This is what I got from a conference about social life of the cities. A really interesting take on the spaces in the city and the people on the periphery who are taking over the space they have been pushed out of through street art.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 27, 2011
"The city belongs to those who can move around it."
That's what the slide said. She calls it a manifesto, a campaign
slogan of sorts of the urban youth, mostly from poor localities,
pushed to the periphery by the lopsided development in Brazil's Sao
Paulo, a city of 16 million people, a city that's is the canvas for
the youth, disgruntled with their situation, victims of fear and
crime. They move around it, and take over its urban space, reducing
barriers of class and colour in their imagination.
Teresa Caldiera, a professor at University of California Berkeley and
an anthropologist, who is researching the spatial segregation and
street art in Sao Paulo in Brazil, walked the audience through a
selection of snapshots of graffiti and tagging in the city torn by
crime and divided by inequalities.
Hers is a study of the mushrooming street art, including graffiti and
tagging in Sao Paulo and the act of owning the city, asserting their
identities through the street art, often representations of self in
context of the society, and the process of urbanization that is now
being witnessed by major cities in the world, including Delhi.
At the three-day conference “The 21st Century Indian City” organized
by the Center for South Asia Studies, Center for Global Metropolitan
Studies, and Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics at UC
Berkeley and Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, Teresa talked about
the social life of the cities and her project of studying spatial
segregation in cities in the midst of urbanization and the creation of
public space by those relegated to the periphery.
Through a series of images, snapshots of the graffiti on the walls of
the city of Sao Pualo that range from angry outbursts to vivid,
colorful images of the city and its harsh realities, she walked the
audience through a fascinating phenomenon that has everything to do
with political articulation and imposing new dynamics to social life.
Colorful, outrageous, ugly in a few instances, and very, very honest
in their being, the art was disturbing, too. But it wasn't devoid of
hope, of assertion in the face of what has become a painful reality
for those on the other, darker end of the spectrum defined by the
growing inequalities of our times.
In her slides, a slice of the social life of the city of Sao Paulo,
the urban youth from the periphery of the city were taking over,
laying claim to the city through their art, spraying walls, climbing
up buildings and writing their names in balck, bold paint. This was
their way of seeking and proving their identities and leaving their
mark on territory from which they had been pushed out. Armed with what
is equivalent of their weapons, the spray paint cans and brushes and
imagination fueled by anger and desire to assert their identity, the
youth with the spray cans tied on either side of the bikes traveled
through neighborhoods, searching for walls where they could paint, and
in the process leave their mark, and eventually in their own
imagination, take over the city bit by bit, wall by wall.
Through her slides, she told the story of fear and crime and the
assertion of the identity of the poor, unemployed youth pushed to the
periphery, the favelas.
Street art, a collage of life and inspired by popular culture, then is
the creation of an urban space, a process of democratization of the
city.
It is also a counterforce to advertising, the billboards that contain
the aspirations of the society.
Teresa said movements in Brazil have led to exclusion and the practice
of enclosure practiced also by the upper classes who live in fortified
enclaves guarded by security guards. The difference is something they
challenge. They are against the segregated city.
A recent trend in the cities of the world are the creation of
controlled public spaces by the middle classes, or the elites who live
in fortified enclaves and thus assert their right to the city, and the
street art that is now scattered through the city of Sao Paulo and
can't be missed from its streets and alleys, are somewhat in
retaliation to this.
“It is the youth's engagement with the city,” she said.
The city then becomes not just a canvas for expression but its
graffiti entails a deep knowledge of the city that comes through their
backgrounds of working class neighborhoods, struggling families and
raging crime.
As inequalities between the rich and the poor grow and anger and
frustration abound, the side effects of development, liberalization
and globalization, the ones who have been left behind want to take
over, express their right to the city, a growing movement across the
cities of the world.
“It's like leaving one's mark all over the city,” Teresa said. “They
affirm their existence in the city and through the art, they also
expose the discrimination and they represent themselves in relation to
the city.”
In a city characterised by violence and fear and high homicide rates
in the poor localities, young men from the periphery are reversing the
rules of visibility, she explained.
The street art, also equated with vandalism, is illicit but it has the
potential of democratising the city.
“It makes the urban space literally a place of dispute,” she said.
Teresa has written on the subject in her book City of Walls and is a
professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley.
In India for the conference, she said she was surprised to see the
walls of the city shorn of such articulation.
It was the silent walls of Delhi that led to a chain of arguments with
social scientists like Amita Baviskar of the Institute of Economic
Growth in Delhi reasoning that it could mere acceptance on part of the
residents in the metropolis that is behind the silent and bare walls
of the city, or maybe the people on the margins haven't yet attained
the level of anger to propel such outbursts.
Street art is illegal in Sao Paulo as it is in most cities of the
world, but since it has been done on such massive scale, the police in
the city mostly resort to spot prosecutions rather than imprisoning
the ones who paint the city walls and tell stories through their spray
paint cans.
The galleries for such artists are alleys, the walls, and the
crumbling buildings where they can paint their narrative, and through
it the narrative of the city will flow.
In Delhi, a few walls have been subjected to such expressions but
these haven't been coherent, or tie into a theme.
When the Commonwealth Games happened in the city and the poor,
homeless and the migrants were forced out of the national capital
because nobody wants to showcase poverty in the face of such
extravaganza, the city woke up to a few graffiti. These were angry
outpourings on the state of the affairs, a lament on the corruption
that was rampant.
There are many reasons why unlike Kolkata and a few neighborhoods in
Mumbai that are breeding grounds for such expressions of the street,
Delhi has remained untouched. In its tucked away neighborhoods like
Hauz Khas, now rechristened as an artists' village, walls are colorful
and graffiti is a fashionable statement, a decoration that ties into
the larger image of the neighborhood lined with boutiques and designer
shops.
They say Delhi within its walls, within its confines, houses more than
30 cities, its layers pronounced in the way its residents live and
behave.
Social scientists say the sense of belonging to Delhi is lacking. For
many, it is rite of passage. They would move on. For migrants, it is
like camping in a city and then moving on to the next one till they
can find a holding somewhere. The class hierarchies in Delhi are
pronounced, and demarcating unlike Mumbai where slums flourish, even
thrive next to the high rises.
So, there is no involvement with the city. There are unauthorised
colonies that are demanding regularization and there are the numerous
RWAs that are promoting participatory citizenship among the residents
within its gated confines, but beyond those littered examples, there
are not many instances of the poor trying to assert their right to the
city, which is brutal in its discriminations, in its whimsical
attitude towards the poor that it can throw out anytime by thrusting a
ticket in their hands or rounding them up and transporting them to the
train stations as it happened during the CWG.
Street art isn't the Art for Art's Sake variety. It is about getting
reactions and these can range from the wow of admiration to
disapproval. Street art is in cities everywhere--New York, Los
Angeles, London, São Paulo, Philadelhia and even in Syria where the
protests kick started because writers on the walls of the nation were
imprisoned, and in reaction there were even more writings calling for
the dismissal of the government. As it gains more popularity and
becomes a potent symbol of protest, cities are grappling with its
spread and appeal. Branding it as illegal or transgressive hasn't
worked in most cases.
It is in this art that urban youth realize the city is up for grabs
and if not through political participation, at least through political
articulation of the walls that's for everyone to see, the poor can
claim their space with the splash of spray cans and because it is
illicit, they can even show their guts to do what's the society terms
as illegal.
In Delhi, the crime capital according to the government, the level of
anger hasn't reached the point where walls become the testimony to
that rage. It has also got something to do with the city's
infrastructure and what is within means for its poor youth. Spray cans
are expensive for those who barely make it to the point of earning
minimum wages. Rather than wasting their labour on the walls, they
provide for their families.
In India, we have had a protest culture of a different kind. We have
taken to the streets to denounce reforms, policy changes, everything.
But recently, the protest street behind the Jantar Mantar monument was
taken pver and rules of protest were set into motion. With that space
gone, maybe soon the walls of the city will replace the protest street
with political articulation, and the right to the city will come into
being. Till then, we can move around in a city of blank walls that
speak nothing.
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