This insightful volume examines the politics and contestations around urban space in India’s national capital, Delhi. Moving beyond spectacular megaprojects and sites of consumption, this book engages with ordinary space and everyday life. Sites and communities analysed in this volume reveal the processes, relations, and logics through which the city’s grand plans are executed. The contributors argue that urbanization is negotiated and muddled, particularly in the spaces occupied by informal labour, resettled communities, and small-scale investors. The critical analyses in this volume shed light on the disjunctures between planning and ideology, narratives of growth and realities of immobility, and facades of modernity and the spaces and practices produced in its pursuit. The book is organized in four parts – (I) Dis/locating Bodies, (II) Claims at the Urban Frontier, (III) Informalization and Investment, and (IV) Gendered Mobility. The studies report current empirical work from a variety of sites, investigating the dynamics of capital investment, state planning and citizen response in these spaces. These studies, set in ordinary spaces in Delhi, reveal a subliminal disarray of thought and action, stemming from the impetus to make the city attractive to capital, while having to manage marginality and reorganize welfare functions. The volume provides fresh insights into the nature of urban planning and governance in an Indian megacity two decades after the neoliberal shift.
Table of Content
Introduction.- Propertied Ambiguity’: Negotiating the State in a Delhi Resettlement Colony Kavita Ramakrishnan.- Unpacking the ‘’Unauthorized Colony’: Policy, Planning and Everyday Lives Subhadra Banda and Shahana Sheikh.- Local Bodies/Global Cities: Reclaiming Citizenship in Neoliberal Delhi Ursula Rao.- Settling the nomads: A Case of Kathputli Colony Shruti Dubey.- Governing Street Hawkers: Seeing Like a Fragmented Metropolis Government Seth Schindler.- Criminalising Africans in an Urban Village: Race-tinged Moralities and the Depoliticization of Gentrification Persis Taraporevala.- The Middle-class Home as a Site of Work and Struggle Sonal Sharma.- Monuments in the village: Negotiating Memory and Function in Begumpur Narayani Gupta.- Making and Unmaking of Intimacy in the ‘world class’ city: The Case of the Delhi Mohalla Neha Dhole.- The Street: A Revisionist Note from Delhi’s Black Town Ajay Gandhi.- Urban village as Entrepreneurial Space: The Hospitality Niche in Mahipalpur Surajit Chakravarty.- The Shape/ing of Industrial Landscapes in a Large Metropolis: Life and Work in the Industrial Areas of Delhi Sumangala Damodaran.- ‘Special Regime’ and Justice of Exception: The Metro and Property in East Delhi Berenice Bon.- Contested Formality and Incipient Informality in Delhi’s New Suburban Space: A Case Study in Savda Ghevra Resettlement Colony Vilde Ulset and Rolee Aranya.- Bus/bas: The Delhi Gang Rape, City Buses, and the Ghost of Rosa Parks Tara Atluri.- Antinomies of the Post-Socialist ‘Clean’ Delhi Waquar Ahmed.- Filling in for the State: Artist-mediated Consensus-building in Khirkee Aastha Chauhan.
About the author
Surajit Chakravarty, Ph D, is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at ALHOSN University, Abu Dhabi. Surajit holds a Ph D in Policy, Planning and Development (University of Southern California) and a Master’s in Urban Planning (University of Illinois). His research focuses on the politics of urbanization and the production of space. He is particularly interested in themes of informality, civic engagement, housing, and planning for diversity. His ongoing projects are based in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi and Delhi.
Rohit Negi, Ph D, is Assistant Professor of Human Ecology at Ambedkar University Delhi. Rohit has a Ph D in Geography (Ohio State University) and Masters in Urban Planning (University of Illinois), and his research interests span the intersections of capitalism, urbanism and ecology, with regional specialization in Southern Africa and South Asia. Negi’s work has been published in journals including Geoforum, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Economic and Political Weekly, and in popular publications like Himal Southasian, The Hindu and The Tribune.
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