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The enclosure of urban ecological commons into private property has facilitated the growth of the neoliberal service sector in Mumbai, India. These changes are brought forth through a reworking of communally managed land into narrowly understood public space, which has paved the way for private development. At the helm of Mumbai’s urbanization is a power alliance between state and elite non-state actors across colonial and neoliberal regimes. The process has gravely impacted subsistence and livelihood activities of fisher communities residing in proximity to the development, disproportionately affecting fisherwomen. This paper centers fisherwomen’s urban worlds to analyze the uneven legibility of existing spatial patterns. Across various scales, the categorical and material reworking of land–water commons has reduced resource availability. Women bear a greater, although underrecognized, burden in maintaining lives and livelihoods within this changing landscape. The relative illegibility of fisherwomen’s spaces, however, allows some everyday activities to continue unnoticed despite ongoing processes of enclosure. My analysis of the enclosure of urban ecological commons and its gendered dimensions advances a dialogue between intersectional feminist and urban political ecology on colonial–neoliberal continuities, categorical exclusions in public–private binaries, and gendered urban environments.

Parikh, Aparna. 2018. “Contradictions of neoliberal urbanism in Mumbai, India.” PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University.Feminist scholarship has focused on intimate experiences of marginalized act...

This article focuses on women’s mobility in urban public space in Mumbai, India while working night shifts in outsourced call centres. The outsourced call centre industry is heralded as the...

This chapter considers women’s strategies for leisure while working graveyard shifts in Mumbai’s neoliberal call centers alongside ongoing social movements in South Asia aimed at countering patriarchal norms that regulate women’s access to urban public space. Across these realms, there are tussles between modernity and tradition that shape decision-making processes. Taking cues from the right to the city paradigm, one can observe that both entail an appropriation of the urban, with social movements extending their goals to participation as well. Despite differing scale and intent, an analytical consideration of women’s night-time leisure with ongoing social movements can paint a broader picture on gendered reclamations of urban public space in the Global South.

Hoang, L. A. and B. S. A. Yeoh, editors, 2015: Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and the Changing Family in Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 331 pp. $100 (hardback), $100 (paperback). ISBN 9781137506856. ISBN 1137506857.