Speaker
Description
While there are attempts to claim the public space, modern Indian cities continue to be hostile for women. There are myriad limitations imposed on their access to public space, say in the form of active harassment or lack of sanitary toilets (to name a few). Fear and insecurities persist and their ‘right to loiter’ (Phadke 2007) is severely inhibited and discouraged by patriarchal norms, urban planners and policy makers. Women access the city and opportunities associated with the city through sanitised surveilled routes authorised and controlled by familial patriarchal control. The control is often justified by the patriarchal family structures, patronising state and internalised by women themselves as discourse of safety of women in an unsafe city. This leads to significantly different experience of the city among women. Women’s access to the city and its opportunities are limited by a patriarchal disciplining structure governing women’s mobility. Women are allowed to access the city through pre-approved predefined and predictable routes and modes of transport. The perpetual fear and surveillance translates into curfew times, restrictions on mobility or constant tracking of movements. Alternatively, in absence of a direct patriarchal control, the access to the city, its associated opportunities and freedoms are circumscribed by a mental calculation of risks and strategies to safely access the city. This allows for a reconciliation between patriarchal anxieties internalised by women and the desire to be more independent. Interestingly these same strategies could be utilised to subvert patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and labour. The use of GPS enabled apps to track one’s route, time mapping (sharing ETAs with origin and destination parties), trip sharing with friends et cetera appear as strategies women employ to get better control over their own mobility and to ‘safely’ access the city. This paper proposes to study women’s use of GPS enabled apps, trip tracking, time mapping and its impact on women’s relationship with the city. In an ongoing study on understanding women’s mobility patterns in the city of Delhi, we found that a majority of the sample reported sharing their locations with a family member or someone known to them. This proposed paper seeks to delve deeper into this phenomenon: what prompts women to share their locations- who do they share their locations with and how? When do they share their locations? How much of this is voluntary/forced in nature? Does this create a semblance of ‘safety’? Or do they feel stifled, inhibited and surveilled? Is this behaviour mediated by class, caste and residential location? Do technocratic solutions like safety apps and location tracking just create a semblance of safety and leave the structural constraints unaddressed? The paper could offer insights about how women reclaim their agency and control over their mobility.
Biography
Smriti Singh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) and associated with The Urban Research Lab at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology–Delhi (IIITD), India. She has earned her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is a Fulbright-Nehru scholar (2015–2016). Her research focuses on questions of Urban space, community, and identity.
