A Post by Meenakshi Nair

Cities – arguably constructs of the human mind – are experienced by and in human bodies marked by gender, caste, race, disability, age, weight, class, and religion. These identities intersecting with one another create different bodies such as that of a healthy rich Brahmin woman or a poor Dalit man with a disability. It is these markers that influence the experience of the city by a human body.  

Women – across class, caste, and disability – face exclusion in the public spaces of the city on account of their gender, albeit this inclusion varies with other intersecting aspects of their identity. Filing complaints, going to court, and engaging in consciousness raising is one method of offering resistance to this often violent exclusion. Culture – both ‘high’ culture and ‘popular’ culture – may also be used to interrogate the gendered access to public spaces. This can be seen in online video projects such as Bharatanatyam in the Wild or Girls at Dhabas. 

Yet another way women claim their right to public spaces and record their experiences of these spaces is through the use of modern technology. This use is well-illustrated in the Delhi phase of the ‘Gendering the Smart City’ Project. 

This project began in the Madanpur Khadar Colony in Delhi as a WhatsApp diary project to record and understand the links and journeys between digital and physical spaces of Violence Against Women. It is now a rich co-production of knowledge and action around the smart city, gendered safety, mobility, and everyday life in urban peripheries. The project, funded by King’s College, functions organically. It is structured around developing trust with women participants through semi-structured interviews and mental maps. The project is partnered with Jagori and Safetipin. It envisions the use of bottom-up urband technology to speak back to the smart city from Delhi’s urban peripheries. 

First, WhatsApp diaries were used, and then the project leaders found that the idea of creating a song was very popular with the young women involved in the project. The rap song and music video were envisioned by these young women who perform in it and record narratives of their lives in the peripheries of a city such as Delhi. 

The project is interesting in that it did not use earlier models in which NGO’s parachuted into the locality, ‘delivered’ knowledge from above and then left. Here, the project ensured that the young women spoke themselves, and claimed their own narratives. The use of WhatsApp also allowed the young women to share their experiences in closed and supportive environments, and the participative nature of the music video that came together influenced by the writing projects undertaken by these young women during the course of this project. Through the project, the women assert their claim over city spaces, singing “yeh sheher humara aapka, nahi kisi ke baap ka’. 

This whole project could not have been completed without mobile phones. Participants are avid phone users, and documented every stage of the process through selfies. But phones were essential to the WhatsApp diary method, to share their experiences, to discuss and debate important themes, and to arrange the meetings and workshops. Only one participant did not have a phone, and she invariably missed out on several important conversations and information on WhatsApp. Other participants had to make several trips to her home to keep her informed, and this came with its own challenges of negotiating with her family members about her participation.

Co-production and participation were inherently transformative for all the girls. It made them feel and express solidarity towards one another, it made them feel safe in expressing their feelings, it made them feel as if they could make a difference and most of all they said this was the most ‘fun’ project they have worked on.

The purpose of this project is not to deliver knowledge from a position of power, but for women to develop tools of resistance themselves and to create knowledge about their own cities on their own terms.