Capitalism and the Urban Poor: A Look at the Urban Commons in Contemporary India

Vinay Gidwani is Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Gidwani�s present area of focus is urban geography and approaches this field in an interdisciplinary way, drawing liberally from long standing traditions in ethnography, classical economics, Marxist theory, subaltern studies, law and agrarian studies. His most celebrated work, Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (Permanent Black & University of Minnesota Press, 2008), focuses on the rise of agrarian capitalism in Western Gujarat and its impact on the rural poor. Using detailed field work, Gidwani makes the case for reassessing our definitions of development and our understanding of its relationship with work. He has also published articles in a number of journals including Economic and Political Weekly, Economic Geography and Journal of Development Studies.

Gidwani will be speaking on the fate of the urban commons in contemporary India, using the example of garbage workers in Delhi and Ghaziabad. Building on a long tradition of urban subaltern studies, pioneered by intellectuals such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sudipta Kaviraj, Gidwani raises fundamental questions regarding the impact of capitalism on the urban poor. Trapped between a modernizing state that seeks to render urban areas both economically �efficient� and aesthetically pleasing and a rapidly collapsing subsistence rural economy, the urban poor are affected the worst by the onward march of capitalism.

Yet in the teeming by-lanes and gullies of India�s metropolises, the urban poor do not always constitute a submissive community pushed around by the whims of the state. The fact that they have no safety nets, and literally nowhere to go means that they have the highest stake in preserving the urban commons that the state so wishes to appropriate, not only for their present but also for their future. Indeed the struggle over the urban commons is not just a struggle for space; it is a struggle for the right to municipal services and sustainable livelihoods, a struggle for the right to anticipate a future. Gidwani will be speaking on Wednesday, 13 October at Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue. The room is wheelchair accessible.