Urban Undesirables: Volume 1

Book excerpt: This book presents urban transition experiences over nearly three decades in Bangalore based on the narratives of the city's street-based sex workers. Sex workers – female, male, and transgender – have been omnipresent in Bangalore's streets for decades. However, despite being blacklisted as 'undesirable' and hazards to the 'ideal public', they have their own unique imaginaries and narratives of the city and its mutations. In mapping out their spatial and social ecosystems and experiences with technology, this book redraws, rewrites, and relooks at a city and its transformations from their perspectives. The analysis of their experience is anchored to concepts around neoliberal urbanism, gender, labour informality, and the politics of technology. The authors take an unconventional journey through their spaces, comrades, and battles to announce and affirm their individuality and agency through their empowerment strategies, and through their struggles to reclaim their spaces and assert their identities as informal workers and legitimate citizens of the city.