Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Representing Urban Change beyond Gentrification, Apr 2023

This article reads the emerging cinema of the National Capital Region (NCR) of India as a primary archive that documents urban transformation in the rapidly developing area and examines the representation of space within the same. Using three films set in the region – Aurangzeb (Atul Sabharwal 2013), Titli (Kanu Behl 2014) and Gurgaon (Shanker Raman 2016) – the article reads the effects of privatized city-making and the deeply unequal growth reflected within the diagetic place-making of the region and argues that theoretical frameworks like gentrification are not adequate to register the urban transformation in these postcolonial post-liberalization contexts, and that the films themselves serve as primary archives that offer a means to visibilize the unique nature of spatial change that also distort social ties in the region.

My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and ordinary citizenry of ‘the City-State’ where they work from dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila’s novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes the affective and embodied lives of the mining city as a constitutive aspect of urban informality that at once exceeds and clarifies colonial infrastructural remains.

Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) offers an interesting take on urban life after a pandemic and a resultant zombie apocalypse have turned New York City into a ghost town. The dystopian speculative fiction novel intertextually references the literary and media histories of science fiction and horror. Yet, it exceeds their often exclusively White and cis-male focus for a more comprehensive understanding of how the processes of gentrification are gendered and racialized. This contribution argues that Ma’s novel expands the repertoire of storytelling about gentrification through several stylistic and thematic features. For example, the ways that urban experiences are mediated through stories and enmeshed in global capitalist structures of consumerism. Further, the contribution explores the list of gentrification as an essential stylistic feature of urban fiction and the theme of pregnancy and its relevance in the gentrifying city.

This article analyses three novels which employ speculative fictional elements to explore gentrification: Reggie Nadelson’s Londongrad (2009), K. Chess’s Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019) and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020). Although these novels are set in western cities – London and New York – Peacock argues that their speculative conventions reflect a conception of the city as ‘planetary’, as what Hyun Bang Shin describes ‘as unbounded space, understood as being constituted through its relationships, including flows and networks, with other places’. These novels use the trope of alternate worlds partly as metaphor for the clash of different views of authenticity in gentrifying spaces; partly as metaphor for diversity, migration and the alienation of global extraterritoriality; but also partly as a means of decentralizing the western city or to propose multiple, competing centralities at all spatial levels – domestic, neighbourhood, civic and beyond. In so doing they offer, in divergent ways, critiques of and symbolic alternatives to neo-liberal gentrification.