Locating Feminist Political Ecology in Urbanization in India

Oct 23

Erik Swyngedouw coined the term “'Urban Political Ecology” (UPE) in his canonical paper, The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization, emphasizing the theoretical synergies across political ecology and political economy, as well as science and technological studies (STS) by way of diffusing uneven ideological, bio-chemical, and material power relations. Scholarship in UPE complicates the cartesian dualism of core and margin, binaries, and the transition between urban and natural environments. There is no static circulation of non-material (socio-cultural aspects) and material flows (economy and politics) in urbanized environments. In fact, the production of urbanized environments is uneven. Urban metabolism, the central tenet in UPE, demonstrates the management of tensions, contradictions, and conflicting dimensions persisting in the urban as the line between nature and society becomes blurred. The resilience of this hybrid socio-natural aspect of urbanization is due to urban metabolism. This analysis explores the definitional contours of peri-urbanism and urban political ecology in India. Here, climate change is framed as an act of socio-ecological violence. This analysis arguesthat feminist urban political ecology is the solution to unsustainable urbanization in a 'rurban'izing India.

In this analysis, we are looking at the concept of the “rurban”, which integrates the urban and the rural in the coevolution of material and non-material processes under the urbanization process. The rurban should not be considered as an ancillary to the core of the neighboring city, but rather as a holistic, self-sustaining ecosystem in which the rurban is the net producer of ecosystem ecological services. The fragmented nature of the rurban on the outskirts of both rural and urban areas must be consolidated as a spatial and urban sociological environment that adheres to the resolution of structural violence within its policies of sustainable urbanization. The rural elements percolating within the urban landscape and the urban aspects seeping into the rural landscape highlight the need of viewing urbanization as a socio-cultural material and non-material process, rather than merely a geographic location. Poor urban and peri-urban women have much more in common than privileged urban women and women in peripheral regions. Instead of focusing on geographic specificities in and around cities, public policies and governance strategies should be customized accordingly.

Moving beyond the city and within the transition zone of sub-urban, urban, and peri-urban brings to light the subaltern and southern urbanisms. In this context, the intersections of decolonial, queer, and feminist UPE narratives are instrumental in comprehending the peri-urban. Jonathan Silver's reading of Frantz Fanon with UPE frames climate change as socio-ecological violence - an intensely politicized and dynamic structural violence that suffocates the racialized urban poor, queer communities, and gentrification within urbanized consolidated zones of social marginalization within the city landscape. Women and marginalized genders are left with the additional precarity of climate change that only exaggerates the structural impediments they face; for example, a Dalit woman who is a manual scavenger in peri-urban India goes completely under-studied by UPE scholarship. Once we go beyond the city, we realize that the lens of Feminist Urban Political Ecology (FUPE) may be a suitable lens to read the city's landscape, but it remains inadequate for studying peri-urban, semi-rural, or rurban environments. Transition zones where strict dualistic logic does not apply are best addressed by queer feminist political ecological paradigms, which, while still in need of theoretical enrichment, provide insights into the dysphoria of the urban landscape in the peri-urban or rurban.

In this manner, UPE becomes an enriched discipline that attempts to comprehend the nuances of zones of ambiguous governance and transitions, what Henri Lefebvre refers to as “heterotopy”, the place of the “other” or “the other place,” simultaneously excluded and interwoven. His conceptualization of spatial heterotopy simplifies the study of what lies between the urban and the rural. If handled carefully, the seemingly disorganized life within rurbanity can provide innovative solutions to unsustainable urban sprawl, urban fringe, sub-urban, and peri-urban.

Rurbanization and peri-urbanism: two-way street- reflects transitional geographies within Urban Political Ecology (UPE)

The rural-urban binary divide is not adequate for processing the analytical framework for urbanization and urban planning that creates fringed peri-urbanized and rurbanized ecosystems. Peri-urban geographies alongside urban agglomerations are referred to as transitional zones. Peri-urban areas in highly urbanized regions are enmeshed in socio-economic, casteist, and cultural deprivations exacerbated by energy insecurity due to floods, cyclones, earthquakes, or routine inaccessibility to water services across the urban fringe. Women undertaking non-remunerative work within domesticized gendered roles find it difficult to access potable water for domestic chores. Such women are mostly from informal urban slums, Dalit communities, and migrant populations.

[Heritage buildings ground urban people to their bloodline legacies, and sustainable urbanization plans must be cognizant of this fact. Urbanization must not be used to uproot already displaced peoples (Photo by: Vani Bhardwaj)]

In the article, Peri-Urban: Is the Unwanted Child of Rural and Urban?, Usha describes peri-urban regions as transitional zones with ambiguous governance that do not fall under either rural or urban municipal jurisdiction. As a result, public services such as sanitation, water, and waste disposal lie in disarray in peri-urban areas. Urban planners must treat the peri-urban not as a rigidly compartmentalized geographical unit, but rather as a contiguous process between the urban and the rural via high-intensity flows and interlinkages of people, information, economic and socio-cultural ecosystems. Women in peri-urban areas are highly engaged in the unskilled informal economy. I argue that the housing market in peri-urban India is where a gender-inclusive housing boom based on house subsidies and loans can alleviate peri-urban housing issues in India. The urban agglomerations and urban peripheral areas, which are frequently peri-urban geographies, should adopt climate change-sensitive housing with green buildings that adhere to the Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC); this may be conducive to the suggested gender-inclusive housing policies. It is worth noting that climate change has increased the adversities and vulnerabilities faced by informal settlements.

The authors of Coping Mechanisms for Climate Change in Peri-Urban Areas affirm the advantage of peri-urban forestry in terms of managing microclimates, decreasing the urban heat island effect, and adopting enhanced greening strategies. However, one must exercise caution when it comes to plant species used for reforestation and recovery of desertified land in peri-urban areas around urbanized areas. A case in point is eucalyptus, which has negative effects on food security, soil fertility, and allelopathic traits, and is intensely mono-forested in peri-urban areas.

Enhancing the visibility of the women in rurban India

Food security in peri-urban areas can be assured by community gardens cultivated by women's self-help groups and agriculturalists funded by climate adaptation finance. Indigenous women migrating from rural to peri-urban areas are valued for their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), advocating for climate resilient solutions in peri-urban life. Their TEK may be used if they are recruited as Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) dedicated to peri-urban areas. Currently, ASHAs and community health workers are recruited for both urban and peri-urban areas. However, specialized cadres of community health workers committed only to peri-urban health systems must be developed to promote such climate resilient traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).

[Shopping centers and commercial hubs providing employment to the urban poor women are conjoining the walls of heritage buildings. This disturbs the conservation and sustainability of heritage buildings within rurbanized areas. (Photo by: Vani Bhardwaj)]

Homeless women, criminalized beggar women, and women in informal and gig economies are all deserving of serious UPE research as they are either within the margins of the city or the transitional geography of the peri-urban or urban fringe. Maria Kaika observes how the aerotropolis becomes invisibilized as everyone sees the airport terminals but not the surrounding suburbs. This is true for the large swathes of urban slums around Mumbai airport, as well as the displacement of an entire village and destruction of unidentified heritage architecture around the Delhi aerotropolis. In a similar vein, Michel Foucault studies cemeteries on the fringes of a city as the curious heterotopia wherein human finitude provides the idiosyncratic contradiction within the peri-urban geographies via a sense of stilled time in the context of fast-paced urbanization. Given that cemeteries are assigned a casteist tinge in the Indian context, studies on caste dynamics and cemeteries in the peri-urban or the urban fringe may be conducted.

FUPE shines a light on the invisible women in India's rurban systems, which are administratively and socioeconomically disorganized and feature an eclectic mix of micro-cultures. If field research results in inaccessibility to women research participants due to their restricted mobility in urbanizing India, ethnographic research becomes exclusive of gendered dimensions. Because of the naivety of the potential victims, the possibilities for human trafficking and organized crime are high in migrant-heavy rurban regions. As a result, it is critical that urban geographies and processes are made environmentally sustainable and gender-sensitive as soon as possible. Otherwise, the growing absence of law and order in rurban areas might pose future difficulties to the civic culture of Indian society.

Policy Recommendations

Provide women's self-help groups to restore mangroves that have been damaged due to intensive port construction to sustain ecosystem services in peri-urban areas such as urban wetlands.
Encourage adaptive finance that is gender resilient for urbanization projects in peri-urban areas. Rural women migrating to urban settlements seek informal employment near urban fringes. Thereby, there is scope for women-led entrepreneurship in adaptation technologies at the community level.
Involve women in peri-urban agriculture to make them major stakeholders in the agriculture logistics sector and forward linkages to the agri-technology industry in nearby cities. Peri-urban agriculture can have opportunities for women agriculturalists.
Construct peri-urban forests to mitigate the urban heat island effect to ensure a healthy balance of microclimates, since peri-urban agriculture influences local microclimates.
Create subsidized housing for women in peri-urban areas, with women homeowners receiving first preference for loans to finance micro and small entrepreneurial ventures.
Integrate rurban classification in the census in India.
Research gentrification in rurban areas.
Form rurban governance plans; decentralized political bodies for rurban areas must be constitutionally legislated in India.
Implement gender-sensitive ecological solutions to urbanization in rurban regions to promote green urban agglomerations in the foreseeable future.
Involve FUPE in the voices of Dalit feminists and environmentalists to truly enhance the scope of Dalit Feminist Political Ecology, although it cannot be ingrained with Brahmanical patriarchies of the upper classes and upper caste women.

[Intensive connectivity of peri-urban areas with rural hinterlands facilitates inter-state and intra-state natural resource extraction (Photo by: Vani Bhardwaj)]

The above analysis has emphasized the significance of studying urbanization processes through the lens of FUPE, in addition to other subaltern UPE paradigms. Only when policies are anchored on FUPE-oriented research will rurban India be able to transition into the broader vision of sustainable urbanization. As natural disasters and climate-induced disasters cause multiplying obstacles for girls and women across India, the peri-urban and the rurban transitional zones deserve policy attention - both statutorily and non-statutorily.

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