Navigating ‘New’ Delhi: Moving Between Difference and Belonging in a Globalising City

Abstract

Delhi's government is remodelling the built environment into an imagined ‘global city’, to attract transnational capital, human resources and an international sports spectacle (the Commonwealth Games 2010). As the city's population is diverted and moved on to make way for new infrastructure, residents are, in the process, traversing new spaces, reappropriating space in new ways and engaging in new interactions. This paper explores the possibilities and challenges of these interactions in a qualitative study of the everyday mobility of 23 diverse young people living in Delhi. The study found that interactions were defined by existing perceptions of ‘order’ and ‘proper’ behaviour by known and unknown others. The navigation of both familiar and uncomfortable territories was carried out through the deployment of competencies such as translation and avoidance skills. While the findings indicate that the city contains spaces of interaction that can generate unintended meanings and contest established power relations, these interactions were not always harmonious, reinforcing the idea that social relations that constitute urban space are divergent and unequal. The paper concludes by arguing that while Delhi was divided into spaces of belonging and familiarity, working against the possibilities of interactions with ‘others’, these spaces can be necessary to manage positions of difference and inequality.

Keywords:

• Multicultural City
• Global City
• Delhi
• Youth
• Diversity
• Belonging
• Geographies of Difference
• Social Geography

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all the participants for their time and energy. Thanks also to Nairwita Banerjee and Vrindra Chopra for their assistance, and to the reviewers for the constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. During slum clearances in the 1970s, evictees were re-housed in designated ‘resettlement colonies’ in different parts of the city. The colony in east Delhi where the group of young women in this study lived is one of the oldest of these. Other, informal, resettlement colonies, such as Balbir's residence in south Delhi, tend to be densely populated and unplanned, resettled by migrants or squatters. They can also be termed a basti.

2. Participants were asked to reflect on how they travel, where and who with, who they see and meet, how they interact with others, how they feel about the various places they move into, out of or avoid, where they are comfortable, where they are afraid and why, and what skills they thought they used to move around the city on a daily basis.

3. Eleven young women from the resettlement colony took part, however, social expectations in this community circumscribe limited mobility. As using street directories was, therefore, not appropriate, many of the women drew their own ‘maps’ of the streets in the colony in which they lived and moved through.

4. See debates in local media, for example: ‘Delhi residents turn to LG for more playgrounds’ (2008). Midday. 12 December 2008. Available from: http://www.mid-day.com/news/2008/dec/291208-Lieutenant-Governor-Tejendra-Khanna-childrens-petition-park-playground-fundamental-rights-MCD.htm [Accessed 7 March 2009].

5. This is a dominant cultural identity within Delhi.

6. The British architect Edwin Lutyens designed New Delhi as the capital of India in the early 1900s. In contrast to the rambling and congested lanes of Old Delhi, New Delhi is a space of wealth, wide avenues, roundabouts, and bungalows, incorporating Parliament and the embassy district. Southern suburbs have grown out from Lutyen's original dimensions for the city.

7. Selvaraj, for example, had lived in Japan with his academic parents.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melissa Butcher

Dr Melissa Butcher is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Open University, UK. The focus of her research is cultural change and conflict in diverse urban spaces. Before joining the OU, Melissa taught in universities in Ireland and Australia. She is currently writing a book on transnational mobility and cultural change, and her previous publications include Dissent and Cultural Resistance in Asia's Cities (with Selvaraj Velayutham, Routledge, 2009), and Ingenious: Emerging Youth Cultures in Urban Australia (with Mandy Thomas, Pluto Press, 2003)