Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Bombay, and then Mumbai, as a city has transformed over the years and so has its urban spaces. Kamathipura witnessing one such transformation is situated in the heart of the erstwhile Bombay city. It houses small businesses and migrant laborers but is more known for housing the sex trade of the city. As Kamathipura comes to occupy lucrative real estate in the city, the trade is being pushed to the peripheries of the transforming city. This in turn is resulting in the displacement of the dwellers of Kamathipura to different urban spaces within Mumbai and within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. The space of sex trade is becoming mobile and lived elsewhere from the traditional red light areas. Keeping the study in the background of the mobility of the sex trade, this paper draws upon how the trade creates space within the city. Taking the theoretical gaze of Lefebvre concerning the production of space in everyday life, the study analyses how the sex trade is moving and its production is taking place which is recreating the social for the sex trade in the peripheral part of Mumbai. It sees how the transformation of the space for the trade changes the gaze with which the space is created, lived over, imagined, and then again reanalysed for its expression and existence.