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Producing Urban Space

This chapter analyses the efforts to make Dimapur more city-like. Beginning with attempts to hold municipal elections with reserved seats for women in 2017, we navigate the deeply contentious politics around the classification and re-classification of space in the city. As the largest city in a tribal state, Dimapur is an experiment in the production of legible urban space in areas with customary law and constitutional protection. At present the experiment is provoking deep anxieties. Producing legible urban space from the collection of settlements, villages, barracks, commercial zones, ceasefire camps, encroached tracts, and wastelands under various socio-legal regimes is rarely coherent and often chaotic. We argue that the city is a space to challenge and transgress customary law in ways unthinkable at the village level. However, transgression was a catalyst for crisis, a scenario likely to remain constant in urban politics for the conceivable future.