The Village Inside

US $26.95 Thirty-five contemporary thinkers offer insight into the workings of vibrant, ecological, equitable communities and their economies. Advance Praise for What We See “It’s as if Jane Jacobs’ bright eye hadn’t dimmed . . . In the hands of this book’s essay writers, new thoughts sprout, all as true to Jane’s spirit and inventive urbanity as the gardens (intellectual and physical) she cultivated in her lifetime.” —Neal Peirce, journalist and Chair, The Citistates Group; author, Boundary Crossers CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS Foreword by Michael Sorkin “A delicious international and interdisciplinary banquet of offerings to honor the passionate and multifaceted work of our beloved urbanist, Jane Jacobs.” —Wendy Sarkissian, author, Kitchen Table Sustainability and Creative Community Planning “How can one resist cheering on this urban original? . . . We see how Jane Jacobs and our neighborhoods live on through her ideas.” —Victor S. Navasky, Publisher Emeritus, The Nation, and author, A Matter of Opinion “The reflections on this remarkable woman, and the still-unfolding project of city-building today, are a joy to read.” —Anthony Flint, author, Wrestling with Moses “The essayists in What We See have built on those essential footholds that people who have never heard of Jane Jacobs will benefit from for decades.” —Majora Carter, founder, Sustainable South Bronx, and winner, Rachel Carson Award “A moving and enlightening tribute to the ideas and methods of Jane Jacobs . . . that will inspire others to observe closely, contemplate broadly, and engage civically.” —Glenna Lang, co-author, Genius of Common Sense “There is no better starting place for re-evaluating tomorrow’s complex cities than this book, which is full of the wisdom and insight Jane Jacobs so astutely taught us . . . Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” —Fred Kent, President, Project for Public Spaces Edited by Stephen A. Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth Published jointly by the Center for the Living City and New Village Press ILLUSTRATIONS OF JANE JACOBS AND HER SPECTACLES BY ROBERT COWAN www.newvillagepress.net CULTURAL STUDIES / URBAN PLANNING / ECONOMICS Stephen A. Goldsmith & Lynne Elizabeth, Editors Janine Benyus, Hillary Brown, Robert Cowan, David Crombie, Pierre Desrochers, Matias Echanove, Nan Ellin, Mindy Fullilove, Jan Gehl, Arlene Goldbard, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Kenneth Greenberg, Nabeel Hamdi, Chester Hartman, Sanford Ikeda, Allan Jacobs, Daniel Kemmis, Samuli Leppälä, Jaime Lerner, Elizabeth Macdonald, Clare Cooper Marcus, Richard Register, Mary Rowe, Janette Sadik-Khan, Saskia Sassen, Ron Shiffman, Robert Sirman, Rahul Srivastava, James Stockard, Ray Suarez, Deanne Taylor, Alexie Torres-Fleming, Susan Witt, and Peter Zlonicky “In this book are the testimonials of ‘Jane’s children’. . . building on what she began back in the ’60s. It’s taken a long time, but it’s happening.” —David Byrne, musician, artist and author, Bicycle Diaries WHAT WE SEE For Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) Leading thinkers observe our world with a candor that honors Jane Jacobs’ honest way of looking. WHAT WE SEE ADVANCING THE OBSERVATIONS OF JANE JACOBS More than thirty notable minds from di- verse fields offer timely, original essays that update the insights of urbanist-activist Jane Jacobs. Through an enlivening discussion of critical issues affecting our cities and economies, What We See combines fresh reflection on Jacobs’ views with the unique personal and professional experience of each author. Turning an eye to their own streets and concerns, contributing essayists explore the essential components of vibrant neighborhoods: interconnectivity, cultural and economic diversity, walkability, mixed-use design, civic participation, and environmental responsibility. What We See carries on the brilliance and truthfulness of Jane Jacobs, who set twentiethcentury city planning on its head by observing that the best-informed advisor in matters of planning and policy is the community itself. Anyone seeking inspiration and common sense for bringing cities and their economies back from the edge will appreciate What We See. Its ideas prompt us all to join the conversation about next steps for shaping socially just, environmentally friendly, and economically prosperous communities. Find news of What We See author events, guidelines for study circles and neighborhood Jane’s Walks, and more: www.whatwesee.org The Village Inside Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava Chapter in What We See: Advancing the Observation of Jane Jacobs, Edited by Stephen Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth. Foreword by Michael Sorkin. New Village Press, New York. May 2010. Introduction One of Gandhi's main obsessions was the idea of the self-sufficient village—one that would service most of its inhabitants’ needs and act as an independent republic of its own. The idealization of the small-scale, self-sustaining and communitarian village was a characteristic reaction to the global emergence of large-scale, bustling industrial cities and trading centers that had changed the way the world organized itself from the nineteenth century onwards. The city had become a larger-than-life figure perceived to be simultaneously mechanistic and out of control, environmentally destructive and socially alienating, while the village was posited as a human-scale alternative in tune with Indian traditions, morality and spirituality. As brilliantly argued by political psychologist Ashis Nandy, the archetype of a Gandhian village could not have emerged anywhere else than in the unsettled mind of an urbanite. Gandhi, a city boy by all accounts, produced most of his village visions during his stay in South Africa and later from his colonial Bombay home. This image, according to Nandy, was as much the product of Gandhi's late explorations of rural India as the fruit of a deep introspection, which slowly brought to surface the ideal vision of a village in him—as in every Indian. Gandhi’s village, however, cannot be reduced to romantic folklore or agrarian utopia. It was based on the principles of industriousness and autonomy, and located the artisan— symbolized by the famous cloth spinning wheel—at the center of its organization. It represented freedom from top-down political control and economic dependency. Local management of natural resources, including food production, and an insistence on selfmade homes, were hallmarks of the Gandhian village. Gandhi believed that any construction had to be built with material solicited from an area of approximately five miles radius around the site (Henderson 2002, 94). Ivan Illich and other radical critics of the construction industry echoed this in the 1970s. Illich argued that building regulations and the real estate industry took away the ability of people to build their own homes (Illich 1973). Under the guise of defending collective and general interest, construction law has in effect proscribed self-made houses and habitats. Moreover, public spending has been invested into the edification of new towns and housing complexes instead of helping people to build and maintain their own abodes. These new industrial homes, built according to preset norms, are unaffordable to the poor, resulting in the vicious housing crisis that all modern cities are experiencing today—a crisis manufactured to serve the interest of an industry that far from providing housing to the needy, produces more misery and homelessness. Gandhi responded to the same industrial-urban logic at work in colonial India. However, as compelling and influential as Ghandi's defense of the Indian village may have been, it was not enough to contain the massive and continuous rural exodus that the country has been experiencing ever since independence. For many, the transition from the village to the city was, and continues to be, experienced as a liberation from social hierarchies and servitude. Indeed, a major voice opposing Gandhi was that of Dr. Ambedkar, a social reformer, ideologue and revered Dalit leader (from the exuntouchable community), famous for being the architect of the Indian constitution. While Gandhi was exhorting Indians to go back to the villages, Dr. Ambedkar was urging Dalits to move to the cities, where they could liberate themselves from a backward milieu characterized by caste-based exploitation, poverty and illiteracy. One could argue that both Gandhi and Ambedkar's visions were ultimately fulfilled and perverted in India's shadow cities. Gandhi’s idealization of the village was surely problematic to start with. He saw it as an objective reality that could be conceptually posited as a counterpoint to the city. This oppositional logic was typical of Gandhi’s time—marked by extreme political ideologies—and it remains one of the most widespread misconceptions about urbanization today. The era of industrial urbanization has typically been represented as a shifting point, when the split between cities and villages became wider and irreversible.This polarization was however more notional than real. Gandhi’s emphasis on the village as the locus of economic activity and social progress was as a response to Western faith in industrialization and urbanization; but this response became susceptible to other kinds of dogma and ideologies. After independence, the Indian government adopted a Gandhian line and largely ignored urban development. Development strategies focused instead on rural areas, where real India was said to reside. Incentives and support were given to cottage and small-scale industries in rural areas. Yet the movement of citizens from the countryside to the city continued. For several decades, this movement did not really worry the government, given that total numbers of people in rural India remained high. The government therefore persisted with its rural bias. Meanwhile, a version of the village was actually being recreated inside India’s sprawling cities. Rural-urban migrants were resurrecting old community ties, arts and crafts in a new form (Nandy 1998, 6). In quest for livelihood, water and freedom from feudal ties, rural migrants came in millions to the cities and brought with them their skills, talents and evolving traditions. Hamlets, villages and settlements mushroomed in and around cities, providing ever-cheaper labor, goods and services to urban residents. These settlements were never seen as legitimate since they were not planned and could not be property audited. Integrating the city in their own terms, the needs of these emerging settlements were largely disregarded, leading to their marginalization. Their illegitimacy, though, is as much a result of conceptual fallacies as anything else—a fallacy that insists on understanding the world of habitats in terms of watertight compartments and believes that villages and cities belong to different planets. In truth, cities and villages have always been much more integrated and mutually dependent than Gandhi acknowledged. Jane Jacobs’s concept of a city-region recognizes that agricultural villages are essentially part of the urban economy they serve (Jacobs 1969, 17). Inversely, the village has always existed within the city’s ethos, fabric and practices. Gandhi’s dream of a dominant countryside was never realized; instead, it was happening, some would say in a nightmarish way, in the dirty, polluted and promiscuous city. Rural migrants were building thousand of industrious shacks with locally available materials wherever they could find space: marshland, junkyards, along railway tracks, on the pavements. Incrementally developing and consolidating, self-reliant and defiant, slums flourished to the point that they are now said to be home to more than half the population of Mumbai and many other cities. Unfortunately, the Indian government never saw slums as striving urban villages, bravely self-developing and worthy of support. Quite on the contrary, to this day they are perceived as shameful marks of underdevelopment, irreconcilable with the country’s aspiration to become a modern and civilized nation. While slum dwellers are dismissed as squatters, slums are perceived as natural enemies of city planning and good governance. Thus, the only possible official response to slums seems to be repression, through erasure or willful indifference. For instance, Dharavi in Mumbai, mistakenly known as the largest slum in Asia, has never been properly retrofitted with water pipes, sewage systems and electrical infrastructure, nor does the municipality treat it as a legitimate part of the city. Instead, its residents and businesses have had their sheltering and livelihoods threatened by “imminent” redevelopment projects for decades. Million Dharavis Planners and politicians have used Dharavi's unplanned, messy, indeed slummy appearance to justify its destruction. Dharavi is typically pictured as a backward locality, an urban parasite preventing Mumbai from becoming a “world-class city.” However, as we argued in a recently published response to the movie Slumdog Millionaire, reality stands in sharp contrast to the way slums are usually represented: Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Well over a million “eyes on the street,” to use Jane Jacobs's phrase, keep Dharavi perhaps safer than most American cities. Yet, its extreme population density doesn't translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. In addition, you won't be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering—Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state— including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city. (Echanove and Srivastava 2009) Even more remarkably, visitors have observed that many aspects of Dharavi are reminiscent of European old town and villages, with their labyrinthine and narrow streets, low-rise and high-density structures, mixed-use spatial arrangements, small shops on the ground floor and living spaces on the upper floors, workshops and lively street activity where pedestrian traffic dominates any other mode of transportation. This is no coincidence. Many neighborhoods around the world share a similar history of incremental development. These are the parts of the city which, though never planned or designed, have acquired a strong identity over time, marked by the evolution and mutation of micro economic and cultural practices. These practices of daily life, to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, shape space and produce context. Space becomes the malleable receptacle of local practices. As practices shape the space they inhabit, they increase its use value. Space becomes not only supportive of, but also conducive to certain uses and practices. This process is at work in these neighborhoods, with different levels of intensity and various degrees of autonomy from the larger context. The relationship between space and practices produces its own temporality, connecting a familiar past with a not so distant future. Incrementally developing neighborhoods can also fall into history, memory or nostalgia when the built environment is artificially preserved long after it ceases to fulfill any function. But more often than not, they evolve in creative ways and acquire new meanings over time, just like SoHo, New York, where galleries, high fashion, luxury retail and stylish lofts have replaced artist studios and squats, which themselves had replaced warehouses and factories. In Dharavi, the spectacle of a neighborhood transforming itself in fast-forward mode captivates the attention of researchers, reporters and audiences around the world. Dharavi is constantly in formation from the day its first inhabitants, who were nomadic fishing tribes, settled perhaps three centuries ago on this auspicious creek at the confluence of the Mithi tributary and the Arabian Sea. In the early twentieth century came Muslim and Tamilian artisans, who set up tanneries to produce leather goods for Bombay's expanding consumer market in the early twentieth century. As the city grew, migrants came from all over India, bringing with them their arts and trades. They have established themselves, improvised, struggled, made roots, built up and moved on. Dharavi is today a major trading hub, central to Mumbai's economy, exporting goods to all over the country and beyond. The Genesis of Cities Habitats such as Dharavi have been generated in response to basic human needs for sheltering and subsistence. According to Jane Jacobs, the foundational principles of urban development are intimately linked to certain forms of livelihood, such as huntinggathering, trading, artisanal production and its scaled-up versions. Historically, the political kingdom was a unit that involved a relatively smaller proportion of its inhabitants living in close proximity to each other - what we would refer to today as urbanized settlements. This population was intertwined in an economy that serviced the ruling establishment and acted as nodes in larger networks of exchange of goods and services. Anthropologists like Anthony Leeds see them as urban systems that encompassed vast territories of land dotted with villages, fields and inhabited forests, all of which were part of the kingdom. They were connected to each other through taxation, interdependence of food, security, and other economic needs.1 All kinds of inhabited space, and in particular agricultural land and forests were regulated and controlled. The act of ruling included the process of administering surveys of populations, controlling their movements, involving people in acts of construction as cheap labor and shaping their livelihoods through economic regulation.2 At the same time, since most people lived outside urbanized centers, the physical aspect of their habitat was not regulated. The ruling administration was mostly concerned with taxation and political security. As a result, villages and townships improvised built-forms in response to their means and activities, often in collective ways, using locally available skills and technologies. The industrial revolution is supposed to have brought in a huge disjuncture in contemporary organization of social life and this is largely represented in terms of a change from rural to urban, with a vast majority of the population physically moving from rural to urban areas. This move reflected a massive crisis of administration in the nineteenth century and saw the evolution of new modes of administration and control of the rural migrants. Modern urban planning emerged as a response to this need, and the ideal of the planned city - to be eventually emulated by everyone - became some kind of a global norm. This ideal posited itself as a counterpoint to rural life. Urban planning was defined along the functional lines dictated by industrialization and the cultural values of modernization. Hardly a scaled up version of the mixed use and improvised village, the master planned city strictly zoned and structured around well-defined activities. It left little space for the grey zones between public and private, and living and working that characterizes unplanned habitats. The artisanal home, a distinctive aspect of village life, was seen as problematic. Homebased manufacture and traditional skills were seen to be outmoded with the factory becoming the legitimate site of production. Trade of goods and services had to be regulated. The presence of a bazaar-based exchange that floated through the economy and was an intrinsic part of village’s exchange networks had to be controlled. The segregation of places of residence, places of work, of leisure and markets were presented as hallmarks of contemporary urban life, necessary for the efficient functioning of cities with their large populations. Failure to control spatial use was seen as a failure of urbanization and planning. 1 2 Anthony Leeds, Cities, Classes and the Social Order, Roger Sanjek Publications, 1994 James Scott, Seeing Like the State, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998 Urban-Rural: The Conceptual Void The government, international organizations, and the real estate industry seem unable to respond to the hundred of thousands of improvised settlements in Indian cities in any other way than clearance and redevelopment. This happens in spite of the fact that the construction of mass housing and factories has never been able to slow down the growth of urban slums. It also disregards the operational logic of many slums where space is used in a much more flexible way, with functions such as living and working constantly overlapping. Even the most enlightened urban plan trying to bring these functions closer together, at most succeeds in reorganizing them in ingenious way, but is strictly unable to merge them operationally. From a planning perspective, any ambiguity in the way space is used is perceived as a potential threat. The unwillingness to recognize self-developing neighborhoods as legitimate alternatives can partly be attributed to a colonial habit of organizing and controlling space, which has evolved into all kinds of planning directives and urban designs. By and large, heroic planning attempts have failed in post-independence Indian cities, which remain desperately—some would say wonderfully—chaotic at all levels. One space that it succeeded in colonizing completely, however, is the space of imagination. The city is perceived as being modern, high-rise and motorized (think New York, Singapore and Shanghai), or slummy, messy and backward. There is no conceptual in-between for a city that is incrementally developing, mixed-use, efficient and convivial. Kisho Kurokawa, a much-revered Japanese architect and proponent of the Metabolist movement, locates this conceptual void in Western conceptions of urban order. According to him: Western culture rests on innumerable binominal oppositions: spirit and flesh; freedom and necessity; good and evil; conservatism and reform; art and science; reason and emotion; mankind and nature; traditional and technology; capitalism and socialism; the individual and the whole… we have scarified much to this precious for the sake of this philosophy of dualism … (Kurokawa 1993, 9) Similarly, when they are understood as opposites, categories such as “city and village,” “urban and rural,” “modern and primitive,” “formal and informal,” and “order and chaos” do become mutually exclusive—with dire consequences for cities, especially in the developing world. Interestingly, the fact that in Japan these categories were never seen as mutually exclusive allowed for a completely different landscape to emerge. According to Kurokawa, in Japanese cities order includes chaos or “noise,” as he calls it in reference to Edgar Morin's theory of noise. This is why Japanese cities are so tolerant to those forms of urbanism that Western notions of planning and urban order would call “irrational,” “messy,” or even “slummy.” Tokyo, says Kurokawa, is an agglomeration of three hundred cities... At first there seem to be no order, but the energy, freedom, and the multiplicity that comes from the parts are there. The creation of this new hierarchy is a process that makes use of spontaneously occurring forces. For this reason, it is probably most accurate to say that Tokyo today ... finds itself set somewhere between true chaos and a new hidden order. (1993, 11) Few other countries have been as accepting of the (apparent) paradox of local selfdevelopment in urban land. Typically, as they expanded their spread and transportation network, Japanese cities have absorbed villages, while allowing them to keep developing in a gradual, incremental manner. In the postwar period in Tokyo, planning was for the most part limited to retrofitting localities with basic infrastructure and transport systems. The government encouraged local self-reliance and did its best to help local actors in their effort to rebuild their neighborhoods. This pattern of development has basically been maintained until today. It explains why Tokyo has one of the best infrastructures in the world, as well as a housing stock of great variety. In most of Tokyo’s neighborhoods one can still find wood and hardware stores selling self-help construction material used by local residents to maintain their houses. This is why, until recently, “the majority of neighborhoods were characterized by flimsy wooden constructions, and slum-type housing dominated many areas” (Hein et al. 2003, 26). Corrugated metal sheets and wood frames are still a fixture in many parts of Tokyo, particularly in neighborhoods traditionally inhabited by merchants and artisans known as Shitamachi, “the lower city.” These parts of the city have much more in common with the slums of Mumbai than many would like to acknowledge. In fact, their human-scale, lowrise, high-density typology, and the way they have managed to preserve a strong economic and social life, with corner-shops, restaurants, bars, public baths, schools, and shrines, tell as much about their history as about the potential of places like Dharavi. The Tool-House More than anywhere else these distant realities converged in the space of the artisan’s home, which according to Japanese urbanist and writer Magoroh Maruyama, unified “the place of work and the familial space, reinforced the solidarity of local residents and maintained close relationships between neighbors” (Hiroshi 1994, 385). It also brought together employers and employees, who all stayed under the same roof. Maruyama deplores the exodus of business owners and landlords from their place of work in Tokyo to remote residential areas, which made them indifferent to the faith of their old neighborhoods. The impact of this incision was most strongly felt in the multipurpose house of the artisan, where most of the goods that circulated in the preindustrial economy were produced. We call this flexible live-work arrangement the tool-house, because the space of the house itself is used as a productive tool in all kind of creative ways. A tool-house emerges when every wall, nook and corner becomes an extension of the tools of the trade of its inhabitant—when the furnace and the cooking hearth exchange roles and when sleeping competes with warehouse space. The tool-house is still alive and kicking in neighborhoods such as Dharavi, and a million others all over Asia. Many will argue that this is because Dharavi is wrapped in a preindustrial time and space. We believe that Dharavi should instead be seen as some type of contemporary postindustrial landscape. After all, this is where the industrial, unionized mill workers were absorbed after the cotton mills started shutting down after the 1980s. What could be mistaken for an expression of backwardness is actually happening at an accelerating pace in first world cities like London, New York and Tokyo. What is the artist’s loft if not a tool-house? Live-work arrangements are making a comeback in rich cities just as they are being castigated in developing cities. Indeed, the mixed-use live and work artisan’s home continues to live many different lives. The tool-house can be a container in Kabul, serving as a store during the day and a shelter for the night; a mud structure used as a covered working and resting space in an Indian village; a shack in a Mexican town housing a rural migrant family and its activities; an internet-based home-office operating from a Osaka flat; a warehouse converted into a recording studio with guest-rooms in Philadelphia; or a luxury condo apartment used as a party space and social venue in Copenhagen. The value of such spaces is maximized by their capacity to fulfill multiple functions with creative arrangements and flexible forms. User-Generated Cities The tool-house is the multishaped, multifunction building block of what we could call “user-generated cities.” Such cities or neighborhoods are typically produced in increments rather than by design, in a piecemeal and decentralized fashion. There is no reason this age-old yet constantly updating urban development process could not be recognized and supported by planners and architects. The production of information about localities, the expression of individual and collective aspirations and visions, decision-making and many aspects of the implementation of urban plans can be done with the involvement of motivated local residents. Fifty-years after Jane Jacobs’ advocacy work in Manhattan, policy-makers and planning departments have yet to acknowledge what local knowledge and expertise can contribute to the planning process. Ignoring local actors comes at a high cost, accompanied as it is by strong oppositions, and more often than not results in inadequate urban development. It is only with a paradigm shift in the way we conceive of cities that we can actually tap into local intelligence and its productive capacity. In an age of “information” in which billions of people are exchanging bits and data across platforms and boundaries, we should no longer rely on the master planner’s map and the one-way powerpoint presentations that pass off for community involvement. Participatory workshops involving local actors, creative people and professionals, along with user-friendly, location-based web tools can be used to harness individual knowledge and collective imaginations, one neighborhood at a time. Grassroots initiatives are not just multiplying all over the world, they are also professionalizing their output like never before, presenting local development strategies that are often much more sophisticated and better informed than what governments are able to produce. Moreover, neighborhood groups are rarely as conservative as they are often portrayed. We repeatedly see resident neighborhood associations articulating their own agendas in proposals that accommodate the interests of the government. Far from fighting for preserving the status quo, most neighborhood groups fight for change they can control. The concepts of citizen involvement and public participation have found their ways to planning departments in many cities around the world. However, their rhetoric rarely translates into innovative practices at the ground level. This is probably because at the end of the day, real estate interests, and not planning departments, dictate the urban landscape. But even then, it may well happen that developers, tired of having their projects delayed and stalled by defiant neighborhood groups, actually turn to participatory practices—in hopes that dealing with local interests at the conception stage of their projects rather than at the implementation stage may save time and money. In Conclusion Urban renewal and redevelopment projects such as those described by Jane Jacobs in the West End of Boston and the West Village in New York City, or those happening today in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, or Dharavi, Mumbai, all follow a familiar pattern of the state supporting increasingly large and global real estate bids on neighborhoods. After all, real estate acquisition and development remains the best way to cool off hot money. The most disturbing part of this process is the fact that the government systematically evokes the messy and makeshift appearance of certain strategically located neighborhoods to justify their redevelopment, even when the proposed structural changes work against the needs and interests of local users. The violence of the redevelopment process is often compensated by tokenistic moves that focus on conserving some heritage symbols or involving a few local representatives in emerging political bodies. In fact, replacing labyrinthine and pedestrian streets packed with small vendors and casual buyers with shopping malls and motorways is not as much an urban makeover as an economic takeover. At stake are the human-scale and organic characters of these neighborhoods, as well as their social, cultural and economic wealth. The first casualty of redevelopment projects are indeed local businesses, social networks, a sense of shared identity, and the ability of these neighborhoods to constantly reinvent themselves. Most of us remember Jane Jacobs’ successful opposition to one of the most powerful builders of all times, Robert Moses. She demonstrated that neighborhoods have the capacity to respond to takeover bids by making the stakes higher through political participation, business association, social cohesion, local skills and knowledge, street presence, collective expression and self-affirmation. Her writing taught us that these are not only forces of resistance, but also developmental impulses that have a long and complex history, from the village to the city and back. References Echanove, Matias and Rahul Srivastava. 2009. “Taking the Slum Out of ‘Slumdog’”, Opinion, New York Times, February 21. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/opinion/21srivastava.html Hein Carola, Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Ishida Yorifusa (eds). 2003. Rebuilding Urban Japan After 1945. New York Palgrave Macmillan. Henderson Garcia, Carol. 2002. Culture and Customs of India. Westport Greenwood Press. Hiroshi, Tanabe. 1994. Les “territories” à Tokyo, in Augustin Berque (ed.) La Maîtrise de la Ville: Urbanité française, urbanite nippone. Paris: Edition de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row. Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Economy of Cities. New York : Random House. Kurokawa Kisho. 1993. New Wave in Japanese Architecture, London: Academy Editions. Berlin: Ernst&Sohn. Nandy, Ashis. 1998. The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.