Understanding the City through its Margins

Pluridisciplinary Perspectives from Case Studies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East

André Chappatte, Ulrike Freitag, Nora Lafi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351695688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Cities the world over and in particular developing countries suffer from uneven development and inequality. This is often coupled with the view that these inequalities constitute unfortunate anomalies. In contrast, this edited volume draws out the ways in which the city has not been able to exist without its margins, both materially, ideationally, and socially. In this book the margins are, first, the mirrors of the city and, second, a fundamental route through which various centers can legitimate and sustain their power. Contemporary case studies are compared to a number of those from history with the accent on Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and engage with the underlying theoretical questions of what is the urban margin and what is marginality in urban society and spaces?

1 The city and its regulations

Unexpected margins

André Chappatte, Ulrike Freitag, Nora Lafi

Almost out of breath, I ascend the final narrow staircase of an unremarkable building in Gombak, on the outskirts of Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur. My anonymous contact has assured me over the phone that I have arrived at the Hauzah Imam Ali ar-Ridha Centre, the home of the Kuala Lumpur Shia community. Framed pictures of Koranic verses have led me up the stairs to the top floor, but on the final part, an iron grill door blocks the way. I call my contact; he calls the imam inside, who opens the door and welcomes me in. The imam and the other community members gathered there take a moment to gauge their new visitor. Too often, their space has been invaded. The rooms are already vaguely familiar to me. Videos of the premises are on YouTube. Someone filmed a raid by religious authorities in 2010. Snippets of the raid have been uploaded by both members of the Shia community to gain support and by regime-allied groups that want to instil fear. Shia Islam is illegal in Malaysia. The National Fatwa Muzakarah Committee declared all Islamic teachings other than “Sunnah Wal Jamaah” (Sunni Islam) to be against Islamic law in 1996. The Home Ministry declared Shia Islam as illegal, citing both this fatwa as well as “national security”.

This extract from Saskia Schäfer’s chapter in this volume offers a compelling glimpse of the researcher’s sudden and crude experience of the marginal as it is encountered through socio-spatial interactions. The very experience of travelling to the meeting could not but remind her of the asymmetric power relations that discriminate against what is now considered to be a threatening sect of Islam despite its longstanding presence in maritime Southeast Asia. The urban marginality is multidimensional, to say the least. But the study of this obvious complexity is too often undermined by the classic disciplinary walls that frame social sciences. To overcome this fragmentation, this book contributes to the study of urban marginality through a pluridisciplinary dialogue about the dynamics of margins from a set of specific historical and current case studies. This dialogue involves mainly historical and socio-anthropological perspectives, but also geographers and political scientists. Based on empirical studies from Asia and Africa, their findings deepen the theoretical understanding of urban marginality at large.

Why, one may ask, does this book bring together cities from Asia and Africa, including the Middle East, and why does it combine megacities such as Istanbul and Jakarta with capital cities and metropoles (Tunis, Dar es Salaam, Beirut) and large (Izmir) as well as small (Odienné, Ivory Coast) provincial towns? Much of the foundational literature on urban marginality is based on European case studies. The field of urban studies in Asia and Africa has certainly been booming for some time, but they are rarely put in dialogue. While this is true for comparisons between “Western” and “non-Western” cities – something this book does not endeavour to do – it is equally true for Asian and African contexts, which this volume brings into conversation with each other. While it might perhaps not be surprising that entertainment and prostitution are more commonly found on the fringes of cities, as described by Chappatte for Odienné and by Dağyeli for Bukhara, the latter’s careful description of the quarter of the corpse washers also shows that social and spatial marginality were not automatically linked. This point is also illuminated by Lafi’s chapter on an inner-city wasteland-cum-market in Tunis.

Pérouse’s elaboration about the development of new quarters on the edge of Istanbul shows clearly how politically powerful populations, once located at the centre of cities, move to the fringes in search of more comfortable housing, built by companies closely linked to the centre of political power. Here, the centre moves to the margins, socially speaking. While, in Pérouse’s case, this spatial marginality also allows for the space necessary to establish a more religiously conservative lifestyle, Chappatte’s chapter shows the very opposite, the socially illicit establishing itself at the discreet margin of the city. This differentiation also warns us not to jump to conclusions from spatial to social marginality, or vice versa. In a dialogue involving an African historian working on Dar es Salaam (Zöller) and a Middle Eastern anthropologist writing about Beirut (Mermier), not only is the construction of social and spatial marginality discussed but it is also contrasted with the integration of the marginal – in the first case a migratory group, in the second case specific market places – into translocal or even global networks of trade and exchange.

All cities discussed are also situated in what is widely known as the Muslim world. Even a cursory reader will discover that while questions of religious affiliation or a moral lifestyle are important to some case studies, in many other cases, religion only plays a secondary role or none at all. Thus, in spite of the widely varying political systems and role of religion in constitutions and ruling parties, state policies were and are mostly not informed by religious considerations, even if notions of morality in a wider sense often permeate processes of urban planning or development, in addition to questions of representation and power, as shown in the chapter by Ufuk Adak on the changing location of Izmir Prison. The papers in the second section address in particular the question of the creation of moral landscapes, be it through spatial politics (as in the study by Schäfer) or of temporal choices (Chappatte). However, it is important to note that the religious element is but one of a number of crucial factors. This becomes very clear in the paper by Ismailbekova and Karimova on the conflict of Osh in Kyrgyzstan. It shows clearly that the ethnic conflict between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz broke out in those quarters or towns where ethnic rather than religious identity was a prominent marker of identity. This highlights that the often-assumed primacy of religious affiliation may but does not have to play a major role in intercommunal relations, something that has been demonstrated by historians of the Middle East for some time (Freitag et al. 2015; Krimsti 2015).

The two major foci of urban marginality in this book involve an open approach to relationality and historicity in order to avoid over-theorized or, at times, mechanical approaches to the topic in order to reach an audience of historians and social scientists. The relationality of margins will, in the course of this introduction as well as the chapters, be discussed in terms of its articulation, the historicity in terms of transformation, in order to employ terms more apt for a pluridisciplinary discussion. The articulation of marginality points to the very ways in which a society functions and defines what it considers to be the centre and what is the margin. The transformation of margins is central to both the historical and the anthropological chapters. It stresses their human-made nature, and hence both the empirical observation that centres might become marginal and vice versa, as well as the potentiality of such a transformation.

A third important and recurrent aspect is the positionality from which a “margin” is defined. This is the key that unlocks its operational preconception and correlatively moves the discussion of marginality away from the instrumental and paternalistic mind-sets that have shaped the concept of urban marginality from its inception.

The next sub-section develops the themes of articulation and transformation by discussing the work of a selected set of scholars that forms the analytical backdrop of the chapters of this book. Bearing in mind the analytical framework set by these two foci, the chapters of the book are then introduced through an unpacking of two main actors involved in the formation of the urban margins they explore, namely the state and those defined (or considered) by it as marginal. A final sub-section concludes by inviting scholars to reflect upon the fact that the regulatory forces of modern societies have developed a concern for, a preoccupation with or even in some instances a fascination with what is marginal. This book ultimately deconstructs urban marginality as an historical rhetoric that espies the fundamental play of light and shadow between centres and margins through an emphasis on the forces, spatial distribution and creativity that ensue from their dynamics.

Articulations and transformations of urban margins

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the development of a series of critical studies in social sciences that considerably changed the philosophical stance scholars adopted towards the margins. A margin remained no longer a deficient and hence useless or even disturbing attachment to the social body that therefore had to be removed; it rather became a concrete reality through which the whole social system could be interpreted. This new sociology of the margins, put forward by Michel Foucault, aimed to build a critical vision of the whole social apparatus based on the idea that the margin is not at the outside but an integral part of the social body (Foucault 1999, 1975; Perrot 1986; Beaulieu 2005; Cuestas 2013). In this regard, the margin became a production of the whole system through which its very nature can be investigated and even challenged. This perspective influenced numerous studies, among them Janice Perlman’s work on the favelas of Rio, which documented how the so-called “outsiders” were in fact socially integrated into the urban fabric (Perlman 1976). The volume Livelihoods at the Margins, edited by James Staples (2007), put forward the notion of “livelihood” to capture the resilience of those who strive to live and survive on the urban margins in Kampala, Rio, Mumbai, La Paz or Bangkok. The reader is asked to “consider their agency in responding to that marginalization” (Ibid., 13). The precarity of these alleged outsiders (i.e. sex workers, street hawkers, drug dealers, cleaners, street children) is analysed in the light of social injustices that led to their marginalisation. The chapters also highlight the resources these groups developed to advance themselves (Staples 2007). This empathetic perspective requires a consideration of marginality not only in terms of vulnerability but also in terms of powerlessness. Against conservative preconceptions of the negative stereotype of the idle and even disturbing urban margin, such studies turned the margin into a window that overlooks the entire system, a critical perspective shared among the authors of this book.

The increasing development of megacities around the globe has motivated scholars, such as Mike Davis (2006), to employ the articulation between a centre and its margins to denounce shanty towns as spaces of exclusion from the supposed benefits of modern capitalism. By contrast, other analysts have explored these so-called “slums” as spaces of alternative social arrangements that are characterised by specific dynamics, thus moving beyond their consideration as spaces of abject poverty (Roy 2011). For these scholars marginality does still imply power asymmetry; this is the very reason why its analytical potential to probe the field of power should not be overlooked. Their approaches to marginality, however, remain elaborated in relation to the figure of the vulnerable poor that is drifting away from mainstream society that reduces centre and margin to a unidirectional articulation. The question of marginality has been deeply paternalistic¹ and moral from its onset insofar as it explicitly or implicitly defines standards considered to be central to society, be it in terms of housing, morality, economic well-being or the like. A juxtaposed reading of the aforementioned works of Davis and Roy reveals the social reciprocity of these articulations. As Asef Bayat (2012) states, the margins can neither be reduced to realms of subordination and suffering nor to realms of opportunity for the exertion of power. Then how can we embrace these realms in a framework that captures this social reciprocity?

The sociologist Murray Melbin compared the progressive alteration of the frontier of time he observed in American towns in the 1970s and 1980s with the conquest of the American West that happened a century earlier. For him, space and time together “forms the physical container of existence” (1987, 4) which have variously been conceived, negotiated and colonised by societies through their frontier. Here the frontier refers to both the notion of centre(s) and its margin(s). A centre has margins as a margin has centres;² what is fundamental is their inherence. Not surprisingly, the study of marginality was part of the intellectual endeavour on the urban that led to the birth of modern sociology (Shield 2013; Bigot 1998; Lindner 1996; Barel 1982). For Melbin, day is the centre of human activity and night its margin. So what can we learn from and how can we turn this “natural” relation into a critical framework for the study of the urban in contemporary societies? The present book offers chapters that probe the nature of processes that articulate centres with margins. Do these processes share the same nature for cities from different parts of the world, and of different sizes? Surely, different types of spatial and social marginality tend to play out quite differently in walled 19th century Bukhara where the area outside the wall was a waste dump, but also the place where the well-to-do established their estates with large gardens (as shown in Dağyeli’s chapter) and in 21st century Kuala Lumpur, discussed in the chapter by Schäfer, where the religiously marginal, banned Shi’ite community hides on the fringes of the city in a building disguised as a company. However, a closer investigation of both cases allows us to draw conclusions about the cities, as well as the societies in which these case studies are located.

Numerous scholars have firmly stated the importance of studying the processes at work between centres and margins rather than their dichotomy (Wallerstein 1976; Robinson 2011; Conrad, Eckert and Freitag 2007). However, the dichotomy is still alive and shapes the way scholars perceive their relationship. This resilience points to the aforementioned moralism which has been rooted in the representations of margins in history. One way to be aware of our own embeddedness in such representations is to question the alleged borders that ought to exist between centres and margins. In this regard, the passage from marginal studies to mainstream studies of some sectors of research is instructive, reflexive and revealing. This was to a large degree the consequence of civic activism and its convergence with engaged scholarship, such as can be found in feminist (hooks 2000; Wallach Scott 1999; Bock 2010, 1989; Perrot 2014) and gay (Wittle 1994; Messer-Davidow 1993; Brekkus 2005) as well as black (Rojas 2007; Hill 2000; Fisher 1992) and subaltern (Lynd 2014; Bhattacharya 1983) studies. A more recent case of such convergence between scholarly research and the struggle against segregation can be observed in the case of the study of Muslim minorities in European and North American societies (Malik 2004).³ The degree of engagement in such debates shows quite clearly the forces at stake when the border between the core of a society and its margins is questioned (Rorato and Saunders 2009; Callahan and Curtis 2008). All these struggles reveal that the moral ascendancy of urban marginality and its instrumental corollary are alterable and hence point at the need to study the possible transformations of margins over time.

In terms of the spatial dimension of marginality, a number of historical works stand out as having contributed not only conceptually but also methodologically. For instance, Bronisław Geremek’s book The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (1971) is a study of crime, prostitution, vagabondage, beggars and outsiders of all sorts; he then elaborated on what he called a “topography of poverty”. Geremek was one of the first scholars to combine a socio-historical approach with a spatial analysis of the city. This micro-topography of marginal urban spaces paved the way for a tradition of study of marginality in late medieval towns, such as illustrated with the recent work edited by Stephen Milner (2005). Geremek’s work notably influenced the Italian school of Microstoria developed by Carlo Ginzburg (1976) and Giovanni Levi (1989).⁴ Microstoria in turn inspired numerous urban historians of the 1980s and 1990s because it allowed them to explore urban societies beyond views of the urban elite which tend to be hegemonic by nature. Microstoria further promoted a specific attention to archives pertaining to allegedly banal aspects of social life. John Merriman’s The Margins of City Life (1991) elaborated a socio-historical approach to archival work characterised by an acute precision in spatial analysis which consequently refined the relation of the social and the spatial to urban margins choosing a perspective “from below”. He also widened the scope of historical archives by including an analysis of the realm of folklore using, for example, songs and festivals as sources. Following a similar grass-roots perspective, Nora Lafi’s chapter explores how a parking lot situated on the ruins of a bombed neighbourhood within the medina of Tunis has recently become a lively ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The city and its regulations: Unexpected margins
• Part I Space and state regulation: The urban interstices
• Part II Diversity and moral policing: Making claims through marginalisation
• Index