Dislocating Urban Theory: Learning with Food‐Vending Practices in Colombo and Delhi

Abstract

Urban theory, produced in North Atlantic centres, has been perpetrated as universal and recent urban studies have pointed to the limits of this theory, calling for a Southern turn. The Southern call is to dislocate the concentration of power and knowledge in the metropolis. Owing to this concentration, concerns of the metropolis often become (or are made to become) concerns of the periphery. Taking informality as a practice, not embedded in people (marginalised) or places (settlements), I will outline how the study of informality has assured the lineage of metropolitan concerns. Moving away from informal‐formal dichotomy, the paper mobilises informal‐urban dialectic to identify and dislocate the metropolitan concerns of urban theory. Discussing empirical cases from Delhi and Colombo, I build a narrative of academic theorisation of informality and juxtapose it with everyday narrative of its practitioners (food vendors), arguing towards the need for a plural and radically non‐global knowledge production politics.

Gender, caste, and street vending in India: Towards an intersectional geography

“…For a woman vendor, this means paying attention to how her occupation of public space is situated within a planning paradigm that has historically been shaped by colonial legacies (Anjaria, 2016), and as an urban informal worker in Mumbai, examining how she is linked to global flows of capital and labour that are determined by North–South power relations, neoliberalisation, racialised ideas of development, and so forth. Indeed, the Southern turn in geography has led to scholars dislocating and complicating canonical understandings of urban informality through the experiences of street vendors in the South (Lindell, 2019; Palat Narayanan, 2022). Thus, bringing the situatedness and the postcolonial spatiality of intersectional thought into conversation with each other can perhaps yield an approach that is more productively suited to realise the complex constitutions of street vending spaces in India.…”

“…This provides us with rich ethnographic detail and socio‐political context, and covering themes such as livelihoods, informality, market culture, identity, conflict with the state, everyday customer interactions, vending strategies, and so forth (Anjaria, 2016; Duneier, 2001; Goldstein, 2016; Kapchan, 2001; Milgram, 2013). Meanwhile, in geography and urban studies, street vending is conceptualised as a spatial practice, and vendors as producers of urban space (Bandyopadhyay, 2022; Lindell, 2019; Luthra & Monteith, 2021; Palat Narayanan, 2022) offering us a critical spatial perspective that is sometimes missing from other works. Several of these studies also use visual and spatial methods such as GPS tools and solicited journals in order to understand the power relations embedded in vending spaces (Eidse & Turner, 2014; Salvidge, 2022).…”

“…. Meanwhile, in geography and urban studies, street vending is conceptualised as a spatial practice, and vendors as producers of urban space (Bandyopadhyay, 2022;Lindell, 2019;Luthra & Monteith, 2021;Palat Narayanan, 2022) offering us a critical spatial perspective that is sometimes missing from other works. Several of these studies also use visual and spatial methods such as GPS tools and solicited journals in order to understand the power relations embedded in vending spaces (Eidse & Turner, 2014;Salvidge, 2022).…”

Surrounds surrounding the South

“…The linear narratives with fixed categories of analysis have long been the key source of metropolitan domination (Palat Narayanan, 2022). These concepts, in leu of understanding the urban, have often led to the creation of an other (always manifested as lacking and lagging behind the metropolis).…”

Points of persuasion: Truth spots in future city development

“…While this phenomenon holds potential for wider efforts at “dislocating” urban theory from the “metropolis” of the global North (Palat Narayanan, 2022) – and we recognize the significance of that scholarly orientation – this is not within the scope of the current article.…”