Streets in Motion

"Investigating sites in colonial and postcolonial Calcutta, this book considers the wider politics and consequences of the modalities that both produce and regulate the street. It situates political economy as belonging not just to the domain of the government, the law, the planner's apparatus but parallelly to the domain of public action on the street. It studies, primarily, city-making by popular passions and public action on the streets. The book looks at the streets in motion through the eyes of the colonial and postcolonial city planners and of squatters who obstruct the movement of pedestrians and traffic. It qualifies the dialectic between the planner and the crowd by factoring in the aspect of city-planning being shaped by crowd action. The planner reorganizes demography through the building of thoroughfares while crowds shape planning by different varieties of occupation-occupation as community (authoritarian: Hindu aggregation of space through communal riots) and occupation as class (democratic: counter-pedestrianism of the street vendors). It thus presents an understanding of the social production of motion"--