Urban Political Mobilisation – Learning from Cairo

Gautam Bhan  | 2013

Excerpt

This chapter focussed on the role of public space as a platform for processes of political change. It is revolved around the post-colonial Indian experience, which began with national urban citizenship and critiqued the urban lexicon inherited from this period in India’s history, with its overarching master planning and contemporary irrelevance to urban citizens. Through various examples of Indian street movements, the idea of the ‘impoverishment of poverty’ was raised. This involves: exclusion from the imagined economy; the rise of a new elite urban citizenship; and an altered representation of the poor. It proposed that it is such discord that sometimes drives revolution.