315 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 The Field of Struggle, the Of ice, and the Flat: Protest and Aspiration in a Mumbai SlumFlat Michael McQuarrie, Naresh Fernandes, and Cassim Shepard T his article recounts a struggle over the demolition of Goli- bar, a slum in Mumbai. Such struggles are not uncommon in contemporary India. Urban space is being reorganized across the country, both to meet the needs of economic growth and to take advantage of rapidly growing real estate values. The struggle in Golibar situates global capital and state actors in opposition to slum dwellers who occupy land that has suddenly become extremely valuable. The Slum Rehabilitation Act of the state of Maharashtra provides Mumbaikars with better tools than other Indian slum dwellers have to make their voices heard in urban redevelopment. In contrast, for example, Delhi slum dwellers are often simply evicted violently. But the case is not simply interesting as an example of such struggles. Instead, we are interested in the case because it represents a chal- lenge to the way we think about cities and the struggles that take place in them. Today urbanists think about cities not as integrated wholes but as agglomerations of balkanized communities, economies, and ways of life. Among these, the poor are often thought to be characterized by narrow materialistic concerns with few aspirations for the city as a whole. The case of Golibar challenges this thinking and suggests that slum dwell- ers are potential agents for realizing a universalist, liberal, and egalitarian city, an ethos that rests on an aspiration for inclusion in the Global City, not simple economic well-being. It is often assumed that the expanding middle and profes- sional classes will be the agents for realizing such an integrative and cosmopoli- Public Culture 25:2 DOI 10.1215/08992363-2020629 Copyright 2013 by Duke University Press ESSAY All translations in the text are by the authors. PC252_11McQuarrie_1PP_sh.indd 315 2/12/13 10:21 AM