[Reader-list] Abstract: Nizamuddin Basti in the Lives of its Children

[Sudeshna Chatterjee]

Nizamuddin Basti in the Lives of its Children
A Socio-Spatial Study of Environmental Child Friendliness in a
Contested Low-Income Delhi Neighborhood. (working title for
presentation)

Sudeshna Chatterjee

Abstract 
The central objective of this empirical study was to understand under
what conditions children come to think of places in their living
environment as "friendly".  A firm believer in the Einsteinian dictum:
"Thinking without the positing of categories and concepts in general
would be as impossible as breathing in vacuum" (Einstein, 1949), I had
developed a theoretical framework in a peer-reviewed paper titled
"Children's Friendship with Place: A Conceptual Inquiry" (Chatterjee
2005). In this paper, I had argued that in order for child-friendly
cities to have any real meaning for children we need to explore the
conceptual possibilities of place friendship in the tradition of
similar studies in place attachment and place identity in childhood
After reviewing the literature on friendship, I developed a framework
for envisioning child-friendly places by deconstructing six essential
conditions of friendship (Doll 1996): mutual affection and personal
regard; shared interests and activities; commitment; loyalty;
self-disclosure and mutual understanding; and horizontality. These
concepts, when translated into environmental terms with the help of
literature from the fields of environment-behavior, environmental
psychology and children's geography, help to define a child-friendly
place from a socio-physical perspective (Chatterjee 2005).

I conducted my fieldwork, in Nizamuddin Basti, a low-income historic
settlement in central New Delhi with a large child population, to
understand how  children develop place friendship. My eclectic
ethnographic strategies included an initial semi-structured interview
with a carefully constructed sample of thirty-one 11 and 12 year old
Muslim children from different forms of families, and backgrounds
(Bihari-, Bengali-, Bangladeshi migrants, older settlers from UP and
Punjab, and some native Nizamuddin villagers). This interview was
designed to get nominations from children about places in their local
area, which allow them to fulfill the dimensions of place friendship.
As there were six dimensions to place friendship that I wanted to
explore, the first six questions probed if there were places in the
children's everyday environment that 1) demonstrated environmental
care and provided space for them to participate in the caring of the
environment, 2) offered opportunities to the child to engage with the
environment on an everyday basis, 3) allowed the child to learn and
gain competence by engaging with the environment, 4) allowed the child
to control the environment in any given time on his/her own terms, 5)
facilitated creation and nurturing of secret places, and 6) allowed
the child to freely explore and express herself/himself in the
environment. I further probed the meaning of each of these
interactions under each category of friendly places, and went on field
trips with children to record their on-site narratives describing
their feelings about places.

Though this is a work in progress with considerable hanging out still
happening every week in the basti, my data suggests that Nizamuddin
basti inspite of being a contested urban settlement that has
accumulated several different negative stereotypes related to poor
Muslims, and environmental degradation typical of Indian slums,
provide a sustainable habitat for poor Muslim families, and a
culturally rich socio-physical environment that children find friendly
at many levels. My presentation at Sarai, will give a flavor of the
findings through a powerpoint presentation, and touch upon the
analysis of two dimensions of friendly places. In my analysis I 
adopted a postmodernist culture studies approach to the study of Delhi
as a child friendly city.