The Politics of Community-making in New Urban India

The Politics of Community-making in New Urban India PDF Author: Ritanjan Das
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000864340
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. It is based on an ethnographic study in Noida, a city at the eastern fringe of the state of Uttar Pradesh, bordering national capital Delhi. The book demonstrates a flexible planning approach being central to the entrepreneurial turn in India’s post-liberalisation urbanisation, whereby a small-scale industrial township is transformed into a real-estate driven modern city. Its real point of departure, however, is in the argument that this turn can enable a form of illiberal community-making in new cities that are quite different from older metropolises. Exclusivist forms of solidarity and symbolic boundary construction - stemming from the differences across communities as well as their internal heterogeneities - form the crux of this process, which is examined in three distinct but often interspersed socio-spatial forms: planned middle-class residential quarters, ‘urban villages’ and migrant squatter colonies. The book combines radical geographical conceptualisations of social production of space and neoliberal urbanism with sociological and anthropological approaches to urban community-making. It will be of interest to researchers in development studies, sociology, urban studies, as well as readers interested in society and politics of contemporary India/South Asia.

The Politics of Community-making in New Urban India

The Politics of Community-making in New Urban India PDF Author: Ritanjan Das
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000864340
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. It is based on an ethnographic study in Noida, a city at the eastern fringe of the state of Uttar Pradesh, bordering national capital Delhi. The book demonstrates a flexible planning approach being central to the entrepreneurial turn in India’s post-liberalisation urbanisation, whereby a small-scale industrial township is transformed into a real-estate driven modern city. Its real point of departure, however, is in the argument that this turn can enable a form of illiberal community-making in new cities that are quite different from older metropolises. Exclusivist forms of solidarity and symbolic boundary construction - stemming from the differences across communities as well as their internal heterogeneities - form the crux of this process, which is examined in three distinct but often interspersed socio-spatial forms: planned middle-class residential quarters, ‘urban villages’ and migrant squatter colonies. The book combines radical geographical conceptualisations of social production of space and neoliberal urbanism with sociological and anthropological approaches to urban community-making. It will be of interest to researchers in development studies, sociology, urban studies, as well as readers interested in society and politics of contemporary India/South Asia.

The Meaning of the Local

The Meaning of the Local PDF Author: Geert de Neve
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1135392153
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
By zooming in on urban localities in India and by unpacking the 'meaning of the local' for those who live in them, the ten papers in this volume redress a recurrent asymmetry in contemporary debates about globalisation. In much literature, the global is associated with transnationalism, dynamism and activity, and the local with static identities and history. Focusing on a range of locales in India's metropolitan areas and provincial small towns, the contributions move beyond the assertion that space is socially constructed to explore the ways in which social and political relations are themselves spatially and historically contingent. Using detailed ethnography, the authors highlight the vitality of place-making in the lives of urban dwellers and the centrality of a 'politics of place' in the production of power, difference and inequality. The volume illustrates how urban spaces are increasingly interconnected through wider social and spatial processes, while local boundaries and group-based identities are at the same time reconstructed, and often even consolidated, through the use of 'traditional' idioms and localised practices. All contributions relate detailed case studies of everyday activities to a range of contemporary debates that highlight various spatial aspects of cultural identities, economic restructuring and political processes in India. The volume provides an interdisciplinary perspective on urban life in rapidly changing political and economic environments. It offers a contribution to policy-orientated debates on urban livelihoods and urban planning as well as a wealth of ethnographic material for those interested in the spatial dimensions of urban life in India.

The Meaning of the Local

The Meaning of the Local PDF Author: Geert de Neve
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethnology
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description


Housing and Politics in Urban India

Housing and Politics in Urban India PDF Author: Swetha Rao Dhananka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108633811
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Providing adequate housing in an increasingly urbanised world is a major challenge of current times. This book puts together a compelling story based on fine-grained analysis of housing processes, as lived by slum-dwellers and their voice-bearers. It situates the lived experience of claiming adequate housing within informal transactions and negotiations of patronage networks vis-à-vis the formal institutional opportunities and closures of Indian democracy. In doing so, this research extends an innovative array of conceptual and methodological tools to grasp the context in which housing claims succeed and fail. This book contributes by responding to critical areas of social movement scholarship and by displaying community engagements and tactical strategies to bring about transformative change to claim adequate housing and resist co-opting forces for socially sustainable housing futures.

The Right to Be Counted

The Right to Be Counted PDF Author: Sanjeev Routray
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503632148
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.

Urban Poverty, Local Governance and Everyday Politics in Mumbai

Urban Poverty, Local Governance and Everyday Politics in Mumbai PDF Author: Joop de Wit
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131546215X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
This book explores the informal (political) patronage relations between the urban poor and service delivery organisations in Mumbai, India. It examines the conditions of people in the slums and traces the extent to which they are subject to social and political exclusion. Delving into the roles of the slum-based mediators and municipal councillors, it brings out the problems in the functioning of democracy at the ground level, as election candidates target vote banks with freebies and private-sector funding to manage their campaigns. Starting from social justice concerns, this book combines theory and insights from disciplines as diverse as political science, anthropology and policy studies. It provides a comprehensive, multi-level overview of the various actors within local municipal governance and democracy as also consequences for citizenship, urban poverty, gender relations, public services, and neoliberal politics. Lucid and rich in ethnographic data, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and students of social anthropology, urban studies, urban sociology, political science, public policy and governance, as well as practitioners and policymakers.

Participolis

Participolis PDF Author: Karen Coelho
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000084361
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
While participatory development has gained significance in urban planning and policy, it has been explored largely from the perspective of its prescriptive implementation. This book breaks new ground in critically examining the intended and unintended effects of the deployment of citizen participation and public consultation in neoliberal urban governance by the Indian state. The book reveals how emerging formats of participation, as mandatory components of infrastructure projects, public–private partnership proposals and national urban governance policy frameworks, have embedded market-oriented reforms, promoted financialisation of cities, refashioned urban citizenship, privileged certain classes in urban governance at the expense of already marginalised ones, and thereby deepened the fragmentation of urban polities. It also shows how such deployments are rooted in the larger political economy of neoliberal reforms and ascendance of global finance, and how resultant exclusions and fractures in the urban society provoke insurgent mobilisations and subversions. Offering a dialogue between scholars, policy-makers and activists, and drawing upon several case studies of urban development projects across sectors and cities, this volume will be useful for planners, policy-makers, academics, development professionals, social workers and activists, as well as those in urban studies, urban policy/planning, political science, sociology and development studies.

The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India

The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India PDF Author: Nandini Gooptu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521443660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
Nandini Gooptu's magisterial 2001 history of the labouring poor in India represents a tour-de-force.

The Political Economy of the New Urban Development in India

The Political Economy of the New Urban Development in India PDF Author: Anurupa Roy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In the wake of the neoliberal turn in India, urban development is increasingly gaining importance. This is not only because of the significant rise in urban population in recent years but also because urban areas are seen as the main engines of growth. The creation of new urban spaces and the development of the existing ones are deemed as the means towards greater progress of the economy. Therefore, in the current context, the issue of developmental dynamics is not divorced from the urban question. Taking an historical-geographical-materialist approach, I seek to examine the political economy of the new urban development in India. I assert that urban-space making and restructuring processes in India are primarily guided by the necessity for unrestrained accumulation on a global scale mainly through dispossession, intensification of the commodification process and redistribution of surpluses. In this regard, the state-at multiple geographical scales-plays a crucial role in the formation and reproduction of the urban spaces. This, however, is a matter of contestation and is largely conditioned by the nature and course of class struggle. I further argue that accumulation by dispossession is crucial to understanding the city-making politics, however, it is not necessarily characterized by extra-economic coercion, as often claimed in the current literature. In fact, the mechanisms and strategies used for attaining accumulation by dispossession are contingent rather than necessary. Further, in the existing literature, the new middle class in India is presented as the main motivating force for the urban-space (re)making politics. It is also seen as the greatest beneficiary of neoliberal urban politics. I contend that the ascendancy of the new Indian middle class is largely a socio-economic construction that is also politically motivated. I argue that middle class politics too is much more contingent in nature than it is generally considered to be. Thus I call for a more nuanced look at the middle class politics based on spatio-temporal specificities. Additionally, this study asserts that the new urban development is not aimed at the betterment of the poor majority, as often gloriously portrayed in the mainstream arena. I demonstrate that the impacts on the poor working class are socio-spatially marginalizing, thus exacerbating the existing uneven (urban) geographies.

An Urban Politics of Climate Change

An Urban Politics of Climate Change PDF Author: Harriet Bulkeley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317650107
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The confluence of global climate change, growing levels of energy consumption and rapid urbanization has led the international policy community to regard urban responses to climate change as ‘an urgent agenda’ (World Bank 2010). The contribution of cities to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions coupled with concerns about the vulnerability of urban places and communities to the impacts of climate change have led to a relatively recent and rapidly proliferating interest amongst both academic and policy communities in how cities might be able to respond to mitigation and adaptation. Attention has focused on the potential for municipal authorities to develop policy and plans that can address these twin issues, and the challenges of capacity, resource and politics that have been encountered. While this literature has captured some of the essential means through which the urban response to climate change is being forged, is that it has failed to take account of the multiple sites and spaces of climate change response that are emerging in cities ‘off-plan’. An Urban Politics of Climate Change provides the first account of urban responses to climate change that moves beyond the boundary of municipal institutions to critically examine the governing of climate change in the city as a matter of both public and private authority, and to engage with the ways in which this is bound up with the politics and practices of urban infrastructure. The book draws on cases from multiple cities in both developed and emerging economies to providing new insight into the potential and limitations of urban responses to climate change, as well as new conceptual direction for our understanding of the politics of environmental governance.