A A A
Change Text Size

Review of Urban Affairs

Urban Multiplicities

Governing India’s Megacities
Vol - XLVIII No. 13, March 30, 2013 | Ashima Sood

A recent two-day international workshop on the "Governance of Megacity Regions in India" in Mumbai revealed the multiple conceptions and contestations that drive metropolitan growth in India and around the world. Though cities globally face similar competitive pressures in an era of footloose capital flows, there were few readymade models of metropolitan governance on offer. Instead the international experience suggests that democratic processes matter as much as getting institutions right. Although questions of sustainability and resilience remained an intriguing but underexplored theme in the workshop, the increasing urgency of environmental governance agendas for India's megacity regions emerged as a key area for future research and policy.

(Un)Settling the City

Analysing Displacement in Delhi from 1990 to 2007
Vol - XLVIII No. 13, March 30, 2013 | Gautam Bhan and Swathi Shivanand

The experience of displacement - of single and multiple evictions and resultant resettlement or homelessness - has defined the process of inhabitation for a vast majority of the poor in Delhi. Analyses suggest that at least 218 evictions have occurred between 1990 and 2007 in the capital, covering at least 60,000 households. Using analytical and geospatial data on the evictions that took place in this period, this paper seeks to answer some key questions and argues in support of policies that favour in situ upgrading over resettlement. The political challenges to this are discussed, particularly in the light of findings that evictions occur with similar intensity regardless of which political party is in power.

Protest, Politics, and the Middle Class in Varanasi

Vol - XLVIII No. 13, March 30, 2013 | Jolie M F Wood

Looking at public protests in Varanasi, this paper focuses on associations representing four middle-class occupational groups - traders, lawyers, teachers, and doctors. It finds that they perceive the state to be unresponsive to formal, contained means of making demands, and see disruptive action as the quickest means to force it to deliver on its promise of good governance. The contentiousness is often highly politicised - bound up with political ambitions and rivalries, electoral expectations, and patronage relationships with political figures. There is also a strong element of assumed class privilege in the outrage that they bring to the street.

Revisiting the 74th Constitutional Amendment for Better Metropolitan Governance

Vol - XLVIII No. 13, March 30, 2013 | K C Sivaramakrishnan

Indian policymakers have been slow in responding to changing metropolitan forms and have largely visualised urbanisation as city expansion. As a result, metropolitan regions, which are complex entities with multiple municipal and non-municipal institutional arrangements, have become mere creatures of state governments with neither the necessary strategic flexibility nor political legitimacy. In part, this is because the 74th constitutional amendment of 1993 has failed to visualise the dynamics of large complex urban formations. This paper suggests both a need to confront this blind spot in the 74th constitutional amendment for long-term durable solutions and to creatively work through available legislative and institutional arrangements in the short to medium term.

Revitalising Economies of Disassembly

Informal Recyclers, Development Experts and E-Waste Reforms in Bangalore
Vol - XLVIII No. 13, March 30, 2013 | Rajyashree N Reddy

In the last decade, reforms introduced by the Indo-German-Swiss e-Waste Initiative were meant to modernise and revitalise Bangalore's informal e-waste recycling sector. While the reforms rapidly transformed the circuits of e-waste recycling in the city, the outcomes have been less than ideal for informal recyclers. This article charts the changing role of informal e-waste recyclers in the wake of the introduction of reforms and shows how reforms disconnected a majority of informal recyclers - who have historically underwritten the costs of disposing the city's e-waste - from newly modernised circuits of e-waste recycling. In sum, it reveals that the reforms provided an impetus to "corporate privatisation" and undermined the extant network of "informal privatisation" of e-waste in Bangalore.

Biometric Marginality

Vol - XLVIII No. 13, March 30, 2013 | Ursula Rao

Debates on India's Unique Identification Number project have so far been based on the analysis of economic data, emerging legal frameworks, policy procedure, and technology. This paper shifts the focus to examine the implementation of the UID project in sites of urban marginality. A study of homeless citizens demonstrates that the usages of UID have not shifted the goalposts but are developing along the lines of established citizen-state relationships in both the empowering and excluding dimensions of the UID. To capture the social impact of UID, debates must move beyond the notion that the transformative potential rests in technology or abstract policy and study the ways it is made available to people in their everyday life.

Urban Poverty in India

Tools, Treatment and Politics at the Neo-liberal Turn
Vol - XLVII No. 47-48, December 01, 2012 | Karen Coelho and Anant Maringanti

What kinds of subjects-in-the-making are the urban poor? The authors in this issue of the Review of Urban Affairs offer neither conclusive arguments nor radically new paradigms. They, however, nudge us to rethink poverty, not as an objective condition that can be addressed through policymaking at a distance or by targeted development schemes, but as constituted through contentious engagements of disadvantaged individuals and communities with neo-liberal policy discourses and agendas.

The Spatial Reproduction of Urban Poverty

Labour and Livelihoods in a Slum Resettlement Colony
Vol - XLVII No. 47-48, December 01, 2012 | Karen Coelho, T Venkat, and R Chandrika

How do mass slum resettlement programmes in expanding megacities contribute to the reproduction of urban poverty? Chennai's premier resettlement colony, Kannagi Nagar, housing slum-dwellers evicted from the city since 2000 has integrated itself into the industrial, commercial and software economies of the information technology corridor on unfavourable terms, swelling the supply of unskilled casual workers for local firms. This article highlights, from the vantage point of workers in the resettlement colony, how the restructuring processes of large formal sector companies within the "new economy" exploit conditions created by the state's slum clearance policies, to enhance the precariousness of work for residents of resettlement sites. It highlights issues of quality of work for casual workers in the formal sector and their role in the production, persistence and reproduction of working poverty. It thereby illustrates how the restructuring of urban space by new imperatives of urban capital, through the peripheralisation of both industrial establishments and working classes, creates new socio-spatial configurations of work and poverty.

New Policy Paradigms and Actual Practices in Slum Housing

The Case of Housing Projects in Bengaluru
Vol - XLVII No. 47-48, December 01, 2012 | Lalitha Kamath

Recent reform programmes for achieving "slum-free" cities, like the Basic Services for the Urban Poor, signal a new integrated approach to slum redevelopment that combines housing, infrastructure and land titling. The new policy paradigm speaks the language of inclusiveness and efficiency, but its outcome has been far from ideal. This study examines two housing projects in Bengaluru to reveal how core elements of the new programme drive inconsistencies, even distortions, on the ground, impinging on the urban local body's ability to deliver on the ambitious aim of providing affordable housing in sizeable numbers. It argues that the new approach to housing projects is overlaid on the conventional "public housing built by contractors chosen by tender" framework and this poses fresh challenges to already beleaguered local bodies.

On the Sabarmati Riverfront

Urban Planning as Totalitarian Governance in Ahmedabad
Vol - XLVII No. 47-48, December 01, 2012 | Navdeep Mathur

 

The web version of this article corrects a few errors that appeared in the print edition.

The official narrative presents Ahmedabad as a pioneer in urban transformation in India. This paper questions whether these claims engage with the experiences of the urban poor in Ahmedabad by examining processes around the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project. Highlighted here are the roles played by the architectural consultancy, city administrators and political managers, as well as community groups, civil society and academic institutions. The efficiency of the administration showed an active anti-poor stance in the court proceedings and in the violence of actual evictions and post-eviction suffering. The evidence presented here also shows how "world-class" urban planning has facilitated yet another blatant instance of "accumulation by dispossession" via the flow of the Sabarmati.