Description
Book SynopsisThe book studies the social production of motion in a capitalist urban context. In the city of capital, motion refers to a fetish. The bourgeois order posits motion as a metaphor for energy, positivity, and progress a norm and obstruction (motion''s dialectical opposite) as delinquency. The book uncovers the social tectonics of spatial mobilization and thus demystifies motion. Who and what set spaces on the move? How did various classes of city dwellers activate, experience, and negotiate it? Streets in Motion develops an approach to urban history by theorizing and historicizing the ''street'' as an apparatus of city-making and subject formation. It works at two registers a local history of Calcutta in colonial and post-colonial periods, and a theorizing of the logistical and political-cultural centrality of the street within this rubric. It is argued that the street is politics in as much as politics is the production of space.
Table of ContentsList of Maps, Tables, Appendices, Images; List of Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter 1. The Making of the Modern Street: Engineers, Commoners, Agitators; Chapter 2. The Regime of the Streets: Renewal and Riots, 1910-1926; Chapter 3. City as Territory: Institutionalizing Majoritarianism; Chapter 4. Frontier Urbanization; Chapter 5. Durable Obstructions, Spatializing Motion: The History of Footpath-hawking; Epilogue; Glossary; Bibliography.
