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

过去二十年来，整个南亚的规划者、决策者以及房地产投机者都在积极致力于将城市重塑为“世界级”城市。然而，这些年来，我们看到了这些努力希望纠正的城市病态的加深；正如世界银行2016年的一份报告所指出的，该地区目前有超过1.3亿人居住在非正式的城市定居点，“其特点是建筑质量差、土地使用权不安全、土地服务不足”。在建设世界级城市的热潮中，穷人不仅被抛在了后面；相反，我们早期的研究表明，参与世界级城市建设计划的被迫流离失所往往加剧了获取城市资源和基础设施服务的问题，特别是对边缘化群体而言。我们还发现，在管理和减轻城市迁移和混乱造成的中断和动荡方面，出现了创新形式的城市实践、政治参与和创造性合作。这些项目通常与社区组织和非政府组织合作，可以产生有利于城市贫困人口的结果。在孟买、拉合尔和科伦坡早期城市住房和基础设施工作的坚实合作基础上，我们将重点关注城市贫困人口获得重要服务（水、交通、通信）的努力，同时关注这些努力与形成城市土地和住房获取模式的动态相互交织的方式。我们的项目将提出这样的问题：在什么条件下，正式和非正式的沟通渠道、个人关系和“偶发劳动”（Elyachar 2005）——通过这些渠道，每天都能进入城市电网——会鼓励有利于穷人的结果？在项目的第一阶段，我们将与当地的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、规划师和政治家，在每个城市开展一系列社区参与活动。每次活动的目标都是为改善服务提供可行的想法。除此之外，我们还增加了强有力的南南合作：我们每年将在科伦坡举办区域研讨会，其优势是巴基斯坦和印度的同事都可以平等地参加，将所有三个地点的项目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.