Elements of Urban Time

Ranabir Samaddar

The idea of "humanity's urban future" evokes a seamless imagination. Yet no future is made without a process of making and unmaking-in this case, urban future without the making and unmaking of cities. The violent process of restructuring of cities strangely but not unexpectedly generates a desire for a clean and better urban future. Cities are desiring machines. The fault lines of the past, also of present time, prompt people to address the cleavages whenever they think of the future of cities.

This is not to say that everyone must become historian of cities, or all should be futurists. Moreover, there are cities and cities, metropolises, megalopolises, small towns, colonial cities, port cities, railway towns, trading towns, immigrant cities, walled cities of the past, and finally, cities existing as ruins or conversely, in the form of futuristic smart cities. Prosperous cities and ghost townships with their contrast haunt people's imagination of a possible urban future. If one visits the UNESCO heritage site and the architectural wonder, Taj Mahal in the bustling city of Agra, the mediaeval capital of the Mughal Empire, one will hear of a nearby ghost city, only thirtyfive kilometres way, Fatehpur Sikri, an earlier capital of the Empire, abandoned due to water scarcity in the year 1610 and now a settlement lying in ruins. Fatehpur Sikri's magnificent urban design of centuries back make one wonder the circumstances that led to its decay and its forlorn state now. Or, coming to present time, two hundred kilometres away near the bustling metropolis of Kolkata lie the ghost towns in the coalfields of Asansol-Raniganj-Durgapur belt.

Yet this contrast is perhaps the cue to imagining a desirable urban future, in which temporality plays a big role. The making/unmaking dialectic works thorugh time, often linear, but one should remember, also in the form of, to use Walter Benjamin's famous phrase, "homogenous empty time", and a diachronic time, where another time is speeding up changes within the great time towards an unknown future. Time makes people aware of the fault lines in social and economic practices, including the making of cities. It points to heterogeneous future-making practices. Indeed, the heterogeneous time of cities tells the plurality of urban future.

The variety of urban forms mentioned a little earlier and the heterogeneous time of the city make any standardised imagination of an urban future impossible. Yet, and this is one more paradox: it is precisely this heterogeneity of form and time that provokes the idea of a desirable urban future. Ideas of a habitable city life, a collective but not homogenous existence, urban justice based on a "right to the city", spaces of negotiation over incipient conflicts, a dialogic urban order, a range of public institutions including those of health, education, transportation, and housing of which the inhabitants of the city are proud, and a work regime that reaches out to the migrants whose relation to the city will be mostly one of "practical intimacy"-an ambiguity to be appreciated and valued, and not hunted down and destroyed by bourgeois strategies of assimilation-these all spring from experiences of recent and distant past. These also speak people's desire for an urban public power that is built on a combination of vertical and horizontal mobilisations-a power that is dialogic, yet orderly, and compassionate.

II

The making/unmaking dynamics can be seen most in port cities, likewise in cities buffeted and soaked by winds of climate change bringing in devastating cyclones or stilted by murderous heat, or cities impoverished or enriched by flights of capital and whims of technology, such as containerisation of port traffic or periods of deindustrialisation. Again, colonial cities were made and unmade through bloody processes of mutiny, riots, punitive campaigns, and forcible induction of labour to make a city work. Similarly, industrial cities went through restructuration processes. Equally importantly, but neglected, is the epidemiological transformation of a city. Think of the city of Mumbai marshalling its labour force through plague. The epidemic peaked in early 1897 with a mortality rate of 75­85 percent. Labour fled the city. Business and commerce stopped. The Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, was enacted to tackle the bubonic plague. Law was meant to control epidemics by providing special powers to the State required for the implementation of containment measures to check the spread of the disease. As the disease appeared in Pune and colonial controls became severe, the Chapekar Brothers, early modern Indian revolutionaries, assassinated W C Rand; the British Plague Commissioner of the city on 22 June 1897, after Pune's public was frustrated with the vandalism by the officers and soldiers appointed by him. Plague influenced the making of the working class in Mumbai for the next twenty years. There is a substantial amount of discussion and controversy as to how the plague created lasting opportunities for labour who wrested con­cessions from millowners in the ensuing period (1898-1918) of crisis in the labour market and unprecedented industrial strife.

Time creates in unanticipated ways structures of relations that last for long. Subaltern urban population desperately defends gains which are products of sudden exigencies.

Public health infrastructure, cordoning techniques, emergence of care givers on a mass scale, policing of "unsafe" quarters, and most significant, governmental attempts at large scale behavioural modification of people, these are parts of the said epidemiological transformation of a city. Add to these the issue of a city's access to resources like water, air, and hinterland. All these are features of the making and unmaking of a city. These shape urban demography. These also produce "urban space." These also pilot the eternal quest for the combination of a "right size," a "right kind" of territory, and "right kind of people" for a perfect city. Illusion drives the neoliberal dream of a contradictionless urban future. It is a phantasmagoria that erases the faultlines.

Of course, the biggest divide in the city is between the official city and city underground. One may extend a likely analogy between the 19th century story of the Underground Railroad in North America transporting fugitive slaves to safety in the North, and the 21st century cities of the South including cities of Southern Europe crisscrossed by routes and trails of migrant passages. Mexico, Johannesburg, Marseille, Naples, Athens, Cairo, Beirut, Karachi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangkok. all these places house huge underground cities. Violent and harsh local border regimes exist in these cities, yet these borders are negotiated on daily basis by migrants, illegal dwellers, criminals, petty traders, sex workers, also workers engaged in waste processing and different informal sectors. Focus on these contested situations; one may be able to reverse the image of a dangerous border into one of a space negotiated by routes, passages, and people. These are "non-spaces" of the formal city. Yet these non-spaces characterised by disorder and resilient life are marked by not only practices of survival, but efforts at creating a better future marked by new interface, exchanges, and dialogues. They are not only the "cities of refuge," they are the birthplaces of new words and lexicons, flags of new "cosmopolitanism", an ideal towards which cities strive.

Nonetheless, these contests, fault lines, and borders make urban life precarious, life of those who must live "dangerously." The knowledge of the dynamics of making/unmaking must make people aware of the intensely biopolitical nature of the task of city making as this involves the making/unmaking of life. The regime of bio-power controlling the city cannot be wished away. The urban turn in people's thinking has been naturalised and people tend to miss the life question.

III

This brings one to the fundamental question of the political ecology of a city. There is no suitable alternative to the idea of "political ecology" that can make sense of the myriads of phenomena marking urban present, propelling with breathtaking speed "Southern urbanism" as the motor of global urban growth towards an uncertain future.

Two events are driving changes in the cities of the South:(a) New technologies have arrived in the South as an event in urban life driving transformation of Southern cities, particularly through changes in land-use pattern and labour forms, construction of smart cities, introduction of just-in-time technology, proliferation of smaller production units run with informal labour, and finally massive ex­pansion of extractive activities and reprocessing units; as a consequence of all these, rent (interest too suspiciously appearing like rent) becoming the main form of urban wealth and basis of capital formation. At the same time the city needs migrant labour to keep this urban regime of capital formation functioning. (b) Climate change as a part of major ecological and environmental disasters is making Southern cities less and less habitable. With environmental refugees pouring in ever more numbers, the incessant growth of cities of the South is by itself one of the pronounced events on a global scale in the twenty-first century. But, note, these two processes do not come singly, their operations as two distinct processes cannot be identified as such beyond an extent. They form a complex leading to a characteristic urban ecology of the South.

Port cities of the South are a classic case of the making/un­making conundrum. Containeri-sation may have increased port revenue. But old warehouses lie derelict and depleted. Narrow streets of yesteryears are unfit for land-based container traffic, and creating an efficient inter-modal system is a nightmare. Land in the vicinity is now the prime spot for high tourism and commercial and entertainment activities. It is a distinct process of what is called "recycling of land." The city indeed expands not around the port, but as if in a disconnected manner, where the port is one face of the city, whose other face is its expansion elsewhere, as in Kolkata where the port is in the west, and the city expands in the east, where a smart city comes up - by gobbling up wetlands causing immense harm to city's ecology. In an ever-expanding mode, the city destroys hinterlands. Urban corridor takes new form with new technologies, with digital connectivity, highways, long-distance metros, oblivious of the dead settlements lying here and there.

In this situation, politics of the city is governed by either of the two ways: (a) Urban politics is refashioned around the issue of security, and consequently the city is run by super cops like Julias Ribeiro (Mumbai) or K P S Gill (Punjab) and tough mayors like Rudi Guiliani (New York) whose methods are backed by hard right-wing administrations. (b) Or, there is a dialogic way of running the city practised by several Leftist and populist mayors. Populist forces run the administration, as in Kolkata, in many other Indian cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, or Delhi, where administration represents the will of the popular classes consisting mostly of people working in informal economy, living in slums, shanty settlements, and irregular, insecure places of the city. These populist administrations have the stupendous task of managing the city in a new way. They try to turn the police into a "civil force" to be accepted by the lower classes, become accountable to the demands of the inhabitants of the "inner city," transform the intolerable lives of the precariously surviving people into tolerable ones, indeed improve them, reach the lower classes access to education and public health, and make co-existence of the lower and middle classes possible in an urban form that will tolerate pluralities of urban life. It is easier said than done. Dreams in such situation compete in a combustible milieu; the city is often delirious. The administration must calm the frayed nerves, rising temper, and moderate class hatred that at times threatens to break apart the fragile existence called the "city." It is doubly difficult because popular classes exist on the margins of legality. A substantial part of their survival practices consists of what a philosopher of the last century termed as "popular illegalism." Populist government tolerates such "illegalism." In a sense, the lives of the popular classes are marked by counter-conduct, counter to the prescribed norm of urban existence. The experiences of "new municipalism" provide a rich repertoire of a possible new urban ecology.

This is the nature of urban biopolitics   today.   In   this biopolitical situation, an acknowledgement of the various claims to the city and a dialogic order are the two pre-requisites towards working for an urban future, at whose heart will be the presence of the popular classes. This, the least one can say, is one of the possibilities of the making/unmaking dialectic of urban life. Behind this there is a new idea of urban power.

IV

The modern city, people know did not emerge as merely a head­quarter of administration and a seat of royal power. It came into existence at the early modern age, around the seventeenth century, as an outcome of a conjuncture of three developments: the need to secure life of the subjects from crime and diseases, the transformation of the subjects into a governable population, and a definite territory fit for commerce, production, transportation, and movement of labour.

Urban transformation is discontinuous. Often cities are devastated by wars. The heterogeneous time of the cities points to a bigger reality, that of crisis, con­juncture, and rupture. Slum-dwellers, unorganised and informal workers, militant women from the lower classes of society, subaltern political entrepreneurs, and activists of informal settlements do not take initiative to change life conditions as consequence of slow, gradual, pedagogic training. Even if determined political movements are there, autonomous initiatives appear usually in the wake of crises, more importantly in a situation of conjuncture of circumstances, when the outcome is uncertain, and a rupture becomes a possibility. That is the occasion for the lower classes to take initiative to change their conditions of life. Like the consequences of the outbreak of bubonic plague in Bombay-Pune in 1896-97, or the malaria-cholera epidemic in Kolkata in the 1950s, or the massive popular struggles for food and work in the last decades of the last century (1960s in West Bengal and Bihar in India), there are sudden unanticipated moments of conjuncture when the situation opens to possibilities of social transformation. Thus, for instance, even though infant deaths in India still happen in public hospitals due to sudden oxygen crisis, life conditions in many cities of the South have improved; with Leftist and populist mayors in charge, subaltern life is not "nasty, brutish, and short". The lower classes wait for the next opportunity to press further their claims.

The neoliberal transformation of cities faces stiff challenge in these southern urban conditions. Neoliberal mode of power wants to utilise the fragmentary urban condition in the South to make the entire society a market (think of the regenerative scheme for Dharavi slum in Mumbai), where everyone is a producer and an actor in the market. At this point, one wonders what smart cities and infrastructures mean for informal populations who are avid users of mobile platforms, even if largely for entertainment and communication. There are two elements at play here: first, the points of intersection of the formal and informal, these might include the domains of bourgeois production, such as food, housing, or transport, as well as various forms of low wage production-probably not present very much in high value sectors such as finance, trade, and digital production, but certainly in construction, waste reprocessing, etc.-which become more vulnerable to change and struggle; and second, the desiring city - the subaltern desire to be visible joined by the State's desire to know the life details of the people (Aadhaar in India is the exemplar). It is a deeply unstable dialectic. Migrants to the city embody the connections of the city and the rural hinterland, whose existence the big cities refuse to acknowledge. These vectors are responsible for changes that take time to manifest, but surely, they offer a cosmopolitan standpoint at odds with everyday oppressions.

On the other hand, populist-Leftist urban leaders of these Southern cities try to turn the same conditions for greater security of life-with creating more avenues for education, greater access to healthcare, work opportunity, housing, more opportunities for small and medium entrepreneurship, facilities of recreation, and most importantly, greater mobility.

The contest between the two strategies takes the form of a social war echoes of which reach people as soon as they put their ears close to the ground. People must allow then the factor of chaos, conjuncture, instability, and suddenness, elements of a war, in understanding of urban time. Urban time, in this age of artificial intelligence, surprisingly is still event-centric.

An amusing instance by way of ending this note: Last October (2024) during the annual autumn festival in Bengal when giant marquees are set up with idols of goddesses inside, this writer heard a commotion one evening. People, mostly festival goers from suburbs and villages were rushing towards a large pavilion. The loudspeaker was blaring: after fifty years Kolkata would look like this, there will be helicopters on the rooftop of large public hospital buildings to ferry patients in emergency condition from their houses to the hospitals. At the sprawling lawn where the marquees had been set up, people were watching a helicopter atop a tall structure. Then all on a sudden, the humming sound of a possible drone nearby was heard. Then a large number of watchers around a cordoned area. Inside, a drone was flying up, roaming above the cordoned field for a while and then coming down to the ground. The announcement was going on: Fifty years later drones would watch the city and conduct surveillance, lest any inhabitant should pollute the city by throwing plastic bags and other material on the streets. The drone would identify the house number and the resident would be duly summoned and penalised. Kolkata would be clean of plastics.

Dreams work in strange ways. The future is here, materialising in the desires exhibited in the carnivals.

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Frontier Autumn Number
Vol 58, No. 14 - 17, Sep 28 - Oct 25, 2025