{"id":248972,"date":"2026-11-04T13:42:59","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T13:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=248972"},"modified":"2026-11-04T13:42:59","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T13:42:59","slug":"encroachment-and-blight-visualising-the-right-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/encroachment-and-blight-visualising-the-right-to-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Encroachment and Blight: Visualising the Right to Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

If someone were to suddenly drop you in Amsterdam Noord or a new-build project in Toronto or Copenhagen, you might have some difficulty knowing which country you were in. The architecture and activities of the street would be similar: the \u2018universal city\u2019 by design conveys a sense of placelessness.<\/p>\n

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Amsterdam Noord<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We see standardised architecture, chain retail dominating, zoned areas and surveillance networks monitoring every action and square inch of space. The right to \u2018do nothing\u2019 on the street or to indulge in spontaneous acts without \u2018permission\u2019 is seen as loitering or suspicious, as public space is converted into a purely transactional \u2018corporate plaza\u2019.<\/p>\n

In the Global South, we see it too. Shopping malls and steel and glass corporate districts can be seen across India\u2019s cities, but they coexist with streets and lanes that operate on a different logic. Here, stores spill onto the street, and the street is where everything occurs everywhere with physical and social segmentation less apparent.<\/p>\n

The environment is dense and \u2018messy\u2019, but to technocratic master-planners obsessed with smart-city ideology and international capital that demands uniformity, these areas represent backwardness and disorder to be cleared away. But this \u2018messiness\u2019 is where human autonomy and economic self-reliance persist.<\/p>\n

In the messy lane, commerce and the street are one and the same. Trade takes place directly on the street, merging with the public thoroughfare. Price is a live conversation between two human beings (still mostly done with cash). A concrete step serves as a seat, a street corner as a social club and a narrow alley as both a workshop and a transit line. It is an environment that resists segregation and zoning.<\/p>\n

This is not to romanticise such aspects. These streets are not free from state-corporate power or local mafia coercion, but they remain less standardised and less completely enclosed. And we should resist the temptation to frame the \u2018informal economy\u2019 or the street vendor as pushback or a conscious militant staging an explicit act of autonomous resistance to enclosure.<\/p>\n

The vendors, artisans and hawkers seen on the streets of India\u2019s towns and cities are just getting through the day and navigating a system characterised by minimal social safety nets and immense economic pressure. Working on the pavement with a handcart is rarely a deliberate choice.<\/p>\n

However, if we only see alternatives given voice through formal protests or organised political movements, we miss where the real stand against total corporate enclosure actually lives. Although international capital seeks to standardise and commodify every aspect of human interaction, there still exists the relatively unmonitored persistence of the localised physical street.<\/p>\n

True alternatives to a globally flattened world persist in the unglamorous routines and spontaneity of daily existence. Not everything has to resemble an airport departure terminal, with hyper-surveillance and a psychologically manipulated public herded into areas dominated by CCTV and chain retail.<\/p>\n

In recent years, I have been visually documenting these \u2018messy\u2019 spaces by using a cheap handheld mobile phone to capture real-time street scenes. This is a deliberate choice. It challenges the idea that chronicling urban space belongs only to professionals with expensive equipment or knowledge of framing or artistic knowhow when taking photos. Rough and unvarnished they might be, but the images exist to make a point.<\/p>\n

The result is a series of open-access photobooks<\/a> intended as a visual archive that documents human agency, identity, self-reliance and spatial resilience. Whereas the book The Great Flattening<\/em> (and also The Agrarian Imagination<\/em><\/a>, 2025) theorises and \u2018describes\u2019 how enclosure has extended to many aspects of life, these image-based publications attempt to \u2018show\u2019. They are an experiment in visual storytelling, an attempt to see if images can capture how communities maintain their character and cohesion in public spaces that aren\u2019t yet closed off.<\/p>\n

Not yet, at least. Because the push for the total state-corporate fencing off of everyday public spaces is gaining pace everywhere. It occurs under the banner of \u2018development\u2019, which is too often a euphemism for state-corporate imperialism and dispossession. And it feeds into a certain urban bourgeois sentiment that equates orderly architecture (glass facades, flyovers, gentrification, zoning, chain retail, etc.) with \u2018progress\u2019.<\/p>\n

Within this framework, it becomes easy to view informal markets and public spaces as blight and encroachment. That begs the question of encroaching on what? And whose land should it belong to anyway? Ordinary people who occupy such spaces are merely asserting their right to be.<\/p>\n

\u2018Development\u2019 results in a uniform, placeless aesthetic and mode of thought that reduces the rich, localised identity of a city to a blandness. It paves the way for clearance and displacement along with hyper-surveillance and corporate logos to be projected to tell us that we are in a place of \u2018progress\u2019, while we are actually in a space of total enclosure.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the continued existence of the \u2018informal\u2019 stands as proof that a human-scale world for ordinary working people has not been completely paved over to serve the interests of wealth and power.<\/p>\n

Author: Colin Todhunter<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

yogaesoteric
\nNovember 4, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If someone were to suddenly drop you in Amsterdam Noord or a new-build project in Toronto or Copenhagen, you might have some difficulty knowing which country you were in. The architecture and activities of the street would be similar: the \u2018universal city\u2019 by design conveys a sense of placelessness. We see standardised architecture, chain retail […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society-1602-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248976,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248972\/revisions\/248976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}