Mutable Aspirations and Uncertain Futures: Everyday life and The Politics of Urgency in Kathmandu

This dissertation interrogates the right to the city as a category of analysis with recourse to an account of extreme marginality. As a starting premise, it seeks inspiration from Kristin Ross’ (1987) take on everyday life as a site of dominant relations of power on the one hand, and an incubator of utopian possibilities on the other. To this end, the dissertation probes three key questions. The first question asks: what are the conditions of possibility enabling the “slum dwellers” (sukumbasi in Nepali) in Kathmandu, Nepal, to make claims for the right to the city? I document the rituals of everyday life and the capacity to make claims that are organized through a metaphorical framework of a “house with three pillars." The second question broaches the issue of how claims for a right to the city come up against governmental programs seeking to secure norms of private property, environmental sustainability, and elite aesthetics. It asks: How does the threat of violence forge sukumbasi political subjectivity and inform renewed strategies of inhabitance? The third question investigates what implications these strategies have for diminishing, or modifying, the right to the city project? The last two questions prompt us to locate the practices of the poor within the context of a “politics of urgency” – an ad hoc creative and counterintuitive “non-movement” forged in the crucible of crisis, in which the organized ritual of everyday life is disrupted and stretched in new and uncertain directions. It is under these conditions that the demand for the right to the city loses its aspirational spirit on the one hand, while ushering in an evolving politics of possibility, on the other. In considering the politics and contingencies of the right to the city, we are presented with a stark understanding of the possibilities and limits of the political aspirations of the poor. The dissertation draws on ethnographic research of “the slum” in Kathmandu, and aims to combine Postcolonial Urbanism, Planning Theory and Critical Urban Studies to constructively probe the role of urban everyday life in troubling the political contours of the right to the city project.Ph.D