Table Of ContentGendering Urban Space in
the Middle East,South Asia,and Africa
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Gendering Urban Space in
the Middle East,South Asia,and Africa
Edited by Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali
GENDERINGURBANSPACEINTHEMIDDLEEAST, SOUTHASIA, ANDAFRICA
Copyright © Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali, 2008
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-1-4039-7523-2
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2008 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-53586-6 ISBN 978-0-230-61247-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230612471
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gendering urban space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa /
edited by Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sociology, Urban—Developing countries—Case studies. 2. Sex role—
Developing countries—Case studies. 3. Political participation—Developing
countries—Case studies. I. Rieker, Martina. II. Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961–
HT149.5.G46 2008
307.7609172'4—dc22 2007047249
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
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First Edition: June 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Gendering Urban Space 1
Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker
1 Gendering Urban Colonial Casablanca:
The Case of the Quartier Réservé of Bousbir 17
Driss Maghraoui
2 Morphologies of Social Flows:
Segregation, Time, and the Public Sphere 45
Susanne Dahlgren
3 Pulp Fictions: Reading Pakistani Domesticity 71
Kamran Asdar Ali
4 Race, Security, and Spatial Anxieties
in the Postapartheid City 101
Thomas Blom Hansen
5 Remaking Urban Socialities:
The Intersection of the Virtual
and the Vulnerable in Inner-city Johannesburg 135
AbdouMaliq Simone
6 Thin Lines on the Pavement:
The Racialization and Spatialization of
Violence in Postcolonial (Sub)Urban France 169
Paul A. Silverstein
vi Contents
7 Cosmopolistan: Culture, Cosmopolitanism,
and Gender in Karachi, Pakistan 207
Oskar Verkaaik
Author Biographies 229
Index 231
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the educational institutions and funding agen-
cies that made it possible for us to assemble groups of excellent schol-
ars at various sites to share their work. These papers represent some of
the intellectual outcomes of those workshops. We especially thank the
Social Science Research Council (New York); SEPHIS (the South-
South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of
Development); the Population Council (Cairo); the Institute for
Gender and Women’s Studies at the American University in Cairo; the
Institute for Women, Gender, and Development Studies at Ahfad
University (Khartoum); Sabanci University (Istanbul); the University
of Texas at Austin; and the Lahore University of Management
Sciences (LUMS) for their support and encouragement. We also
thank all the participants in our workshops who, by their presence and
enthusiasm for the project, made the effort worthwhile. The Shehr
network that we both coordinate could not have moved forward with-
out the initial and continuing encouragement of friends like Lisa
Taraki, Ayse Oncu, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ann Lesch, Asef Bayat, and
Maureen O’Malley; to them we owe our gratitude. The article, “Pulp
Fictions: Reading Pakistani Domesticity,” by Kamran Asdar Ali, first
appeared in Social Text (2004, issue 78, pp.123–45). It is reprinted
here with the kind permission of Duke University Press. We are
indeed grateful to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their faith in
this project from the very beginning and for helping us in seeing it
through. Finally, both of us thank our respective families for their
kindness and understanding.
4
I N T R O D U C T I O N
GENDERING URBAN SPACE
Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker
I
n his recent novel, Knots (2007), the Somali author Nuruddin
Farah situates the story in contemporary Mogadishu, a city run by
warlords and drug barons in an increasingly assertive Islamic cultural
milieu. The female protagonist, Cambara, returns from exile and
through her ability to move around in the city, finds possibilities of
connecting with other women activists to work toward reconciliation
and peace. A tale of hope and female strength, the novel depicts the
emergence of new kinds of urban spaces in the global south where,
despite frictions, violence, and conflict, varied actors—male and
female—create opportunities to coexist and prosper.
Farah’s portrayal reminds us of Elizabeth Wilson’s (1991) discus-
sion of the emergence of the modern Western city and its relationship
with women. Wilson too, as subtly hinted by Farah for an African city,
characterizes the urban as a space of opportunity and abandon for
women. Notwithstanding its difficulties, Wilson argues, the city eman-
cipates women far more than rural life or suburban domesticity (10).
However, despite promises of egalitarian freedoms, the disciplinary
nature of “liberal”1 modernity has seldom allowed the urban to be a
space of such complete abandon for the working poor. Modern urban
representational tropes like mobility, speed, and rationalized spatiality
also foreclose critical questions that examine ways in which, for example,
2 KAMRANASDARALIANDMARTINARIEKER
the multitude of poor women negotiate urban space in conditions of
declining public transportation infrastructure. The control of urban
crowds, the management of the working poor, the harnessing of
female sexuality, and the issues of vagrancy and unattached children
have been the historical dilemma faced by those—administrators and
academics alike—who seek to control the city and make it “safe.”2
This said, it still needs to be emphasized that although women, the
poor, children, and minorities in most cities have not been granted full
and free access to the streets—they are not complete citizens—indus-
trial life has brought them into public life. Women (and men) may use
the urban space for mobility, transgression, and different pleasures
that they seek, in the process navigating the everyday in favorable and
unfavorable terms (Ali n.d.). Hence they survive and flourish in the
interstices of the city and “negotiate” its contradictions in their own
particular way (Wilson 1991, 8).
How people survive in their private and work life in expanding
cities in the global south are stories and histories that are yet to be told
or written. The chapters in this book emerge out of a long-term dia-
logue initiated by the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes Network
(http://www.shehr.org/), an academic initiative that seeks to further
a social-historical and critical understanding of contemporary cities
and urban practices in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. It
examines the efficacy of the category of the city in modernist dis-
course and seeks to chart this spatial imagination and its effects
through an exploration of the complex processes in which gendered,
classed, and raced citizen-subjects have negotiated and been the
object of urban projects in these regions. Attuned to both the legacy
of modernist conceptual grammars and their inadequacy for under-
standing the remaking of space and place in the neoliberal present, the
purpose of the network is to open up an arena in which to address the
particular positioning(s) of contemporary urban landscapes and urban
practices.
Following this lead, the chapters in this volume discuss the life
worlds of the men and women in multiple geographic spaces in the
larger global south, focusing specifically on how they exist in multi-
ethnic and economically uncertain urban milieus. The comparative
framework builds partly on a shared history of the colonial encounter,
modernity, nationalism, and urbanity and is deepened by the larger
cultural framework that influences social life in these spaces. In doing
this we remind ourselves of the complex history of the Western Indian
