Across the Western world, the public realm is being sterilised. 

Benches are segmented or removed to deter resting, space is zoned for corporate retail footfall, cash is phased out in favour of digital payments and surveillance networks try to monitor every square inch. Spontaneity is being engineered away, and public space is being converted into a purely transactional ‘corporate plaza’.  

Step onto an Indian street lane, and you are confronted with an entirely different logic. The environment is dense and ‘messy’, with pavement vendors displaying produce on canvas tarps and prices negotiated face-to-face.  

To technocratic master-planners designing the smart city, this environment represents backwardness and disorder to be cleared away. But this ‘messiness’ is where human autonomy and economic self-reliance persist.  

In The Great Flattening: Enclosure Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power (2026), I trace how global finance capital, technocratic planning and platform monopolies seek to standardise and privatise the commons. This historical process, which began with the enclosure of land, now includes seeds, water, urban space and data.  

The smart city grid is designed around predictability: algorithmic traffic flows, cashless transactions, corporate storefronts and measured consumer throughput. Informal trade and lingering in public space are treated as inefficiencies to be eliminated. Cashless infrastructure and app-based delivery platforms remove the need for human contact.  

We see an architecture of separation whereby glass thresholds, heavy doors, security barriers and private security designed to isolate individuals from one another and from the goods they buy. The un-enclosed street operates on the opposite logic: human presence and integration.  

In the messy lane, commerce and the street are one and the same. Trade takes place directly on the street, merging with the public thoroughfare. Price is a live conversation between two human beings. A concrete step serves as a seat, a street corner as a social club and a narrow alley as both a workshop and a transit line. We see an environment that resists segregation and zoning.  

When documenting these spaces, an immediate temptation arises. We should not force everyday scenes into neat political categories or frame the street vendor as a conscious militant staging an explicit act of autonomous resistance to enclosure. The vendors, artisans and hawkers are not staging a performance against corporatisation of retail or global finance capital. They are just getting through the day and navigating a system characterised by minimal social safety nets and immense economic pressure. Working on the pavement with a handcart is rarely a deliberate choice.  

However, if we only see resistance in formal protests or organised political movements, we miss where the real stand against total corporate enclosure actually lives. Although international capital seeks to quantify and financialise every aspect of human interaction, there is the relatively unmonitored persistence of the physical street, where human life continues to unfold face-to-face and largely beyond the state-corporate grid.  

True alternatives to a globally flattened, digital monoculture persist in the unglamorous routines of daily existence. The vendor operating on the curb is simply occupying physical space and trading directly with another human being. That mundane act represents a zone of life that has not yet been fully financialised or absorbed into the grid.  

Visually documenting these spaces does not require high-end photographic gear or artistic staging. Using accessible, unobtrusive mobile phone technology to capture real-time street scenes is a deliberate methodological choice and it challenges the idea that chronicling urban space belongs only to professionals with expensive equipment.  

The resulting images in the new open-access photobook Common Ground: Visual Notes from the Indian Street are meant to be a visual archive that documents human agency, self-reliance and spatial resilience. Whereas The Great Flattening theorises and ‘describes’, the new book ‘shows’. It attempts to show how communities continue to survive and maintain social cohesion in public spaces that have not yet been fully privatised, enclosed, sanitised and corporatised.  

Their existence alone stands as proof that a human-scale world has not been completely paved over.  

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author’s substack, https://substack.com/@colintodhunter.

Featured image is from the author

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