[Reader-list] Acts of Property

[zainab at xtdnet.nl]

Dear All,
I have been thinking about the series of discussions which we had on the
subject of 'Acts of Leisure'. I have been thinking about acts of
publicness and acts of privateness in a city and relating these to acts of
property. Acts of leisure could be both public and private. But the
question is what is 'public'?
Recently, while in Panchgani at the Initiatives of Change (IC) Center for
a workshop on liberty and society, I realized that in the case of major
institutions and campuses, the first renovation/decoration takes place
through the designing of lavish high gates, usually the black bar and
golden tip styles. In the case of IC, I have been part of this institution
since 1998, but it was only a few years ago that a large and high gate was
constructed and a security post was created around it. I recollected my
first memories of JNU where a friend who is a student in the institution
spoke of how the authorities had spent 5 lakh rupees in the putting up of
the gate. I think of my own building society where the first signs of
'keeping up with the times' was to close the gates at nights and then
gradually at all times in the day. I don't even remember when the security
post was renovated and updated. And I think that the changes in the urban
with respect to built structures are taking place along the lines of
creating lavish and high gates. This makes me wonder whether the act of
property is by itself always an act of exclusion?
I am tempted to conclude, from my recent field visits to Nariman Point,
that the fear of the tresspasser is either "too real" or "too imagined" or
"too created" or all of these. The act of protecting the property, which
includes the owned property as well as the by-lanes and the streets is the
act of ensuring protection from the anonymous trespasser. Among the vast
crowds, who knows who is scheming, who may attack, who may create mischief
or trouble?
I have also been thinking along the thought of whether the urban is only
about the individual or only about the community. While researching on
local trains, I realized that spaces in the urban are also about
encouraging and fostering the sense of urban community along with the idea
of the urban individual (or urban anonymous?). Recently, intercomm systems
were introduced in our building society so that the watchmen below could
phone us and check whether a visitor is truly known to us and hence should
be allowed to the home or just sent away. What was damn funny and at the
same time alarming to me was that I began to use the intercomm to
communicate with my neighbours over the phone. Thus, the intercomm apart
from serving the purpose of making decisions about the known and the
unknown (and hence entry or exclusion), enabled me to avoid face-to-face
contact with my neighbours and communicate with them through sound bytes!
That's all for today.
Cheers,
Zainab



Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes