In Delhi, 2020 was the year of protest. The first part of the year saw agitations against the government’s controversial citizenship initiatives in Shaheen Bagh and other places around the Capital. At the end of the year came another set of protests – which continue – against new farm laws.
These protests have obviously been studied by political scientists and sociologists. But they should also be of interest to those of us who study urbanism. After all, it’s clear that these protests have helped to humanise what scholars are calling “networked cities” – metropolises that are built on the physical networks of fast highways and bullet trains as well as digital networks of high-speed broadband that connect them to other global cities.
In her book The Global City: New York, London and Tokyo, Saskia Sassen’ describes the networked city as a flow of capital and information with the blurring of geographical boundaries between cities. But networked cities more…