Zahra Chhapra

This dissertation is dedicated to researching the role of walls and fences in urban neighbourhoods and communities. The practice of enclosing apartment buildings, schools, parks, religious spaces, office buildings or any built and unbuilt piece of land on a local urban level has transformed cities around the globe. Yet, unlike border walls, boundary walls within our cities are rarely critically analyzed, even lesser so in the context of the cities of the global south. Due to the scarcity of discourse on fencing within cities, the narrative of national border walls and gated communities is often borrowed to speak about boundary walls and fencing within neighbourhoods – the narrative which, accuses walls in neighbourhoods of creating a landscape of fear and paranoia.

However, the proliferation of walls within the urban fabric has been rapid, haphazard and personal rather than a planned measure. Walls, fences, and hedges are such a common element of everyday life in cities that their habituation in the cityscape has made them almost invisible. And even though the practice of walling or fencing private or even public property has taken every city by storm, the fabric of each city — the relationships between its actors and the forces at play within the networks of communities, is unique and site-specific. Hence, a nuanced understanding of the social life of walls in cities as temporary or permanent architectural objects and urban artefacts from the point of view of everyday urban practices is essential.

Recent years have seen a growing research interest in urban walls. The multifaceted nature of the walls of our neighbourhoods — of being divisive yet traversable, private yet public, providing security as well as connection has attracted researchers’ interest. The social life of walls within the everyday life of a city is studied for their materiality, territoriality, visibility and use. Yet, there is still so much to uncover about the role of boundary walls within our societies. Each neighbourhood and city bring forward a variety of actors and narratives, that surround its walls.

This pragmatist perspective will follow empirical research methods to follow walls in their natural surroundings and pay close attention to details of events as they unfold in real time and space. It will focus on the scenario and shed light on the many shapes and shades of these wall-like objects and the social, political and economic scenarios in which they are situated. The central questions are:

• What are the walls doing?

• How are walls contributing to the composition of everyday (social) life in cities?

• How do we interact with the walls?

• What are the networks the walls are embedded in?

Addressing these questions will allow the research to foreground the complexities and multiplicities of lived urban realities.

The research will present a cohesive analysis of a crucial yet highly mundane object of the contemporary urban landscape. Networks such as that of walls participating in a security regime — allowing, forbidding and impeding movement along with enabling or disabling visual, social and economic interaction will surface through this research.

The dissertation will, therefore, contribute significantly to our understanding of the social life of walls in our cities. It will contribute to object-oriented philosophy, urban regional sociology, anthropology of practice, Actor-Network Theory research in urban studies and territoriology. It will be relevant to sociologists, urbanists, architects, interested city dwellers and town planning authorities.