Women’s Issues in Transportation: Summary of the 4th International Conference, Volume 1: Conference Overview and Plenary Papers (2011)

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50 Gender, Poverty, and Transportation in the Developing World Ananya Roy, City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley The start of the 21st century is marked by strik-ing contrasts. until the recent financial crisis, many countries of the world were experiencing brisk economic growth. This global material prosperity was not confined to the countries of the industrialized world—what is often known as the developed world. Indeed, emerging economies such as India and China have harnessed the benefits of globalization and have captured significant shares of the world economy. It is thus that Thomas Friedman (2005), the well-known analyst of globalization, declared that the “world is flat” and that it is a “level playing-field” of economic competition where old geographical separations and historical divisions are irrelevant—one where Banga- lore, India, can compete neck and neck with Silicon val- ley, California. This world, as imagined by Friedman, is one of mobile entrepreneurs, instantaneous flows of capital and innovations, and unprecedented time-space compression enabled by new technologies of informa- tion and transportation. It is an interconnected world, but more important, it is a world where such connec- tions have engendered the democratization of economic opportunity. Such optimism is only slightly amended in Friedman’s (2008) most recent text, which notes that the world is flat but that it is also hot and crowded. In sharp contrast to Friedman’s celebratory nar- rative of globalization is the sheer fact of widespread and persistent global poverty. The statistics have now become common sense: of a world population of 7 bil- lion people, 1.3 billion live under conditions of extreme poverty, earning less than $1.25 a day. Such figures are a shorthand for what is in fact a complex configuration of deprivation and vulnerability. viewed from the perspec- tive of the “bottom billion,” the world is constituted of steep hierarchies, exclusive enclaves, and unbridgeable distances and borders. It is a world where there may be mobility, but where such mobility is often forced, keep- ing the poor on the move as refugees, migrants, and the homeless. In short, the world is not flat. In this paper, I take a closer look at a world marked by persistent poverty and inequality. I am particularly interested in the gendered nature of vulnerability and deprivation. I am equally interested in how such vulner- ability is closely connected with issues of “spatial disad- vantage.” I borrow this term from the latest report of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (2008), which is based in england. Indeed, spatial disadvantage—whether man- ifested in the form of forced migration and displacement or in the form of limited access to transportation—is a key feature of poverty. The relationship between gender, poverty, and spatial disadvantage lies at the heart of this paper. MillenniuM develoPMent goals: integrating gender The world’s poor are disproportionately concentrated in the countries of the developing world. They are dis- proportionately concentrated in rural areas. They bear a disproportionately high burden of risk and exposure, thereby suffering during moments of crisis, be it a natu- ral disaster or a financial crisis. The world’s poor are also disproportionately women. While sex-disaggregated sta-

51GenDeR, PoveRTY, AnD TRAnSPoRTATIon In THe DeveloPInG WoRlD tistics are hard to come by, an oft-quoted figure is that 70% of the world’s extreme poor are women, a claim first asserted at the Fourth united nations Conference on Women in 1995 (Chant 2008, p. 166). It is not sur- prising, then, that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ratified in 2000 by the member countries of the united nations, have highlighted the status of women as a central component of human development. MDG 3 explicitly seeks to “promote gender equality and empower women.” MDG 5 seeks to “improve maternal health.” In addition to these women-focused goals, the other MDGs also emphasize the gendered dimensions of poverty and inequality. Thus, MDG 1, which seeks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, has recently added a new target of achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all, especially women and children. The MDGs can be viewed as a global social contract. They make poverty visible and make the task of poverty alleviation urgent and central to international develop- ment and global partnerships. However, the achievement of the MDGs now faces significant obstacles. The 2008 MDG report, recently released by the united nations, makes note of swelling ranks of the world’s poor. A perfect storm of rising food prices, climate change and environmental vulnerability, and the financial crisis with cutbacks in aid now stands to threaten the gains made in poverty alleviation in the early years of the 21st cen- tury. For example, the 2008 MDG report estimates that higher food prices will push nearly 100 million people deeper into poverty, with much of this increase taking place in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, already the regions with the largest numbers of people living in extreme poverty (united nations 2008, p. 6). At the same time, the report estimates that overseas development assistance will continue to drop, reversing commitments made in 2005 and earlier (united nations 2008, p. 44). Indeed, as various editorials have noted, the world’s rich countries, gripped by a financial crisis, are “failing the world’s poor” (New York Times, September 23, 2008). Some of the MDG targets that are therefore threatened are the achievement of gender parity in primary and sec- ondary school enrollment, reductions in maternal mor- tality, and improved sanitation and living conditions for slum dwellers (united nations 2008, p. 4). Many of these relate to women in poverty. Indeed, the introduc- tion to the 2008 MDG report makes a strong statement about this matter: ensuring gender equality and empowering women in all respects—desirable objectives in themselves— are required to combat poverty, hunger and disease and to ensure sustainable development. The lim- ited progress in empowering women and achiev- ing gender equality is a pervasive shortcoming that extends beyond the goal itself. Relative neglect of, and de facto bias against, women and girls con- tinues to prevail in most countries. As an indis- pensable starting point for women’s betterment in later life, all countries that failed to achieve gender parity in primary and secondary enrolment by the target year of 2005 should make a renewed effort to do so as soon as possible. Improved support for women’s self-employment, and rights to land and other assets, are key to countries’ economic devel- opment. Above all, however, achieving gender equality requires that women have an equal role with men in decision-making at all levels, from the home to the pinnacles of economic and political power. (united nations 2008, p. 5) It is a powerful statement, one that is echoed in a recent united nations Development Fund for Women (unIFeM) “Progress of the World’s Women” report titled Who Answers to Women? Gender and Account- ability (unIFeM 2008). The report notes shortfalls in the achievements of women-focused MDGs, such as the reduction of maternal mortality, but also argues more broadly that “gender inequality is a major factor in hold- ing back achievement of the MDGs” (unIFeM 2008, p. 14). one example is that of access to water, a tar- get of MDG 7. The unIFeM report reveals the deeply gendered dimension of the water target, noting that in most poor communities around the world, “women carry the buckets” (unIFeM 2008, p. 36). Indeed, the 2008 MDG report shows that in 71% of poor house- holds, women and girls collect and carry water (united nations 2008, p. 42). The unIFeM report highlights the disabling effects of this conjuncture of gendered labor and service deprivation: Research in sub-Saharan Africa suggests that women spend some 40 billion hours a year collect- ing water—the equivalent of a year’s worth of labor by the entire workforce in France. Where water is more readily available, men increasingly share in the responsibility of managing household water supplies. This makes an investment in improved water also an investment in freeing women’s time. (unIFeM 2008, p. 37) of course, the MDGs are not the only way in which we can track the gendered dimensions of poverty, but they are “the expression of a global aspiration” and “a key element of accountability systems” with “clear, time-bound targets” that make possible tracking, mea- surement, and monitoring (unIFeM 2008, p. 116). It is therefore worth using the MDGs to analyze not only the nexus of gender and poverty, but also that of an additional nexus: that of gender, poverty, and spatial

52 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 disadvantage. In the water example, spatial disadvan- tage, or the lack of access to water, also manifests itself as a crushing time-use burden, one borne primarily by women. Transportation, as a connective infrastructure, makes evident such issues of space and time. I now turn to the role of transportation in spatial disadvantage and time-use burdens, structural patterns that are key fea- tures of the nexus of gender and poverty. Whither transPortation? The MDGs are surprisingly silent on the matter of trans- portation. Although Goal 7 pays attention to infrastruc- tural deficits, such as access to safe water and basic sanitation, and seeks to improve the lives of slum dwell- ers, there is little mention of transportation in the imple- mentation targets. I believe this is a serious gap and one that hampers the achievement of the MDGs, and espe- cially the efforts to tackle the gendered dimensions of poverty (see also Riverson et al. 2006, p. 153). There are two ways in which transportation matters at this nexus of gender and poverty. First, it is an infra- structure of mobility, one that is inevitably implicated in human development goals, be it the achievement of universal primary school enrollment or reductions in maternal mortality or access to full and productive employment. For example, an often-cited World Bank case study from Morocco found that girls’ school atten- dance increased by more than 40% after a new road was put in (Peters 2001). Second, transportation is a collective good. The political economy of its provision, that is, whether it is privatized or whether it is publicly provided, gives an important indication of the welfare entitlements of the poor. Such themes are central to the latest World Devel- opment Report recently released by the World Bank. Titled Reshaping Economic Geography, the 2009 World Development Report focuses on geographic disadvan- tage. It presents as the urgent development challenge three intersecting geographies, “an intersecting 3 billion: a billion slum dwellers in the developing world’s cities, a billion people in fragile lagging areas within countries, a billion at the bottom of the global hierarchy of nations” (World Bank 2009, p. 5). Rather than make the case for the geographic dispersal of economic activities, the report argues for economic concentration, declaring that “the world is not flat” (World Bank 2009, p. 9). It also argues, however, that such forms of economic concen- tration must be accompanied by investments in “connec- tive infrastructure.” In a press release, the World Bank (2008) states, “Throughout history, mobility has helped people escape the tyranny of poor geography or poor gov- ernance. The report sees this as part of a vital process of economic integration, since mobile people and products form the cornerstone of inclusive, sustainable globaliza- tion.” Indeed, it is such mobility across a broad range of geographic scales that makes possible the report’s insis- tence that economic concentration and the convergence of living standards can be combined: “Prosperity will not come to every place at once, but no place should remain mired in poverty” (World Bank 2009, p. 20). While the World Development Report’s argument about “economic concentration” may be controversial, it is worth taking away the important point that trans- portation is a key type of “connective infrastructure.” It is thus that researchers have emphasized the linkages between gender, mobility, and health, for example, in relation to maternal mortality. As emphasized by the unIFeM 2008 report, the “most off-track of all MDGs” is that concerned with maternal health: “Globally, over half a million women every year die during pregnancy or childbirth, and over 90% of these largely preventable deaths occur in developing countries” (unIFeM 2008). Between 1990 and 2005, maternal deaths decreased at a rate of less than 0.4% per year, far short of the 5.5% annual reduction targeted by the MDGs (unIFeM 2008, p. 126). Spatial disadvantage once again plays an important role in such deaths, greatly reducing women’s access to medical care and greatly increasing the risk of maternal mortality. Thus, the important work of Marga- ret Grieco highlights the role of transportation as a key factor in maternal deaths (see Porter 2008). Many trans- portation networks (for example, east Africa’s motorcy- cle boda-boda taxi services), mostly operated by young men, are poorly equipped to deal with obstetric care. A new project in Kenya, funded by the united Kingdom’s Department for International Development, thus seeks to rework these motorbike ambulances with padded side- cars in which a patient can lie down, safely strapped in, and which allow a nurse or midwife to travel behind the driver in an emergency (Mobility & Health n.d.). Similar experiments are afoot in Southern Sudan (Martell 2009). The challenge is that each motorcycle with sidecar costs $6,000, a steep price in resource-constrained environ- ments (Raube, personal communication). Such interventions speak to the complexity of the gen- der, poverty, and transportation nexus. As Peters (2001, p. 7) notes, there is a “new core consensus that ‘roads are not enough.’” In rural Africa, only about 10% of trans- port activity is regional travel; the overwhelming major- ity of trips take place locally, on village-level tracks, trails, and paths, and on foot. Much of this is the work of women. Thus, Malmberg-Calvo concludes that “the most common means of transport in Africa are the legs, heads and backs of African women” (in Porter 2001, p. 8). This texture of mobility means that transportation planning has to involve much more than the building of roads. It has to remake local transportation networks such as the boda-bodas, thereby reversing the deprioriti-

53GenDeR, PoveRTY, AnD TRAnSPoRTATIon In THe DeveloPInG WoRlD zation of certain transportation activities such as obstet- ric care. It also has to understand the gendered division of labor in households and communities. For example, in rural Africa, the starting point has to be that “women account for over 65 percent of household time and effort spend on transport” (Peters 2001, p. 8) and that much of this transport quite literally takes place through the bodies of poor women. Implicated in this starting point is a set of gendered meanings and practices. As Porter (2008, p. 287) notes, “head loading and child carrying are embodied skills widely expected of poorer women, in particular, and imbued with social meanings such that a woman may carry 63 kg of fuel wood (with a baby on her back; this an actual case) but find no contradic- tion in the fact that she is considered—and may con- sider herself—too weak to operate a push-truck.” For transportation to be a “connective infrastructure” its planning and provision has to confront such gendered meanings and practices. These in turn are embedded in broader structures of power. Here it is worth taking a short detour through the feminist literature on gender, poverty, and power. froM “WoMen” to “gender” A common way in which the nexus between gender and poverty is addressed is through the concept of the “femi- nization of poverty.” Initially used to indicate high lev- els of poverty among women-headed households in the united States, the term is now more generally used to suggest a gender gap in income, opportunity, and assets. Indeed, Buvinic (1997) declared women in poverty to be a “global underclass.” She argued that women were not only income poor but also experienced a range of vulnerabilities and burdens, and that these were espe- cially exacerbated in women-headed households. Chant (2008) agrees that gendered poverty is much more than income poverty but also notes that women should not be viewed as a homogeneous mass. Indeed, there are sharp class differences among women, just as there are between women and men. The term “feminization of poverty,” though provocative, thus requires some amendment. In my work, I have found two other concepts to be much more useful. The first is the “feminization of liveli- hood.” In its broadest use, the term signals the gender order of global labor regimes. For example, Standing (1999) makes note of how globalization proceeds through the incorporation of large numbers of women into formal and informal labor. It is in this sense that ehrenreich and Hochschild (2002) have designated a “Global Woman,” referring to the maids, nannies, and sex workers—the laboring bodies—through which the globalization of ser- vices is constituted. of course, the feminization of work means more than simply increasing numbers of women workers. It also indicates the feminization or downgrad- ing of work itself. My research on Calcutta, India, shows how the deindustrialization of a once vibrant industrial region has been accompanied by the disappearance of for- mal work and the rapid growth of informal work (Roy 2003). At the bottom of the economy, these disposable and flexible jobs are increasingly held by women, who have emerged as the primary wage earners in poor house- holds. As is the case in many other parts of the developing world, poor urban women are present in large numbers in the labor force, and yet they are concentrated in the infor- mal segments of the labor market. Indeed, such a femini- zation of livelihood shows that the issue at hand is not so much poor women, but rather how gender is an analytic category that allows us to understand how certain social groups come to be concentrated in devalued and margin- alized segments of the economy. The second concept is the “feminization of responsi- bility and obligation.” In their recent work, Brickell and Chant (2010) note that Women’s disproportionate share of the “altruistic burden” within low-income households appears to be increasing rather than declining. For example, rising female labor force participation in most countries of the Global South does not seem to have replaced the centrality of domesticity or childcare in women’s lives, or to have granted them extra rights and privileges, but instead simply involved them in an “ever-expanding portfolio of maternal obligations.” Such “altruistic burdens” take place not only within households but also in communities. Feminist theorists have argued that the “new Poverty Agenda” of the 1990s has turned poor women into an “instrument” of development (Jackson 1996). By this they mean that var- ious development interventions, from health programs to environmental management initiatives, rely on the work—often unpaid work—of women. The inclusion of poor women in such programs is of course welcome. As Molyneux (2006, p. 432) argues, it is “global feminism” that made women’s poverty a visible and urgent part of the new poverty agenda. In the 1990s, various united nations summits, such as the Cairo Conference on Pop- ulation and the Beijing Conference on Women, created arenas for the agendas and activism of thousands of non- governmental organizations (nGos), advocacy groups, and activists affiliated with the field. Indeed, as Rankin (2001) argues, the current mainstream development interest in women would not have been possible without the decades of organizing and institution-building by the Women in Development movement. The issue at stake, however, is how poor women are integrated into antipoverty and development programs.

54 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 Does their inclusion reinforce or dismantle gender inequalities? Does it lessen or increase the altruistic bur- den of women? For example, various poverty programs, such as oportunidades, Mexico’s highly praised cash transfer program, position motherhood as key to their success (Molyneux 2006, p. 432). The program pivots on the idea of “co-responsibility,” making mothers “pri- marily responsible for securing the program’s outcomes” (Molyneux 2006, p. 434). Molyneux (2006, p. 437) rightly asks if this is “female altruism at the service of the state”? I have termed such trends a “feminization of policy,” indicating the ways in which development oper- ates through women-oriented policies that serve to main- tain traditional gender roles of social reproduction. Such policies can deepen the “feminization of responsibility and obligation,” often creating a third shift of voluntary, unpaid labor for women (Roy 2002). Such policies can also open up a space of negotiation and even empowerment for women. This seems to be the case in Bangladesh. one of the poorest countries in the world, Bangladesh has, in recent years, witnessed sig- nificant improvements in human development. A 2008 World Bank report titled Whispers to Voices: Gender and Social Transformation in Bangladesh notes the halving of fertility rates, the closing of the gender gap in infant mortality, and higher enrollment of girls in secondary schools than boys. Such achievements stand in sharp contrast to Bangladesh’s giant neighbor, India, which has enjoyed brisk rates of economic growth but has also seen increases in poverty and inequality. This so-called Bangladesh paradox—strides in human devel- opment in a “cultural context widely believed to be repressive to women” (Das 2008, p. 3)—is partly attrib- uted to a unique set of nGos in Bangladesh that pro- vide microcredit to poor women. The World Bank report characterizes the effects of these programs thus: “not only did women learn to save and get access to credit but the credit groups created a sense of solidarity that allowed for other services, such as family planning, to be delivered through them. Women’s awareness in many other spheres was enhanced through these collectives as they began to access other opportunities, including train- ing and self-employment” (Das 2008, p. 5). These micro- credit programs do not lessen the burdens of feminized obligation, but they perhaps transform women’s voice and role within households and communities. The complexities and contradictions of such findings indicate that there is no simple and fixed formula by which we can designate the nexus of gender and pov- erty. At work in each case is what may be understood as a “space of vulnerability” (Watts and Bohle 1993). Building on the work of Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Watts and Bohle (1993, p. 44) designate this space of vulnerability as shaped by three processes: a distribution of entitlements that allow a command over commodities, the larger canvas of rights through which entitlements are defined and fought over, and the structural proper- ties of the political economy that precipitates entitlement crises. Such spaces of vulnerability are shaped by, and produce, gender. Such spaces are more than metaphori- cal spaces; they are also real geographies. The seminal work of Hanson and Pratt (1995) indicates how spaces of vulnerability are also spaces of containment, restric- tive geographies of home and work that reproduce gen- dered divisions of labor and opportunity. once again, transportation is a “connective infrastructure,” one that can disrupt or consolidate this vulnerability. In the next sections of this paper, I explore the real urban geogra- phies that are entangled with spaces of vulnerability, with special attention to the case of Indian cities. case study 1: coMMute against hunger I first became interested in the nexus of gender, pov- erty, and transportation while conducting research in the city of Calcutta, India, in 1996 and 1997. My proj- ect examined structures of rural–urban poverty, track- ing the survival strategies through which poor migrants found a foothold in the city. As rural landless households migrated to the city, they made a fragile living as domes- tic servants and day laborers and squatted in peripheral spaces—alongside railway tracks and canals and in the interstices of agricultural land at the eastern metropoli- tan edge. I also discovered another, more “footloose” condition (Breman 2003): the daily commuting of poor women from villages to the city on the crowded local trains. This was a daily commute against hunger and rural deprivation. Dubbed the “automatic washing machines,” these women were the laboring bodies that made possible everyday life in the city. The commuter women are a poignant example of what I have earlier described as the “feminization of livelihood.” In a context of high male unemployment, these women are the primary wage-earners in their rural households. Yet, they are concentrated in “feminized occupations” such as informal vending and domestic service. Their routines of work are grueling. For exam- ple, these domestic servants are paid not on a monthly basis, but often on a piece-rate basis: for every bucket of clothes washed, the number of rooms cleaned, and so forth. These are the sweatshops of urban services. The trends captured by my research are borne out in recent macrostudies. In 2004, the state of West Bengal (of which Calcutta is the capital), in collaboration with the united nations Development Program, launched its first Human Development Report. The report documents that in the past decade, economic growth in West Bengal has gained momentum. It shows, however, that employment growth has not kept pace with income growth or population

55GenDeR, PoveRTY, AnD TRAnSPoRTATIon In THe DeveloPInG WoRlD growth. More striking, in West Bengal, the “pattern of job creation has shifted towards more casual, marginal, part-time, and insecure contracts or self-employment” (Government of West Bengal, 2004, p. 89). It seems that West Bengal is heading toward a postindustrial pattern where employment in the formal sector will be available only to a small techno-professional class and the rest of the economy will be made up of part-time, flexible, low-paid service jobs. The report thus concludes that the informal sector in urban West Bengal is most likely between 56% and 62% of the workforce (Government of West Bengal 2004, p. 110). Such trends are not unique to Calcutta. Indeed, they have important connections with emerging global trends. Most striking is a body of work that traces the formation of a “new urban marginality,” particularly in Western europe and the Americas. During the 1970s, research- ers were optimistic, arguing that the urban poor were integrated into the labor markets, social life, and politi- cal systems of the city; now they are making the case for the “reality of marginality” (Perlman 2003). Wacquant’s work (1996, 1999, 2007), for example, documents the emergence of an “advanced marginality” that is linked to the “territorial stigmatization” faced by residents of marginalized spaces—the ghetto, the banlieue, the favela. The concept of “territorial stigmatization” once again echoes the idea of “spatial disadvantage.” Such research also shows how forms of territorial stigmatization are produced by, and in turn produce, poor access to jobs. Indeed, researchers are documenting the steady disap- pearance of full-time, stable jobs in many economies of the world, including those of north America and West- ern europe. These forms of unemployment are worsened by cutbacks in welfare services that came into effect on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s and 1990s. In the developing world—for example, Brazil—while there have been state interventions to improve living condi- tions in slums and squatter settlements, researchers show that such programs are minor palliatives in the face of persistent territorial stigmatization. The communities of the urban poor are now overwhelmed by violence: the violence of state repression, the symbolic violence of stigma and discrimination, and the material violence of poverty and unemployment (Perlman 2003; Roberts 2004). In short, territorial stigmatization is no longer an anomaly; rather it is a structural feature of societies in the developed and developing world. In City Requiem, Calcutta (Roy 2003), I trace simi- lar structures of “advanced marginality,” though there has been little subsequent work on this issue in the con- text of India. As Breman (2003, p. 4354), points out, the migrants and commuters whose lives are depicted in City Requiem, Calcutta, “have left the village but whether they have arrived at the city is a debatable issue . . . they are kept in a footloose condition on the outskirts of the metropolis.” He calls this a “footloose condition” to indicate the ways in which these groups float between city and countryside but are unable to gain access to shelter, services, and jobs. They are mobile, but it is a mobility that indicates great vulnerability rather than advantage. Indeed, this “footloose condition” is also an example of “territorial stigmatization”—namely, there is no place in the formal city for the poor. For the women commuters, the local trains are cru- cial. They rely on this daily commuting to support their rural families. Yet, on the trains, they also contest and critique the conditions of work and home. For example, they present their husbands as bekar, a word that means both unemployed and useless: “We work all day long and they stay at home.” In contrast, commuter women define themselves as androgynous, simultaneously par- ticipating in male and female realms: “Amra purush ebong meye [we are both men and women], earning for the household like a man and taking care of the house like a woman.” It is important that these women put forward these critiques on the local trains, in the midst of long commutes that are typically associated with men. Another striking aspect of these commuter women is their daily engagement in political action. every day, thou- sands of poor women travel ticketless on the trains to and from Calcutta and are militant in their refusal to buy tickets. Although male ticketless commuters are at times arrested by ticket checkers, female commuters are aware that they can use gendered techniques to ward off harassment by male ticket checkers. They therefore crowd into the “Men not Allowed” compartments of local trains. Such com- partments are common in many parts of the developing world and are meant to provide a safe space for women. In India, these compartments are most often used by middle- class women, but in this case they are commonly used by the poorest women. The railway authorities have tried to deal with the problem by hiring female ticket checkers, but the women commuters have been extremely aggressive in their responses. Here are some of them: • “Let them arrest us all. There isn’t enough space in the hold for all of us.” • “When she came to fine me, I said, take off your coat and give it to me so that I’ll have your job. Then only will I be able to afford the fine.” • “You want to arrest me? First, get my children from the village. We’ll all stay in your jail and you can feed us.” especially significant is the ability of commuter women to articulate and press claims vis-à-vis the state, defining ticketless travel as an entitlement of citizenship. Their most common statement is this: “We vote and therefore why should we have to pay for what we cannot afford?” The statement is a powerful one, making the case that as

56 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 voting citizens, poor women are entitled to various state protections, including subsidized transportation. At Calcutta’s rural–urban interface, ticketless travel remains a distinctive practice of poor women. Male com- muters from similarly poor households have a very dif- ferent response to the issue of ticket checking. not only are male commuters eager to maintain the impression of being law-abiding travelers, but they also devise elabo- rate mechanisms to avoid ticket checkers when they can- not afford to buy tickets, such as traveling on late-night trains. While poor women mobilize in rowdy groups on the local trains, poor men travel alone. They are thus much more likely to be detained by ticket checkers and much less able to contest such arrest. It is also difficult for a railway administration to be perceived as conduct- ing harsh crackdowns on poor women, especially those whose labor is much needed by the entire city. I am convinced that the ability of commuter women to resist, critique, and challenge has to do with the expe- rience of commuting, of being together with women who are strangers from strange villages but who are intimate in that the conditions of their lives are agonizingly simi- lar. Commuter women form a collectivity in sites where they gather, such as waiting points on platforms and on trains. They travel on the trains for at least an hour each way each day. The tangible experience of traveling on the overflowing trains has a distinct texture—a sense not only of one’s own body but also that of other bodies, jostling against one’s own, usurping space. This means that the space of the trains is distinct from that of home, work, and even political community. The appropriation of the “Men not Allowed” spaces by commuter women points to how they redefine the very meaning of public space and the public sphere. They do so with a sense of entitlement and belonging. of course there are important limits to such politics. These women remain trapped in feminized work, espe- cially the back-breaking labor of domestic service. As more and more poor women turn to the city for live- lihood, the competition for jobs becomes even more severe. older commuters complain about the influx of young girls and women willing to accept lower and lower wages. Indeed, despite this daily mobility, poor women are unable to ensure socioeconomic mobility for their households. Their daily commute simply guaran- tees basic survival. The persistence of poverty through the persistence of feminized livelihoods is amply evident. In fact, the emergence of this sort of commuting in the past 25 years is a sign of economic crisis in the Calcutta metropolitan region. This footloose condition, the con- stant movement, is thus an expression of stasis rather than progress. The daily commute is at once a new and unanticipated public sphere as well as a desperate com- mute against hunger by those who remain on the mar- gins of the city. case study 2: Making Peace With the World-class city In India, the turn of the century has been marked by the violent expansion of the frontier of urbanization, making way and making space for the new Indian urban middle class through the smashing of the homes and livelihoods of the rural–urban poor in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Calcutta. These new forms of urban- ism seek to remake Indian cities as “world-class” cities, those that are globally competitive with other Asian suc- cesses, such as Shanghai, Singapore, and Dubai. With this in mind, in Calcutta, the government has sought to displace peasants and sharecroppers from agricultural land to accommodate special economic zones, foreign investment, and gated suburban developments. Furious protests have ensued, in some cases blocking some of these plans and in other cases proving futile. In Mum- bai, such evictions were starkly evident in the winter of 2004–2005. Acting on a bold report by the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the city put into motion “vision Mumbai.” A cornerstone of this vision is a world-class, slum-free city, promoted by an “nGo” of the elite, Bombay First. In a matter of weeks, govern- ment authorities had demolished several slums, render- ing 300,000 people homeless. The demolitions came to be known as the “Indian tsunami.” The urban poor of Mumbai were quite literally being erased from the face of the world-class city. vijay Patil, the municipality officer who led the demolitions, stated that it was time to turn Mumbai into the “next Shanghai” and that to do so, “we want to put the fear of the consequences of migration into these people. We have to restrain them from coming to Mumbai” (Biswas 2005). “How can you ask people to stop coming to Mumbai? This is a democracy,” noted urban analyst Kalpana Sharma (Biswas 2005). A par- ticularly striking characteristic of the vision Mumbai demolitions is that they carried neither the promise nor pretense of resettlement and rehabilitation. Indeed, the united nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, Miloon Kothari, sharply criticized Mumbai at the united nations Commission on Human Rights, noting that the city had effectively criminalized poverty and violated all expectations of humane resettlement (Khan 2005). This brutal vision of the world-class city was contested by the national Alliance of Peoples Movements (nAPM). Since the vision Mumbai plan had sought to remake Mumbai in the image of Shanghai, the nAPM framed the “Shang- haification of Mumbai” as primarily an issue of rights: whether the urban–rural poor have a “right over urban space” (Patkar and Athialy 2005): “In Mumbai, 60 per cent live in the slums. Shouldn’t they have a right over 60 per cent of the land in Mumbai?” But it is a question that has been cast aside as the demo- litions and evictions continue apace. The latest “world-

57GenDeR, PoveRTY, AnD TRAnSPoRTATIon In THe DeveloPInG WoRlD class” development is in the very heart of Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum. Featured in the film, Slumdog Millionaire, Dharavi is a “a million-dollar economic miracle provid- ing food to Mumbai and exporting crafts and manufac- tured goods to places as far away as Sweden” (echanove and Srivastava 2009). It is also a particularly important urban “asset” (Tutton 2009) at the intersection of the city’s infrastructural connections. Mukesh Mehta, the architect who is leading the redevelopment plan, argues that Dharavi could be India’s “Canary Wharf” (Tutton 2009). Today, 19 consortiums from around the world are vying to claim and redevelop the “only vast tract of land left that can be made available for fresh con- struction activities” at the heart of the city (Singh 2007). Where then will the hundreds of thousands of the work- ing poor currently housed in Dharavi live? How will they survive their forced mobility, their footloose condition? What will be the connective infrastructure that binds them to the city? not surprisingly, the redevelopment of Dharavi faces protests. As Dharavi lies at the intersec- tion of Mumbai’s infrastructural connections, so its slum dwellers have organized marches that utilize these urban arteries. Two of Mumbai’s most famous activists, Sheela Patel and Jockin Arputham write, “The march reminded the government that the inhabitants of Dharavi could easily block all the roads and train tracks that are close to Dharavi, and this would virtually suspend the flow of north-south traffic in the city. . . . they could have caused chaos with traffic, but the organizers chose not to do so” (Patel and Arputham 2008). How long will they choose not to do so? For how long will the urban poor make peace with and make space for the world- class city? These are pressing questions in Indian cities and in many cities of the Global South. In the case of Mumbai, such questions lead us once again to the nexus of gender, poverty, and transporta- tion. The 2004–2005 mass evictions came as a surprise because since 1987, Mumbai’s most prominent pro-poor nGo, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), has pioneered a shift away from demolitions to dialogue. Working with federations of the poor, SPARC articulates a strategy of community-led resettlement and rehabilitation. Most famously, in 2001, SPARC brokered the resettlement and rehabilitation of nearly 18,000 families (approximately 60,000 people) living along Mumbai’s railway tracks on behalf of the World Bank–funded Mumbai urban Transport Project (MuTP). SPARC saw the MuTP case as setting a new precedent for urban governance in Mumbai, one charac- terized by voluntary demolitions and speedy resettlement (Patel, D’Cruz, and Burra 2002). The MuTP project also led SPARC to bid for World Bank tenders, from the design of low-cost resettlement housing and community toilets to the preparation of Resettlement Action Plans and baseline socioeconomic surveys (SPARC n.d.a). SPARC’s approach, which has been celebrated as an example of “deep democracy” (Appadurai 2002) seeks to shift the locus of urban planning to the grassroots, spe- cifically to the urban poor. Thus, a core philosophy of SPARC is self-enumeration. Starting with the path-break- ing We the Invisible report (1985), SPARC has made it possible for pavement dwellers, slum dwellers, and squat- ters to count, categorize, and map their own communities. Indeed, SPARC’s motto is “Knowledge is Power, When in Doubt Count” (unpublished annual report, 2004–2005). SPARC not only promotes knowledge creation in the poor communities of Mumbai, but also facilitates transnational exchanges of such knowledge, for example, through inter- national networks such as Slum–Shack Dwellers Inter- national (SDI), so that the squatters of India can be in conversation with the squatters of South Africa. SPARC writes that such exchanges “enable low-income people to develop their own understanding of their social and eco- nomic context, not just on a microlevel but via exchange in regional and global arenas” (Patel, Bolnick, and Mitlin 2001). Indeed, SPARC must be lauded for having created a new model of pro-poor urban planning. Yet, such a model also demands a more careful and critical look. Central to SPARC’s strategy is the idea that the urban poor must make way for urban development, that they are somehow in the way of the world-class city. For example, in a recent essay on the MuTP “voluntary” evictions, Patel and Bartlett (2009, pp. 3–4) explain the strategy as follows. Millions of people in Mumbai’s narrow island con- fines depend on the north–south railways to reach their places of work each day. The tracks are the city’s lifeline, but service had become overcrowded and slow. A critical problem was the sheer number of people living close to the tracks. Wherever shacks were within 30 feet, trains were required to slow down to 5 kilometers per hour, adding to the congestion of the entire system. When Indian Rail- ways and the Government of Maharashtra embarked on long-planned improvements, these 18,000 households, with support from SPARC, planned and managed their own resettlement, avoiding the turmoil and impover- ishment that so commonly result from forced displace- ment. As cities grow and new or improved infrastructure becomes necessary, some displacement inevitably occurs, but it is rarely a success for all involved. This resettle- ment was successful by any standard—for the railways, state and local governments, the World Bank, millions of commuters, and the railway dwellers themselves. For SPARC, such a strategy is pragmatic rather than ideological; however, the organization also argues that such a strategy emerges from the central role of women in their urban communities. Indeed, SPARC documents root the philosophy of community-led resettlement and negotiated development in the actions and demands of poor women.

58 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 The Federation was used to the strategies of the rights-based approach—vocal and public opposition on the streets and pressure for legal reform. In the 1990s, as the women leaders in Mahila Milan gained in con- fidence, they began to challenge the way in which they were being used by the male leadership. In 1985, when the city threatened to demolish the pavement dwellings, all nGos and youth groups wanted to fight street battles to defend the rights of pavement dwellers to reside on the pavements of Bombay. SPARC, the support nGo, asked women in the Byculla area, who were living on pave- ments, and members of Mahila Milan what they wanted to do. The women said, “We don’t want to fight and we don’t want to stay on the pavements either! Go and speak to the municipality and to the state government and see if you can explain to them our situation” (Mitlin and Patel 2005). In this way, SPARC has made poor women central actors in Mumbai and “trustees of resources within their communities” (Burra, Patel, and Kerr 2003, p. 32). D’Cruz (n.d.) notes how the efforts of these women began a model for slums all around Mumbai and eventu- ally those in other cities in India: These practices have become the rituals that feder- ations across many cities undertake, and they form the basis of a discussion between informal settle- ments and cities. The formula is simple and power- ful. The state provides land at subsidized costs, the Municipal Corporation provides off-site infrastruc- ture like it does to all its citizens, and communities design and manage their settlements spearheaded by the women in the settlements, who having built their capacity to manage savings, create a database of residents, and supervise construction, undertake these activities. To assert that women are the “core of the politics of patience” (Appadurai 2002, p. 34) also places an altruis- tic burden on women. various SPARC documents make note of the “essential qualities” of women (SPARC n.d.b) and of “women as nurturers of their families” (Patel and Bartlett 2009, p. 5). Involving women, SPARC argues, ensures that processes are sustainable, equitable, and col- lective. Such an approach, however, overlooks the social construction of gendered practices and meanings. What SPARC interprets as women’s essential qualities can be understood as what feminist theorists have analyzed as a “feminization of obligation,” in which women take on the additional responsibilities of community orga- nizing and development (Brickell and Chant 2010). The emphasis on women’s essential qualities also obscures what I believe is a core ingredient of the SPARC model: that successful community-led resettlement and rehabili- tation was engendered not so much by the spontaneous actions of poor women as it was mandated by World Bank guidelines. These guidelines themselves were devel- oped by the World Bank to respond to harsh critiques by social movements. Such guidelines are ironically lacking in the developments initiated by the Indian government; it is thus that the vision Mumbai evictions had little in the way of resettlement or rehabilitation. SPARC’s fram- ing of itself as a solitary David facing the “three Goli- aths” of “the state government, the railways board and the World Bank” (Patel and Sharma 1998, p. 149) is thus a mischaracterization. Instead, World Bank guide- lines, however faulty, can be seen to constitute a political economy that facilitates entitlements, including those by poor women. none of this of course changes the fundamental reality of Mumbai’s urban political economy: that the making of the world-class city squeezes the poor out of their homes and livelihoods. SPARC’s gendered pragmatism is unable to tackle this logic; it must make peace with it. As the urban poor get pushed to more remote edges of the city, however, as they are kept footloose and “dis-placed,” so it must be asked how they can be connected to the urban fabric. Such an inquiry is crucial, for as Anand and Tiwari (2006, p. 64) demonstrate in the case of Delhi, the relo- cation of slum dwellers to the outskirts of the city “has severed the shelter–transport–livelihood links of the poor people residing in these slums.” Similar findings are pre- sented for Mumbai by Baker et al. (2005, p. 46), who note that poor households rely more on walking than other households (63% of poor households versus 44% of all commuter households) and that thus, the poor who live in the peripheries are more isolated than the poor in cen- tral Mumbai. Anand and Tiwari (2006, p. 65) note that poor women in particular experience significant transport deprivations. Their study confirms many of the gendered dimensions of women’s limited mobility: their poverty of resources and time, their high concentration in informal and home-based production and service sectors, and the high burden of unpaid reproductive labor. In a finding that echoes that of Hanson and Pratt (1995), albeit in a very different setting, they note that women look for work at shorter distances from home (Anand and Tiwari 2006, p. 78). They also depend on slower and cheaper modes of transportation. These forms of spatial entrapment are exacerbated, the authors argue, through forced evictions that push women to the peripheries of cities and further restrict their geographies of opportunity. conclusion: transPortation Justice, transnational analysis In this paper, by exploring the nexus of gender, poverty, and transportation, I have argued that the world is not flat and that the struggle to create a “connective infra-

59GenDeR, PoveRTY, AnD TRAnSPoRTATIon In THe DeveloPInG WoRlD structure” must take into account “spaces of vulner- ability.” I have also argued that gender, as an analytic category, allows us to better understand the divisions of labor, hierarchies of resource access, and politics of meaning that shape society and space. For example, a gendered lens makes visible the structures of decision making that in turn shape connective infrastructure. The 2008 unIFeM report asks a sharp question: “Who answers to women?” The report highlights the signifi- cance of representation and accountability, noting the absence of women in many decision-making and agenda- setting venues. Such issues are also of pressing concern in transportation planning. In adopting a gendered analysis, I have also sought to provide a global overview, drawing attention to trends such as the feminization of livelihood and the altruistic burden. Yet, a cautionary note is in order. My case stud- ies come primarily from India. The nexus of gender, pov- erty, and transportation is quite different in remote rural Africa or in highly urbanized Bogotá than in Mumbai or Calcutta. Surely such contexts have little in common with the transportation issues of north America. Yet, I hope there are lessons to be drawn that cut across the inevitable diversity of socioeconomic and political con- ditions. Such lessons are united by a broader theme of “transportation justice,” an aspiration that I believe is transnational and cross-cultural. In the north American context, “transportation jus- tice” has emerged as an important concept. It makes pos- sible a “social audit” of transportation policies, revealing enduring deficits. It is a term that makes visible the bur- dens carried by low-income communities of color and thus calls for transportation policies that can mitigate such social inequities. It is a dream that evokes a long his- tory of organizing around transportation, one that con- nects access to transportation to a broader struggle for environmental justice, civil rights, and inclusive cities. The issue of transportation justice is particularly urgent in the cities of the developing world. It is here that much of the urban growth of the new century will take place. This rapid urbanization will unfold in con- texts of great poverty and inequality. Will transportation policies mitigate, deepen, or neglect such stratifications? The evictions in cities such as Mumbai indicate a diffi- cult dilemma for the urban poor: that the poor can only have a fragile and insecure existence in the heart of the city; regimes of shelter may be more secure in the periph- ery, but these are also sites of isolation poorly served by affordable transportation networks (Baker et al. 2005). While some cities in the Global South have sought to expand their rail and bus networks, it remains to be seen whether such circuits of transportation will serve the urban poor, those who constitute the “bottom billion.” Indeed, Gilbert’s (2008) recent analysis of the much celebrated TransMilenio project in Bogotá, Colombia, indicates that this system primarily serves middle-income users. While there are many elements of the Trans- Milenio system that help the poor, such as fixed fares (so that the poor who live in the outskirts and travel long distances are subsidized by the fares of middle-class users who make short journeys), TransMilenio fares remain higher than those on traditional buses (Gilbert 2008, pp. 49–50). Gilbert estimates that with recent fare increases, 20 return journeys a month cost 12.9% of the minimum wage in Bogotá. Such figures are borne out in other con- texts. Baker et al.’s (2005, pp. 30–34) study of poverty and transportation in Mumbai demonstrates that The out-of-pocket cost of rail and bus constitute[s] a much higher fraction of income for the poor than for the non-poor, and that this also explains the less frequent use of these modes by the poor. . . . The results are striking: for the poorest households whose main earner commutes by train, transpor- tation expenditures are 17% of income; when the main earner commutes by bus they are over 19% of income. . . . The share of transport-related expenses . . . is highest among the poorest households. . . . It remains approximately constant at 10% of income for the rest of the income categories. Indeed, the poor pay disproportionately more for transportation—as well as for water, housing, utilities, and health care—than other urban citizens. This is as true in north America as it is India. In the developing world, such burdens will only increase as the urban poor are pushed to the peripheries of cities through evictions and displacements. The examples from the developing world that I have provided also indicate that more is at stake in trans- portation justice than access to transportation. equally important is access to jobs and shelter. The cruel trade- off in Mumbai between decent and secure shelter on the peripheries and a reasonable commute with access to jobs makes a mockery of transportation justice. Simi- larly, the footloose condition of poor commuter women in Calcutta maintains a state of feminized poverty. Such issues are no longer “Third World” issues; they are also relevant to the north American context, where persistent unemployment and underemployment are now struc- tural features of the economy. It must be asked: are we entering an economic phase where full-time, stable jobs with benefits are the exception rather than the rule? If so, what type of connective infrastructure would be needed for increasingly fragmented, flexible, part-time, informal labor markets? The spatial disadvantage that was once associated with spaces of poverty such as the ghetto may in fact be a more generalized condition. linda McDow- ell’s (1991, p. 408) provocative phrase is highly relevant here: “We are all becoming women workers now.”

60 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 The struggle for transportation justice may also be marked by contradictions and dilemmas. As a conclud- ing example, let me return to the case of India, and spe- cifically the Calcutta metropolitan region. It is here that a few years ago the famed Indian corporation, Tata, broke ground on their eagerly awaited nanocar fac- tory. The nanocar itself can be interpreted as a symbol of transportation justice, a cheap car that is meant to dramatically increase the access of low-income groups to automobility in the world’s largest democracy. The factory was plagued by controversy, however. It was located on land that had been confiscated from poor peasants, sharecroppers, and squatters. While the local government, ironically led by the Communist Party of India, had used its power of eminent domain to secure such land, the displacement of the poor became a light- ning rod for organized political opposition. Soon, a pow- erful social movement emerged, drawing attention to the plight of the displaced poor, those who would not be able to participate in the benefits of the nanocar fac- tory or the nanocar itself. By 2008, the Tata Corpo- ration had to abandon the nanocar factory, relocating its assembly line to another part of India. The political landscape of the Calcutta metropolitan region was also decisively altered, and the Communist Party of India suffered severe defeats in several subsequent elections. In leaving Calcutta, Ratan Tata, the head of the Tata Corporation, framed the situation as one where politics and hostility had overcome modern infrastructure and industrial growth. Indeed, there were new protests, this time by those who had hoped to have jobs in the nano- car factory, some who had even exchanged their farm land for this dream of industrial jobs. While this is an Indian story, the issues are not unique to India. This case demonstrates the complexities of trans- portation justice and raises the difficult question, “justice for whom?” Transportation justice for the extreme poor who are constantly pushed to the peripheries of metro- politan regions to make way for urban development? Transportation justice for those who have been unable until now to participate in automobility and for whom a cheap car greatly expands geographies of opportunity? These are the dilemmas of spatial disadvantage that are evident in many contexts from los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro and that demand our attention. Indeed, the world is not flat. acknoWledgMents The author thanks Susan Hanson and Marty Wachs for their encouragement to take on this topic and for their useful suggestions and comments. Special thanks is also owed to Maryvonne Plessis-Fraissard for a review of the paper. 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