Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Over a year ago, I had written on Kafila about the (Ir)resistible rise of Arvind Kejriwal,  a phenomenon thoroughly misread from the beginning to this moment, by free radicals and Left devotees of Congress-style politics. Taking the risk of saying ‘I-told-you-so’, some lessons need to be underlined, learnt from the political developments of the last three years. That post said – referring back to the days of the Anna Hazare movement (itself dubbed reactionary, casteist, even RSS-sponsored and fascist, by pundits of all hues) –

But here was the political class  and the intelligentsia from Left to Right taking the protestors to task – asking them to tame their dissent and channel it through ‘proper channels’. Contest elections and let us see how much support you have, they challenged. Anna Hazare stuck to his guns, refusing the bait. Kejriwal however, seems to have decided to call their bluff. And…

by Nathan Mahaffey

ABSTRACT: Understanding the city requires understanding its processes of development. This essay stirs a dialectical exploration between social processes of ‘evolution’ and ‘revolution’.  The objective is to question through which types of processes can the city be shaped by its inhabitants. 

INTRODUCTION

This essay will explore ‘what makes a good city’ and seek to understand the role that informality has to play in the ‘evolution’ rather than ‘revolution’ of the city. Daniel Quinn’s book Beyond Civilization will provide the conceptual framework to analyse relevant literature. This radical, yet simple book takes a broad view of the past failures of civilization, why we are still stuck in the same cycles, and proposes an alternative vision for the future. The use of this book will serve two purposes: first, to connect and compare other critical texts, but also to test the validity of the book itself. The…