Dislocating Urban Theory: Learning with Food-Vending Practices in Colombo and Delhi

• Published in: Antipode
• Main Author: Palat Narayanan, Nipesh
• Other Authors: Pacte, Laboratoire de sciences sociales (PACTE), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)-Sciences Po Grenoble - Institut d'études politiques de Grenoble (IEPG), Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), Università degli Studi di Firenze = University of Florence = Université de Florence (UniFI), Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique (Grant 181271)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2021
• Subjects: urban informality; Southern Theory; knowledge hegemony; street food; South Asia; [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hal.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/hal-03364812; https://hal.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/hal-03364812/document; https://hal.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/hal-03364812/file/DislocatingUrbanTheory.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12769

International audience Urban theory, produced in North Atlantic centres, has been perpetrated as universal and recent urban studies have pointed to the limits of this theory, calling for a Southern turn. The Southern call is to dislocate the concentration of power and knowledge in the metropolis. Owing to this concentration, concerns of the metropolis often become (or are made to become) concerns of the periphery. Taking informality as a practice, not embedded in people (marginalised) or places (settlements), I will outline how the study of informality has assured the lineage of metropolitan concerns. Moving away from informal-formal dichotomy, the paper mobilises informal-urban dialectic to identify and dislocate the metropolitan concerns of urban theory. Discussing empirical cases from Delhi and Colombo, I build a narrative of academic theorisation of informality and juxtapose it with everyday narrative of its practitioners (food vendors), arguing towards the need for a plural and radically non-global knowledge production politics. R esum e: La th eorie urbaine, produite dans les «centres» du «Nord», a et e impos ee comme universelle; or des etudes urbaines r ecentes ont montr e les limites de cette th eorie, appelant a un «tournant vers le Sud» (Southern turn) afin de d econstruire la concentration du pouvoir et du savoir dans la m etropole. En effet, du fait de cette concentration, les pr eoccupations de la m etropole deviennent souvent les pr eoccupations de la p eriph erie. En prenant l'informalit e comme une pratique (donc non li ee a des personnes ou a des lieux), je montrerai comment l' etude de l'informalit e a donn e la primaut e a des pr eoccupations m etropolitaines. S' eloignant de la dichotomie informel/formel, l'article mobilise la dialectique informel/urbain pour identifier et d econstruire les pr eoccupations m etropolitaines de la th eorie urbaine. En discutant de cas empiriques, provenant de Delhi et de Colombo, je construis un r ecit de la th eorisation acad emique de l'informalit e, que ...