THINKING THROUGH THE POSTCOLONIAL NEIGHBORHOOD: JUGAAD POLITICS AND THE EVERYDAY PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN MUMBAI

Abstract

The principal aim of this thesis is to think about the city through the neighborhood and analyze how the cultural histories and everyday politics in the neighborhood produce distinctive urbanisms. I undertake a comparative analysis of two Art-Deco architectural middle-class residential neighborhoods in Mumbai, India. Through a historical sociological analysis of their divergent spatial restructuring, the spirit of their public religion and the everyday state-society contestations, I argue that the middle-class in postcolonial Mumbai, through their neighborhood management activities, produces a novel form of jugaad urbanism, emergent and attuned to the creative challenges of the society and devious politics of the state. In relation to an administratively inept and ideologically strong state, the middle-class civil society emerges as an agent of urban governance and plays a critical role in not only challenging the state over spatial politics but also in subverting the neoliberal project. In an attempt to synthesize Marxist urbanism and the cultural analysis of postcolonial studies, this dissertation disrupts the politics of cooperation between the state and civil society and shifts the focus of improvisational political tactic from the subaltern to the middle-class.