Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai

Abstract

This article is concerned with the politics of inclusion. It analyzes the institutionalization of participatory citizenship as the formation of regimes of "civic governmentality". Through the study of key civil society organizations such as SPARC and Hezbollah, it studies three dimensions of civic governmentality: an infrastructure of populist mediation; technologies of governing (for example, knowledge production); and norms of self-rule (for example, concepts of civility and civicness). However, such regimes of civic governmentality operate within frontiers of urban renewal and indeed often facilitate and manage such types of development. The article examines the limits and contradictions of the politics of inclusion in the context of the bourgeois city and also studies radical forms of citizenship that emerge to challenge these limits.

Unpacking State Practices in City-Making,in Conversations with Ananya Roy

“…In the case of street traders in Johannesburg, the state's politics of un-mapping is understood as the refusal of the state to take responsibility for unauthorised traders, whose existence is denied. It is also a form of disempowerment of such traders, not aware of their own mass, as shown a contrario by the politics of enumeration from below (illustrated in Roy, 2009b), where pavement dwellers' selfdriven census provide them with self-awareness and local expertise that proved empowering in negotiations with the state.…”

Introduction: Worlding Cities, or the Art of being Global

“…But while such initiatives may invoke democracy and human rights -say, on behalf of the welfare of the urban poor -these urban initiatives cannot be neatly understood as a victory for "neoliberal" rule or for civil society. Frequently, such strategic partnerships are linked to official interests and party machines (e.g., Hezbollah), and their interventions effect an informal extension of corporate interest or state power, shaping a mode of "civic governmentality" (Roy 2009). In other words, the symbiosis between neoliberal calculations and social activism engenders a complex urban scene of multiple motivations, coalitions and borrowings that both destabilize and form new configurations of urban society.…”

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

“…Unlike HSC's deployment of bureaucratic language, as Appadurai informs us, the Alliance used the non-specialist knowledge of the community which gives an authenticity to the survey as revealing the ''voice'' of the subaltern. While Appadurai hails this as ''deep democracy,'' Ananya Roy (2009) shows how the Alliance became a ''native informant'' of the international governing organizations and promoted embourgeoisment of the city by pacifying the poor and earning consent from them for urban renewal. But, overall, it should be accepted that pavement dwellers exist as a governmental category in Bombay, while in Calcutta they no longer surface in public discourse.…”