Infrastructural futures of urban resilience and subaltern geographies of mobilities: Case of Surat, India

Keywords: Critical Infrastructure, Resilience, Racial capitalism, Subaltern mobility, India
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Urban resilience praxis in southern economies have recast urban ‘informality’ as a strategic arena for mitigating intractable social and ecological risks. An assortment of urban climate interventions
are found to naturalize urban infrastructure as the appropriate site for 'transformation' driven by the role
of transnational urban networks in neoliberal global climate finance market. In this paper, I use a genealogical approach to examine the logics and forces animating the formation and ongoing mutations in the local risk and resilience discourse assemblage vis-a-vis their dialectical influences on the naturalization of critical infrastructure as a site for transformative action. I argue that the infrastructural turn mediated by the discourse assemblage envision the role of 'critical infrastructure’ in constructing future resilient imaginaries. In doing so, resilience imaginaries reconfigure subaltern spatiality, networks and mobilities. Upon naturalization through infrastructure, these reproduce a racialized and inequitable socio-political climate order that delegitimize and thwart resilience capacities of some of the most spatially vulnerable migrant working-class populations in the city. I elaborate the effects of foreclosures on relational autonomy, affects, and aspirations aligned with subaltern lived realities and pathways to subaltern resilient futures building on intra-city comparative observations. Critical traditions of southern urban spatiality and mobility alongside debates on racial capitalism, provide theoretical anchor to my contextually embedded study in the historic industrial city of Surat in Northwest India. My findings allude to alternatives arising from subaltern enclaves amidst ongoing foreclosures, that could potentially rescale and reconfigure the resilience culture in favor of subaltern inclusion and associated mobilities.