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Accepted Paper:
Vibrant Edges: Life in the Frontier of an Indian City
Dayabati Roy
(University of Helsinki)
This paper uses the notion of assemblage to describe the urban frontiers of Kolkata city. By exploring the multiplicity, fluidity, and unpredictability of assemblages in an urban settlement, it examines how social phenomena assemble, collide, and disperse across timespaces.
Paper Abstract:
This paper explores how rural populations that have migrated to an Indian city manage to negotiate a space in the urban frontier where two distinct, yet interdependent, neighbourhoods coexist. It uses the findings of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among migrants (2018-2021) who are provisionally settled on governmental lands at the new urbanization. The paper chronicles how the two groups—new middle class and settlers—traverse and shape each other’s lives to form the urban edges. It examines how boundaries are produced between these two neighbourhoods despite the fact that both settler and middle-class families depend on each other for employment and a labour force, respectively. The article contributes to the debates on how we understand the frontier of cities, using the notion of “assemblages” and suggesting that they are unstable and uneven in terms of power but vibrant with rupture and the possibility of new “assemblages”.