SINHAS Vol 31 No 1 Yohei Takata
Urban Configurations and Street Life: Rethinking Street Children in Kathmandu
Yohei Takata
Abstract
This article examines the lives of street children in Kathmandu by foregrounding the urban-material configurations through which street-based practices become possible and visible. While previous studies have illuminated dimensions such as poverty, risk, and subcultural identity, this article focuses on how children’s lives are shaped through arrangements of circulation, infrastructure, informal authority, and social relations. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted intermittently between 2005 and 2011, the article examines how children engage with streets, bus stations, junkyards (kabāḍ), commercial districts, and informal networks of exchange and support in Kathmandu. It shows how intensified commodity circulation, waste flows, transport rhythms, and informal networks create conditions for earning, mobility, temporary security, and social belonging. At the same time, these arrangements expose children to uneven relations of authority, coercion, and violence. Children learn urban rhythms, reinterpret stigma, mobilize charity, and navigate shifting relations of trust and dependence within the city. By examining these socio-material configurations, the article argues that street life should be understood not as a condition outside urban modernity, but as a situated formation emerging within Kathmandu’s changing material and regulatory landscape.
Keywords: Street children, Kathmandu, urban-material configuration, circulation, infrastructure, informal economy, kabāḍ, visibility
Urban Configurations and Street Life: Rethinking Street Children in Kathmandu
Yohei Takata
Abstract
This article examines the lives of street children in Kathmandu by foregrounding the urban-material configurations through which street-based practices become possible and visible. While previous studies have illuminated dimensions such as poverty, risk, and subcultural identity, this article focuses on how children’s lives are shaped through arrangements of circulation, infrastructure, informal authority, and social relations. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted intermittently between 2005 and 2011, the article examines how children engage with streets, bus stations, junkyards (kabāḍ), commercial districts, and informal networks of exchange and support in Kathmandu. It shows how intensified commodity circulation, waste flows, transport rhythms, and informal networks create conditions for earning, mobility, temporary security, and social belonging. At the same time, these arrangements expose children to uneven relations of authority, coercion, and violence. Children learn urban rhythms, reinterpret stigma, mobilize charity, and navigate shifting relations of trust and dependence within the city. By examining these socio-material configurations, the article argues that street life should be understood not as a condition outside urban modernity, but as a situated formation emerging within Kathmandu’s changing material and regulatory landscape.
Keywords: Street children, Kathmandu, urban-material configuration, circulation, infrastructure, informal economy, kabāḍ, visibility