 Welcome everyone once again, let's talk about urban planning and today we talk about how borders boundaries within the cities create inequalities and limit possibilities. And my guest today, Harsh Jactar argues that these borders are often based on colonial modernist ideas that divide the city into categories like formal informal public private. So let's let's check it out. Harsh, welcome to our episode. Hello. So harsh, if I read it well, while the topic of borders in cities has been explored, the specific concept of urban border lands as a space for subaltern agency is a gap in the research so yours focuses on how people living in self built neighborhoods use the spaces between themselves and the formal city to resist inequalities imposed by by a dominant system. So tell us more about this. Yeah. So thanks for first of all inviting me to speak about this topic. So, I just wanted to mention why I was interested in first understanding this, this inequality so when I grew up in, in Western India cities of Western India I see that I saw that there were inequalities within cities that were quite evident. And almost, you know, poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods would sit side by side so there was a very clear divide that separated the cities that I, you know, I've lived in. And it helped me, you know, or guided me to think about borders, really. But what I was interested in, as, you know, as you mentioned, there is a lot of research that has shown that you know top down dominant approaches to urban planning, have a tendency to create borders, and precisely, a lot of scholars have raised the issue of colonial modernity to highlight that it is precise that binary understanding between, you know, for public private vehicular pedestrian secular religious and so on and on is that that logic is what allows or, you know, create some materializes into cities in the form of divisions. And having again, witnessed cities in Western India and, you know, self built neighborhoods. I've noticed also that people exercise their agency to to make their neighborhoods livable. They are not really necessarily, you know, poor marginalized dilapidated housing where everybody's suffering that's not that's not the image that you see when you go and witness self built neighborhoods. So that conundrum that I wanted to resolve or you know understand really as to what is it that people do in the light of the divisionary logics of planning that that come to them from elsewhere from top down. But what is that they do with these borders and how is it that they make life livable right so cities more open and livable. So, well, let's jump into the findings what what the people do. So, so there are again, I mean going back to the literature a bit. There is an, you know, logical response to the top down planning practice in terms of intellectual thinking is that people resist from the bottom up right. So, there's a lot of literature that does show, you know, resistive practices of, of people living in marginalized communities and sell build settlements. So, my research really showed that instead of resisting from the outside, so to say, or in a democratic space so to say, people actually inhabit the border lands that the borders create so any border creates a zone. Around that border that which borderline studies has shown quite well. That that space around the border which allows for, you know, norms from both sides of the border, in this case, private public religious security etc to coexist. Now, what people do is that they inhabit these they make these borderlands their own. And by, by making them their own, they create the creates spaces in the borderlands that are porous that allow for flows from one side of the border into the other. And we have seen a lot of research that shows that shows precisely these kinds of practice at borders between nations, nation states for instance but in this particular research. I show that material artifacts like simple things or mundane things like walls and, and religious structures, you know, small ones that are in the cities are, you know, act like the borderlands that make flows between the, between the two sides of the border is possible. So it is through that, you know, making borders more porous, if you want to call it that people make, you know, the settlements more liveable. So you mentioned these agency from bottom up in your study that people inhabit the borderlands of the zone around the borders and that new flows occur. So what are some, you know, some practical implications from this study like policymakers or for individual choice. What did you say. So, more than individuals that I'll think about what what policymakers and governing institutions right planners can do. Because of the colonial modernist legacy, most planning practices still tend to think through the binary logic of you know what is a public zone and what is a private zone what is the vehicular space and what is the pedestrian state. But given the given the implications of what I what I just mentioned. So thinking through borderlands or using borderlands as a as a logic through which to plan cities is something that planners can take up or policymakers can take up. In other words, policymakers can can actually support borderlands, make borderlands more, more usual in cities, so rather than creating borders create borderlands would be my message to to policymakers. So that's one of the tips to policymakers to us and shifting from policymakers to academia now so what should future research focus on. So, one thing I realized while doing this research and trying to trace some of the binary logics and the borderlands, especially at the, at the nuanced level of, you know, urban borderlands at the level of materiality. I found out that there are many others that need to be still unpacked. So, binaries are all around us, whether it's, you know, east to west or the global south and the global north or men women and so on and so forth right. So that there are, if there are so many binaries and they perpetuate in our cities then there will be so many borderlands to explore. Because, and they will have some sort of materiality in cities, because it is through the materiality of the city that one experiences this binaries and border borders. So I think, in terms of academic academia. There's a lot to explore, both in terms of how what kinds of binaries and borders are being materialized in cities, and what kind of practices subaltern practices or practices from the bottom up that unsettled these, these binaries, and how can we learn from these and translate these lessons from one context to another, so that we create more and more open cities. So I think that would be an agenda for future research. That's perfect. And I would like to follow up on that to know some more about your personal reflections on this because your study, so your work and these new flows that occur in the zones around borders, the spaces, it made me think about possibly and you mentioned this a bit about the limitations of this binary thinking in urban planning or the rich and the poor, the public and the private. This binary thinking should or not perhaps be challenged. And also you just mentioned is this sometimes subtle and unrecognized ways that marginalized groups enact their agency so enact action. But your personal reflections what struck you the most about your study. I would say, I mean, yeah, the thing that struck me the most was was a creativity and resilience that these borderland spaces show, right. And especially in the light of dominant regimes or authoritarian regimes. You know, it's very one, you know, feels that one does not have the agency to change the systems and I think a lot of, a lot of contemporary scholars are thinking in, you know, whether it's climate change or, or other kinds of experiences we are seeing in the world. But I think these borderlands have shown me that creativity of, of, and resilience towards towards dominant structures. So it's that that struck me the most. And precisely the subtle ways. I would say, because one often things that in order to resist dominant regimes, one has to, you know, go on riots or whatever right. But that's not really how necessarily transformation can take place. And that really was a lesson that I learned from this, this research about the subtleness and non is not so much non resistive but more transformative agency that people exercise it through the borderlands. And yeah, there's something to learn from that creativity. If someone just joined our conversation didn't listen to anything that we talked before, and you wanted to give them one or two sentences to wrap up the whole episode. What would it be. Yeah. Well, so it through my research, I focused on material assemblages or materiality at urban borderlands, which, which highlight on the one hand the kinds of binaries. Or inequalities and divisions that are being produced in cities. And on the other hand, I showed that these the borderlands that are that are created around the borders and the materiality within these urban borderlands show that people living in these urban borderlands inhabit those borderlands and unsettle the binaries and divisions. So that would be my summary. Perfect harsh. Thank you very much. Brilliant. Thanks Rodrigo. So for those who are watching this on YouTube, all the resources, all the materials of this conversation the study that just harsh shared the findings you can find right next in the description in the video, along with our Twitter account link to the newsletter, the channels for podcast so that you can follow up on future episodes.