Urban crises as Badiou’s “Event”: possibilities of a new future amidst everyday crises

Keywords: Informality, Violence, Transformation of Commons, Urban Crisis, Event, Badiou
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Informal settlements hidden from bourgeois life in Banglore provide the city with labour wrought cheap by continuous violence, policing and instability of living and working conditions. These settlements built mostly on the peripheries of the city are often sites of political and economic contestations between Municipal bodies, Real Estate and local powerholders. These entities and agents reap profits by gradual transformation of the Commons to Real Estate, using informal settlements to legitimize their claim over land. Simultaneously these settlements mostly inhabited by migrant workers are subject to continuous violence from Municipal Bodies, police and other state apparatuses; and from ecological threats made worse by state neglect. Nevertheless migrant workers continue to create value and keep the spaces alive by their labour amidst squalor living conditions that depreciate their health and well-being, through dialectical resistance facilitated by unions and other civil society allies.

Using qualitative research methods, this paper explores the strategies of coming together of various agents and community structures during times of urban crisis- structural or ecological. An “Event”, drawing from Badiou’s ontology , is a rupture that “interrupts the normal regime of description of knowledge” and through which an eternal truth emerges in a new present. A protest can be called a “weak” event in Badiou’s terms, but it creates possibilities of a new future and praxis. This paper will examine “events” in this light to analyse emergent processes and truths emerging out of various crises in the life of migrant workers.