Navigating the grid in the "world-class city": poverty, gender, and access to services in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka

过去20年来，在整个南亚地区，规划者、政策制定者和房地产投机者一直在积极努力，努力将城市重塑为世界级城市。然而，这些年来，这些努力希望纠正的城市病态正在加深；正如2016年世界银行的一份报告所观察到的那样，该地区目前有超过1.3亿人生活在非正式的城市住区，其特点是建筑质量差，使用权不稳定，地块服务不足。穷人不仅在争先恐后地建设世界级城市的过程中被甩在了后面；相反，我们早先的研究表明，参与世界级城市建设计划的被迫搬迁往往会加剧获得城市资源和基础设施服务的问题，特别是对被边缘化的人来说。我们还发现，在管理和减轻城市拆迁和混乱造成的干扰和动乱方面，出现了城市实践、政治参与和创造性合作的创新形式。这些通常与社区组织和非政府组织合作，可以产生有利于穷人的城市结果。我们将在孟买、拉合尔和科伦坡早先关于城市住房和基础设施的工作的坚实合作基础上，重点关注城市穷人获得重要服务(水、交通、通信)的努力，同时关注这些努力如何与塑造城市土地和住房获取模式的动态相互交织。我们的项目将问：在什么条件下，正式和非正式的沟通渠道、个人联系和“非正式劳动”(Elyachar 2005)--通过这些渠道每天接入城市电网--能够鼓励扶贫成果？在该项目的第一阶段，我们将与当地学术合作伙伴密切合作，但我们也将动员非学术合作伙伴，包括以艺术为基础的活动家和社区团体、规划者和政治家，在每个城市举行一系列社区参与活动。每一次活动的目标将是为改善获得服务的机会创造可行的想法。为此，我们增加了强有力的南南合作：我们将每年在科伦坡举办区域讲习班，其优势是巴基斯坦和印度的同事可以平等进入，将来自这三个地点的项目合作伙伴和利益攸关方聚集在一起，分享他们的最佳想法。

For the past two decades, across South Asia, planners, policy-makers - and property-speculators - have been energetically engaged in efforts to remake cities as 'world class.' Yet these years have seen the deepening of the urban pathologies that such efforts hoped to redress; as a 2016 World Bank report observes, over 130 million people in the region now live in informal urban settlements "characterized by poor construction, insecure tenure and underserviced plots." The poor are not simply left behind in the rush to make the world-class city; rather, our earlier research shows that the forced displacements, that attend world-class citymaking initiatives, often exacerbate problems in accessing urban resources and infrastructural services, particularly for the marginalised. We have also found that, in managing and mitigating the interruptions and upheavals caused by urban removals and dislocations, innovative forms of urban practice, political engagement and creative collaboration have emerged. These, often in partnership with CBOs and NGOs, can lead to pro-poor urban outcomes. Drawing on the strong collaborative foundations in earlier work on urban housing and infrastructures in Mumbai, Lahore and Colombo, we will focus on the efforts of the urban poor to access vital services (water, transport, communications), while attending to the ways in which these efforts intersect with the dynamics that shape patterns of access to urban land and housing. Our project will ask: under what conditions do the formal and informal communicative channels, personal connections, and 'phatic labour' (Elyachar 2005), by which everyday access to urban grids is enacted, encourage pro-poor outcomes? We will work closely with local academic partners in this first phase of the project, but we will also mobilize non-academic partners, including arts-based activists and community groups, planners and politicians, in a series of community engagement events in each city. The goal of each event will be to create workable ideas for improving access to services. To this we add strong South-South collaboration: we will hold regional workshops each year in Colombo, which has the advantage of being equally accessible to Pakistani and Indian colleagues, bringing together project partners and stakeholders from all three sites to share their best ideas.