemporary Los Angeles. Thus, Slater (1992, 324) notes, “I would argue that we can learn from other regions by realizing that it is always the marginal or peripheral case which reveals that which does not appear immediately visible in what seem to be more ‘normal’ cases.”

Second, transnational borrowings have infused new energy into both policy and political activism. Increasingly, Third World solutions are being brought to bear on First World problems (Sanyal 1990). For example, there has been a great deal of interest in replicating the success of the Grameen Bank microcredit program. From the Good Faith Fund of Arkansas to microcredit programs in inner cities, such Third World policies seem to promise hope for the thorny dilemma of persistent American poverty (Servon 1999; Bhatt and Tang 2002). In the broadest sense, such border crossings are welcome, for transnational policy making disrupts the teleology of development, which sees Anglo-America as the idealized yardstick against which all else is to be judged.

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RANJAN’S STORY

Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world. (Kuhn 1962, 93)

The Calcutta metropolitan region of India is one of the world’s largest urban agglomerations. Long notorious for its packed densities, desperate poverty, and crumbling infrastructure, Calcutta has persisted in the popular and intellectual imagination as a “black hole,” a city of death and dying.5 In an urban system constantly fueled by rural migration and running on the motor of informal sector work, many of the city’s poorest residents live in informal housing such as slums and squatter settlements. Enjoying the patronage of competing political parties, the informal sector has been at once a source of survival and livelihood for the urban poor as well as a mechanism for ensuring a political constituency for the eastern edges of the world’s largest democracy. In recent years, such systems of informality have been challenged by a turn toward liberalization. Eager to participate in global economies, the region’s ruling marxist-socialist coalition, the Left Front, has engaged in a perestroika of sorts. This New Communism is particularly apparent in various forms of urban restructuring, including the Left’s sustained efforts to replace the informal sector with a bourgeois city, ordered and orderly. As detailed in my previous work (Roy 2002a), the grounded effects of such liberalization are of course much more complex, involving an intricate choreography of old-style populism and new-style urban developmentalism. But if millennial Calcutta has not seen the spatial annihilation of the informal sector, then at the very least, it is witnessing volatile territorial struggles where the urban poor are rendered increasingly vulnerable.

It is in this context that I want to tell Ranjan’s story. In 1997, I was deeply involved in a process of ethnographic research in the squatter settlements of Calcutta. One evening I accompanied a high-ranking politician to a settlement called Patuli. I had already completed many months of fieldwork in the settlement and knew many of the families well. But I had always maintained my distance from the dominant political parties—until now. In many ways, this visit marked the start of a new phase of research that involved direct observation of the processes and institutions of political mobilization. The visitwas on the eve of a major election, and the leaderwasted no time gathering the crowds around him. He then introduced me thus: “She is a visitor from America, the richest country in the world, a country on whose aid the entire world survives.” Fully aware that most of the women in the settlement worked as domestic servants, he turned to me and asked, “How much is a maid’s salary in America?” As I attempted to stutter a response, he continued, “Well, it must be at least $500 a month.” Singling out a young woman in the crowds, he asked, “You work as a maid, don’t you? How much do you earn a month?” “Four hundred” came the quiet answer. “Well, if you were a maid in America, in her country, you would make fifteen thousand rupees a month— imagine that!”

The incident was a mortifying but commonplace element of ethnographic fieldwork. Even though I had been honest with my subjects regarding my project and status, I felt as though I had betrayed them. Suddenly the chasm between imperialist visitor and underdeveloped shantytown loomed large. With these thoughts racing through my head, I stood quietly to one side. A group of young squatter men, perhaps sensing my discomfort, struck up a conversation with me. “Are there people like us there?” asked Ranjan, a lanky 20-year-old with twinkling eyes. He continued,

I have heard that there are lots of homeless in America. How can that be the

case? Why doesn’t the government simply allow them to simply take over vacant

land like we have? Aren’t they citizens? Don’t they have rights?

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However, there is more to Ranjan’s story than Ranjan’s question. Exactly 10 days after our ethnographic encounter, he and 2,500 other squatter families were evicted in an unforgiving demolition drive by Calcutta’s leftist government. The squatters who had once settled this remote urban frontier were now cleared to make way for middle-class suburbanites. The very system of informality that had made possible Ranjan’s claim to shelter and citizenship had also sealed his fate. Ranjan’s question then turns out to contain within it a myth: that of the Third World as a site of housing rights, of a citizenship that guarantees shelter. It reveals what Bourdieu (1992, 7) terms the double life of social structure. The first order involves a distribution of material resources and power; the second order is a system of meanings that functions as a symbolic template for the first order. The significance of Ranjan’s story lies in the disjuncture between first and second orders, in his great certainty in the face of the territorialized uncertainty of informal housing. This is a poignantly paradoxical model of shelter. To mine its transnational insights requires what Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 7) call a “double reading”: attention to material realities, such as squatting and evictions, as well as to interpretations, such as the claims talk of subject-citizens. In the rest of this section, I discuss three key issues that emerge from a double reading of Ranjan’s story: understandings of poverty, frameworks of shelter rights, and the public domain implied by various paradigms of citizenship. POVERTY AS PATHOLOGY VERSUS POVERTY AS SOCIAL AGENCY The specter of poverty has always hovered in the shadows of the study of American cities, a sense that ineradicable patterns of sociospatial segregation indelibly mark this landscape. But more recently, there has been the nagging awareness of a persistent “new poverty” that appears to go hand in hand with the global restructuring commonly known as post-Fordism (Marcuse 1996). Such seemingly new debates have coalesced around a few old and contentious keywords, the most notorious of which are underclass and ghetto (Katz 1989;Wacquant 1997). The bitter arguments over these terms reveal a cumbersome historical legacy of defining poverty as pathology, whether such perceived deviances are seen as cause (Murray 1984) or as symptom (Wilson 1987; Jencks and Peterson 1991).

Such controversies have also marked the debates on homelessness. Over the past years, there has emerged a sophisticated body of research that conceptualizes homelessness as a social process embedded in structures of class and race and as a spatial process linked to the continuous capitalist reshaping of city spaces (Hopper and Hamberg 1984; Dear andWolch 1987; Hoch and Slayton 1989; Rossi 1989; Gans 1991; LawandWolch 1991; N. Smith 1992; Passaro 1996; Ralston 1996; Takahashi 1996). And yet, there has also been a stubborn persistence of whatWacquant (1997), in the context of ghetto studies, has called “pernicious premises.” Here, homelessness is represented as individual irresponsibility and social deviance, with causality resting squarely in behavioral choices such as alcohol and drug abuse (Baum and Burnes 1993). And more strikingly, it is this latter view that continues to shape and inform homelessness policy. As the American urban poverty debates remain mired in the tropes of social disorganization and moral failure, so American urban policy remains concerned with techniques of managing the pathology of poverty. Measured against the norm of propertied citizenship, the homeless have been seen as particularly aberrant, requiring disciplinary action.

The techniques of management have taken on two primary forms: criminalization and institutionalization. From quality-of-life tickets to a “micro-geography of fortification” (Davis 1990), American city after city has sought to criminalize homelessness, putting into motion what D. Mitchell (1997) calls the “annihilation of space by law.” The homeless body has been thus kept in constant motion, unceasingly displaced, unceasingly penalized (Kawash 1998). Alongside these punitive geographies exist the institutionalized spaces within which homelessness is confined. The reformist interventions are manifested in the bureaucracy of service provision by state and parastatal agencies—shelters, health clinics, and welfare offices. Many of these institutions deploy techniques of incarceration and disciplinary control. Thus, Golden (1992) details the punitive nature of women’s shelters in New York, which she likens to nineteenth-century poorhouses and prisons. Equally important is the ongoing medicalization of homelessness and indeed of urban poverty. In the American context, homelessness has been repeatedly inscribed as a public health concern, requiring both containment and technicist intervention. Such forms of criminalization and medicalization are of course not new. They have geopolitical roots in an Anglo-American modernity that took hold in the transition from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries and whose social technologies were perfected in the context of urban growth and urban poverty (Boyer 1987; E.Wilson 1991; Hall 1996). But their resuscitation at this turn of the century bears renewed attention. Particularly provocative is the way in which these discourses of marginality and practices of marginalization contrast with Third World debates around urban poverty.

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THE CLAIM TO SHELTER VERSUS THE RIGHT TO SAFE AND SANITARY SHELTER

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Such expressions of identity—one claiming membership in democratic citizenship and the other excluded by a propertied citizenship—are in turn rooted in systems of rights. Ranjan’s story indicates a domain of Third World informality marked by the ongoing negotiation of shelter claims. Squatting, as a process of land occupation and self-help building,9 embodies an “expectative property right” (De Soto 1989). That the right to regularized land titles, services, and security of tenure is expected is a crucial aspect of the stability of squatting as a form of housing. That the right is always expected and rarely fulfilled ensures the populist dynamics of the process, the ability of political parties to constantly mobilize the poor through promises of land, housing, and urban services (Castells 1983). That the right is often violated points to the agonizing uncertainty of squatting and other informal settlements. In my research on informal urban development in Calcutta, I have thus characterized squatting as a Faustian bargain, providing access to shelter while sealing the dependence of the poor on fickle-minded political parties and damning them to volatile cycles of land grabs and evictions (Roy 2002a). It is thus that the urban poor of Third World cities are housed, but only tenuously, and that they engage in constant struggle but rarely in revolutionary change. In other words, the paradigm of citizenship associated with squatting, as expressed in Ranjan’s story, indicates negotiable claims rather than enforceable rights. Such claims, in addition, produce political consent.

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Such expressions of identity—one claiming membership in democratic citizenship and the other excluded by a propertied citizenship—are in turn rooted in systems of rights. Ranjan’s story indicates a domain of Third World informality marked by the ongoing negotiation of shelter claims. Squatting, as a process of land occupation and self-help building,9 embodies an “expectative property right” (De Soto 1989). That the right to regularized land titles, services, and security of tenure is expected is a crucial aspect of the stability of squatting as a form of housing. That the right is always expected and rarely fulfilled ensures the populist dynamics of the process, the ability of political parties to constantly mobilize the poor through promises of land, housing, and urban services (Castells 1983). That the right is often violated points to the agonizing uncertainty of squatting and other informal settlements. In my research on informal urban development in Calcutta, I have thus characterized squatting as a Faustian bargain, providing access to shelter while sealing the dependence of the poor on fickle-minded political parties and damning them to volatile cycles of land grabs and evictions (Roy 2002a). It is thus that the urban poor of Third World cities are housed, but only tenuously, and that they engage in constant struggle but rarely in revolutionary change. In other words, the paradigm of citizenship associated with squatting, as expressed in Ranjan’s story, indicates negotiable claims rather than enforceable rights. Such claims, in addition, produce political consent.

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Here, then, is the paradox of the American context: that the formalization of housing rights has greatly restricted access to the domain of housing. If informality is inherently exploitative, then formality is inherently exclusionary. This is not to say that informal housing does not exist in the U.S. context; rather, its status is fundamentally different than in Third World settings. In his look across the border,Ward (1999) shows how the colonias of Mexico gain incremental access to public services and even land regularization, albeit through structures of populism. The colonias of Texas are, however, systematically excluded from state help. In a cruelly ironical example, Ward shows how infrastructure financed by an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant reaches to the Cameron Park colonia but not into it (p. 110). Since the houses do not meet building codes, they cannot be serviced. If the houses had met building codes, the overwhelming majority of residents in that colonia would not have been able to afford them. The paradigm of propertied citizenship, as it turns out, only recognizes formal rights of property, marginalizing the shelter claims of the poor and other vulnerable social groups.

PUBLIC VERSUS PABLIK DOMAINS

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THE WELFARE OF THE PUBLIC

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THE ACTIVISM OF RIGHTS

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HOMES NOT JAILS

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THREE CAUTIONARY NOTES FROM A TRANSNATIONAL SCRIPT

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THE IMPERIAL FRONTIER

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The imperial frontier is also an urban frontier. The city is a crucial site of imperialist endeavors; it is, in Jacobs’ (1996, 4) words, “the spatial order of imperial imaginings.” Urban restructuring is often a process of staking claim to the frontier, through practices of settler colonialism and gentrifying desires (N. Smith 1992). The significance of Homes Not Jails is that it appropriates such imperial frontiers, claiming them for America’s marginalized social groups. Its challenge, and indeed that of most forms of American squatting, is to supersede the motif of the frontier and to instead confront the processes of proletarianization and impoverishment that give the lie to propertied citizenship. By situating such strategies and their hazards in a global context, a transnational framework exposes the scaffolding of norms and meanings that constitute a distinctive American notion of shelter, property, and citizenship. At the same time, it does not guarantee an optimistic alternative that can be effortlessly borrowed from elsewhere. The hard work of dismantling the imperial frontier as it is drawn and redrawn in urban studies and urban policy only anticipates the further hard work of paying close attention to the intense vulnerabilities of each model of housing and shelter. As in this article, a transnational epistemology provides the cartographic tools for mapping multiple pathways of rights and claims. At times, it even provides the inspiration to undertake a journey that crosses borders, to leave the shores of “normal science” by learning from elsewhere.

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Read full article at Urban Affairs Review Vol. 38, Nº 4, March 2003: 463-491.