Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-15T18:37:12.516Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Their City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

Neethi P.
Affiliation:
Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru
Anant Kamath
Affiliation:
National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru
Get access

Summary

We have been crawling all over their city. We have all been working, travelling, enjoying and living in their worksites and their recreational spaces. Our footprints overlap with theirs when we traverse through their world. We are actors in their theatre, as customers, adversaries, invisibles, accomplices, well-wishers and benefactors, adorning the garb of software engineers, factory workers, shopkeepers, food vendors, researchers, teachers, lawmakers, the police and other ‘decent’ people. Our structures sit as stage props in their cityscape, around which their material experiences are built, while our presence and our activities colour their individual and social experiences. The cartography of sex work is one of the shapes of this city, and the labour of sex workers contributes to running this glittering metropolis. However, they are cast as the unpleasant and the execrated, the threatening and the targeted, the invisible and the visible. They are one of the many non-blind people who stroke the surface of this elephant and, consequently, the beast needs to be redrawn, rewritten and reseen from their eyes, feet and minds. Their own unique experiences of the elephant's movements and transformations need to be understood. As a preparatory step towards this, we need to acknowledge that they too are some of the people associated with the elephant.

Old Bottle of Nostalgia, New Wine of Futurism

The elephant has been restless for a long while now, persistently striving to be something else. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Bangalore's planners wanted it to become India's Singapore. During the 1990s and after, for lack of originality in nomenclature (and abundant delusion), they wanted it to become India's Silicon Valley. Each of the Comprehensive Development Plans, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force, the Vision Group and other plans, charted out by the city's principal planning bodies, decade after decade, have had an undertone of image as a prime concern, with these bodies constituted by individuals from industry and commerce, by default, within their august panels.

Type
Chapter
Information
Urban Undesirables
City Transition and Street-Based Sex Work in Bangalore
, pp. 173 - 185
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×