Walking in the City
Dual compression of space and time is a concept illustrated by Michelle Huang's ”Walking in Between Slums and Skyscrapers”, 2004, in which she discusses several Asian cities. She discusses local and global compression are two forms, transnational corporate overtaking of compression of urban space of the city's prime spaces, pushing the residents into a crushed and cramped spaces. It tends to disorient the urban walker because of the vertigo it places on local residents from the new transnational take-overs of the space. Also there is a time and space compression that occurs. The time is always the same and it is never continuous with a conscious orientation for the person experiencing it to conceptualize the moment in which they are. The time could be in the present past or future. According to Huang, global compression “eliminates our sense of history....,physical or temporal boundaries have to be traversed to serve the purpose of assuring a fast return of profit” (pg.17). The time and space concept is result of the shrinking world where the production of commodities has shortened turnover time and thus shortened spatial barriers and time concept. Dual compression is time and the space that is squeezed together along with the individuals experiencing it. Robert Dodgshon also stated, “By contrast, the time-gains produced by increasing time space compression lead to the exclusion of time savings from particular instances of social process, thus freeing time for use or colonization in other ways” (pg. 609).
In Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria's article, “Ordinary states: Everyday corruption and the politics of space”, Mr. Anjaria companies a peddler in the streets of Mumbai to show him how a outsider can observe the barter and trading practices of the poor (hawking) from the benefit of the families they support in the poor slums of the highly populated city. He states about the slum's characterization, “Mumbai is a city of contrasts. Newspaper accounts of the city are often accompanied by now-cliche´ed photos of shining corporate towers built of plate glass emerging from what looks like a sea of shanties,a juxtaposition that encapsulates a compelling narrative of the city as simultaneously one of immense wealth and crushing poverty, globally scaled aspiration and parochial division”(pg.59). The hawkers make the situation of negotiations tricky in the sense that they are not leaving anytime soon in the political and economic space they occupy. “The problems of hawkers’ mundane spatial practices, therefore, also suggest problems of political philosophy. Just as hawkers’ use of the street might suggest innovations on ideas of urban environments, their diverse relationships with the state might suggest innovations in political form as well”(pg. 61). These citizens that are in the midst of the dual compression, have organized business transactions that are contrary to the flow of the global corporate finance because these systems are the continued local form of the economy based on the hawking activities on the slum dwellers in the this Mega-city.
In Mumbai, There are serve differences effecting it's original residents. In one example, The Multi Plexus that have sprung up in the last twenty years has been a abrupt change in the vision and expression of cultural for India. Adrian Athique's article From Cinema Hall to Multiplex: A Public History, he points out, “the public sphere of Indian cinema continues to represent a site of ongoing contest between the different public's emerging from the shadow of colonialism, the legacies of caste society and the principle of universal franchise” (Pg. 147). This vision is not the place the local residents have seen in their cultural until recently, it is a new form of cultural expression that has been released as a transnational form in which causes a displacement of their original cultural expressions that were on the streets or at most, within a one cinema theater. Is this a welcome transformation or been pressed upon Mumbai's local citizens in the form of Huang's “dual compression”?
Changes made to Mumbai in the form of conduction business as a hawker instead of a suited business man with a formal storefront and the rise of the new multiplexes have been a dual compression in their of form of vertigo for the city walker. Residents are forced to watch from the closely immigrated slum dwellings the business dealing of the corporate world from a less dignified place that is the street peddling. The multiplex attendees are forced into a compression of their own loss of several cultural features they had been accustomed to enjoying in a much smaller, familiar, and local tradition of the outside dance that entertained in years past. Indeed, the dual compression is affecting Mumbai's original inhabitants both economy and culturally.
