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L'articolo esplora la foodification della città tramite un'indagine sui social media. Esso mira ad una comprensione concettuale della foodification, che combina gli aspetti materiali, sociali e culturali del cibo e la sua mobilitazione. Utilizzando gli interventi su Twitter lungo 10 anni (2010-2020) a Delhi (India) sui momos (sorta di ravioli), il documento dimostra (i) l'uso di prodotti alimentari popolari per promuovere i produttori, propagando così la foodification, (ii) che i cittadini utilizzano il cibo come mezzo per sottolineare l'identità cittadina e (iii) per alimentare discorsi che vanno oltre il cibo. Il documento utilizza queste tre discussioni empiriche per costruire una più ampia comprensione dei veicoli egemoni di conoscenza nella concettualizzazione della città. Si dimostra come la città è costruita attraverso il cibo e il discorso, le pratiche e le performance che lo circondano.

To understand how our urban world is changing, we need to investigate how seemingly technical or natural objects are embedded in our understanding, or in brief, to acknowledge that knowledges (in plural) are political. There are multiple ways of knowing our environment and these multiple ways matter in how we engage with it. Understanding of some influential groups take precedence over other understanding, which we call knowledge hegemony. Therefore, it is important to understand plural knowledges, who produces them, and how some of them become hegemonic. We, the authors of this book, embarked on an investigation to uncover these different lenses and how they affect the way we live in our cities. The investigations were based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. This illustrated book presents some of our findings and questions we engage(d) with., {"references":["Palat Narayanan, N. (2022). Dislocating Urban Theory: Learning with Food‐Vending Practices in Colombo and Delhi. Antipode, 54(2), 526–544. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12769","Cornea, NL (2019) Urban Political Ecology. in Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199874002-0203","Brua, M, Sinha, A (2019) 'Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation. Social and Cultural Geography 20(8):1160-1180","Attanayake, Dimuthu. (2018) 'Colombo: The City of Crocodiles'. Sunday Observer, 19 August 2018. http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2018/08/19/news-features/colombo-city-crocodiles.","Nagaraj, Vijay Kumar. (2016) 'From Smokestacks to Luxury Condos: The Housing Rights Struggle of the Millworkers of Mayura Place, Colombo'. Contemporary South Asia 24(4): 429–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2016.1244173","Dhammathilaka, Senaka. (2011) 'Havelock City in Colombo: An Advocacy of \"New Urbanism\" to Inculcate a True Urban Culture'. Sri Lanka Journal of Real Estate 5: 35–38.","Saguin, Kristian. (2014) 'Biographies of Fish for the City: Urban Metabolism of Laguna Lake Aquaculture'. Geoforum 54: 28–38."]}

South Asia’s bourgeoning agglomerations are argued to derive their imageries from the abstracted northern notions of the urban, partially captured by the umbrella phrase – world-class. This article unpacks the notion of world-class using planning exercises in Colombo and Delhi. I argue that world-class cannot be seen in isolation to read the violence of urbanization, but when planning is historicized, visions like world-class present themselves as a subsequent logical step. Therefore, for any radical opposition to exclusionary planning, we need to look at the possibility of an epistemological rupture in the planning discourse rather than to critique the notion of world-class., Master plan, planning history, postcolonial, world class, southern urbanism, South Asia, urban planning

This article investigates urban informality via the lens of southern theory and sets out a postcolonial conceptual framework for researching and theorizing the urban. The article develops the framework via arguing towards advancing ontological queries rather than epistemological probing. To this end, it proposes to investigate the urban via informality and not the other way around, of understanding informality as an anomaly to, the constructed notions of the urban.&nbsp

Slums are a highly debated topic with an ever-shifting political position. These political positions address to intervene and eradicate slums, although research has for decades shown that slum is a mere symptom of inequity and not its cause. This article investigates the rationality and discourse which legitimizes state actions and uncovers how slums are discursively produced. It does so by analysing the debates from the question hour of the upper house of the Indian parliament from 1953 until 2014 and complements it through the analysis of slum-related policies and legislation. The article outlines the historical progression of slum conceptualizations, the rationale around it, and how this rationality reigns policy and legislation debates. The article demonstrates how, over a period of 61 years, the slums were created in the parliament and how they have been transformed from a political subject into a technical object. The article concludes with calls for a greater engagement with discourses and rationalities to counter state’s disenfranchising slum policies and the shrinking political space.

Urban informality is a complex phenomenon and recent literature points towards the need to develop a new theoretical framework to analyse and interpret empirical observations. This paper uses Bourdieu’s practice theory to conceptualize informality as a set of practices, analysing two case studies from Jagdamba Camp, Delhi (India), and its surrounding neighbourhoods. The first case centres on practices around a community-managed water supply system and the second on practices around solid waste management. The case studies, based on data collected through qualitative fieldwork in 2015 and 2016, point to multifaceted interactions between formal and informal practices that result in manifestations of in/formal practices in the locality’s everyday politics. The paper argues that informality is not linked to particular people or places in an essentialist way, but dependent on the field in which these actors operate.

This thesis attempts to critically engage with urbanization processes through the lens of informality. That is, urban informality as an enduring concept that defines, describes, and delineates urban development. Using case studies from Delhi, it theorizes informality as a practice and seeks to understand its complex social and power dynamics. The research, based on secondary archival and primary qualitative data, shows the role of informality in the production of space, the everyday politics and reasoning of those who are involved in such practices. This thesis develops on how urban informality forms a critical lens in understanding the urbanization process in India rather than understanding informality via the urbanization process. It is broken down into three components, each of which yields a different scale to the analysis. The first component explores the discursive construction of slums in the Indian parliamentary debates. The slum is a contested settlement category, which provides a very specific illustration of urban informality’s contested notions. This section analyses the debates related to slums from the upper house (Rajya Sabha) of the Indian Parliament over a period of 61 years from 1953 until 2014. Using a Foucauldian framework of governmentality and biopolitics, this part outlines the historical progression of the debates, the rationale around conceptualization of slums, and how they transformed into actions via policy and/or legislation. This section analyses the discursive transformation of the notion of slums from a political subject to a technical object and in the process, how the state makes itself indispensable to deal with urban informality. The second component investigates the role of urban informality in producing the city. It takes the informal dumpling (momos) manufacturing-and-selling sector in Delhi’s Chirag Dilli settlement as a case study. Building on a Lefebvrian conceptualization of space, it illustrates how this particular informal cottage industry contributes to the social production of the city as well as of the physical settlement in which it is located. The results show, first, how the built form of the inhabited settlement gets co-produced with newer living patterns and building typologies. Second, they demonstrate the contribution of Abstract informality to the production of the city. Thus, taking an alternate narrative to the state or the conflict with the state being the primary agent in the production of the city. The third component of the research aims to understand how informality is being produced, and why the same actors oscillate between formal and informal practices. In this regard, a study of water supply management and solid waste management in and around the slum settlement of Jagdamba Camp is taken as a case study. This part of the thesis theorizes informality as a practice using Bourdieu and demonstrates through the case study that the production of informality is a highly varied and nuanced process. It takes the urban infrastructure as a medium to understand social and political aspects of the society. The results argue that informality as a practice is not completely dependent on the habitus of the actors, but on the rules of the field in which these actors operate. This opens the analytical possibility to understand how and why the same actors practice both formality and informality in different fields. The three components are the core chapters of this thesis-by-article. They come together in understanding the urbanization process via informality rather than using formal urbanization to understand informality. The first part outlines the larger historical development of informality resulting in various state legislations. The following two components outline how the people cope, adapt, and influence these legislations resulting in a distinct urbanization process. The overall results are framed using perspectives from southern theory and show how informal practices are universal, but these practices get differentially connoted and acted upon.