It is a commonplace in urban history that the project of making streets ‘modern’ relied on creating arterial networks conducive to capital accumulation: wide streets ‘opened up’ tightly knit neighbourhoods facilitating urban renewal, overhauling the population distribution of cities and ushering in new property relations. Evictions of poorer populations and racialized minorities were the norm in such modernization projects. Streets became critical elements for the movement of capital and vital infrastructural anchors for fixing it. Fast movement sped up production and itself became valorized as the essence of modernity. Waxing poetic about the newly constructed parkways in New York, Sigfried Gideon remarked that it is ‘only by movement, by going along in a steady flow…the wheel under one’s hand’ that the space–time zeitgeist of the twentieth century could be realized. The counterpart of fluid movement, as Marshall Berman reflected, was the destruction of communities and bulldozing of neighbourhoods: planners hacking their way through a crowded city ‘with a meat axe’. The ubiquity of this phenomenon in cities across the globe has led urban history scholars to routinely include analysis of street planning in their accounts of city life. In discussing the experience of the city from the vantage of the street, scholars have leaned on critical theory à la Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Michel de Certeau and others. Few, however, have made the street the analytic focus for narrating the history of a twentieth-century city. Written within a framework of critical theory, Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay’s book, Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture, addresses this lacuna and thus makes a significant contribution to urban history.
Taking the street as the subject of analysis to understand the relation between urbanization and capital accumulation in Calcutta/Kolkata in the long twentieth century, the book demonstrates how ‘popular sovereignty materialized in space’. This story of political friction, obstruction, crowd action and the messiness of urban life that generate ‘narratives of human belonging’ aims to demystify ‘motion’ as it pertains to urban formations. Motion, Bandyopadhyay argues, is not the sole purview of the triad of the state, planner and capitalist. The modern street offers other vantages from which to read its affordances and mobilize.
With a substantial introductory chapter, five chapters and an epilogue, Bandyopadhyay leads the reader through three inter-related arguments: (1) contrary to the dominant representation of a city of failed urbanization, the ‘people’s economy’ – urbanization without accumulation – kept Calcutta vibrant as a city; (2) streets were not merely epiphenomenon of property relations, but popular politics in and of the street ‘reframed the contours of the city’s political economy’; (3) the materiality of the street as public space during the twentieth century produced a distinct political vernacular shaped at the intersection of urban planning, resistance to new property relations and the limits of state authority and imagination of the modern city.
Chapter 1, ‘The making of the modern street’, juxtaposes two divergent views of the modern street – the authoritarian projection of an arterial network for unimpeded movement by planners acting under the aegis of the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT) established in 1911, against the commoning of the street by ordinary citizens as spaces of dwelling and livelihood and by protestors as political space between the 1920s and 1950s. The latter two collectively ‘rescued the streets from an exclusive regime of property and exchange value’, Bandyopadhyay notes. Chapter 2, ‘The regime of the street’, builds on the previous discussion of the CIT’s plans with an in-depth examination of land acquisition for street improvement and extension. The unequal burden placed on the city’s Muslim population by the new regime of property, and the communal conflicts that were created as a result are the key takeaways from this chapter. Urban renewal, Bandyopadhyay points out, facilitated communal polarization. Chapter 3, ‘City as territory’, extends the discussion of communal conflict to explain the new territorial template of Muslim ghettoization that the ‘urban civil war’ of the 1940s and 50s set in place, destroying the closely intermeshed fabric of multi-religious and multi-ethnic living. The path to majoritarianism forged at mid-century created a segregated real-estate market and cast a long shadow on how the city came to be perceived in terms of communal zones. Chapter 4, ‘Frontier urbanization’ discusses two modes of suburbanization: the development of the eastern and southern suburbs through platting by the CIT and land occupation by force (jabardakhal) by refugees from East Bengal and East Pakistan after the Partition of 1947. Jabardakhal, Bandyopadhyay explains, counteracted the property market created by planned suburban development resulting in the ‘virtual withdrawal of urban property from the real estate market for at least four decades’. Chapter 5, ‘Durable obstructions, spatializing motion’ narrates the story of street hawkers who claimed the public space of the street and sidewalk to make a living, and the repeated efforts by the state to clear such obstruction. There is room here, Bandyopadhyay suggests, to craft a grammar of inclusive urbanism. The Epilogue considers the contours of collective action in contemporary cities.
For scholars who work on Calcutta, Bandyopadhyay’s book is an occasion to rejoice. He has introduced the Calcutta Hawker Sangram Committee archives and the hitherto nominally used archive of the CIT. These records bring to the discussion of the city’s twentieth-century planning history new archival depth. Readers would also find much to contemplate as they navigate familiar landmarks and events through Bandyopadhyay’s deft handling of archival research in relation to his ethnographic fieldwork. Urban scholars interested in cities beyond Calcutta will find inspiration in Bandyopadhyay’s argument about ‘urbanization without accumulation’ and the sheer richness of the materiality of street life he shares in this book. The modern street is after all not a backdrop or negative space, nor a space of flow or speedy passage, but the enduring arena of popular sovereignty. Streets in Motion teaches us that it is in events of obstruction – everyday and epoch-shifting – that we recognize the eddies and whorls of popular politics.
