Abstract
As part of Delhi’s urban redevelopment aimed at creating a ‘global city’, new public transport infrastructure is being built. The Metro rail network, in particular, has become iconic of what local authorities and developers refer to as Delhi’s ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘world class’ city status. To explore the possibilities and challenges of this new form of mobility within the context of Delhi’s spatial transformation, this chapter presents findings from a qualitative study analyzing the movement across the city of a group of young people from diverse regional and socioeconomic backgrounds. For many, the Metro emerged not only as a means of transport, but also as a stage from which to consider and experience the city differently; it became a space for the improvised performance of identity and of boundaries of difference and exclusion. Interacting fields of power in the city are embedded in the disciplining scripts that impact on the possibilities of these performances, and on the relationships among passengers as well as between passengers and those in control of the Metro. These relationships also affect the negotiation of space based on young people’s understandings of place, self, and collective identities. To navigate the Metro, and the habituated social scripts travelling within and around it, required the creative deployment of everyday competencies that also enabled the management of the unfamiliarity and inequality that mobility can generate.
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© 2013 Melissa Butcher
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Butcher, M. (2013). Cultures of Commuting: The Mobile Negotiation of Space and Subjectivity on Delhi’s Metro. In: Hopkins, D.J., Solga, K. (eds) Performance and the Global City. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367853_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367853_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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