Urban India: Historical Processes and Contemporary Experience

Abstracts

PANEL 1: URBAN UTOPIAS
Friday, April 29, 2011, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pmTechno-topias and Ethno-topias: Urban India in the Age of Global ModernityJyoti Hosagrahar
This paper will interpret the idea of utopia more generally as an idealized landscape and look at Indian urbanism to reflect on questions of whose visions are expressed in the city and how. Two types of idealized landscapes will be at the focus of the discussion: first, the techno-topias of the Special Economic Zones and the gated communities; and second, the ethno-topia of an exotic traditional city doggedly persistent in a modern world. The two contrasting utopias provide windows into some of the ways that history, place, and locality have engaged with modernity and globalization in a rapidly urbanizing India. The study will also reflect on some of the forces working against each of these idealizations to render them incomplete, the way the seemingly disparate landscapes intersect and overlap, as well as the dystopias that simultaneously co-exist within and around the idealizations.
An investigation of Gurgaon in the metropolitan region of Delhi as a hub for the IT industry and multinational corporations in India will help to anchor the discussion of the techno-topias. The historic city of Srirangapatna near Bangalore, an apparent antithesis to Gurgaon, will provide insights for the discussion of traditional urbanism.
Research for the paper is based on archival and field research as well on critical readings of some policy documents. The paper is drawn from a larger body of continuing research on Delhi as well as some projects of Sustainable Urbanism International in Srirangapatna with the Government of Karnataka.

Jaipur Master Plan 2025: A Case StudySwati Ramanathan
In 2005, the Government of Rajasthan (GoR) launched an urban initiative called State Urban Agenda for Rajasthan (SUARAJ), with a vision to catalyze the transformation of urban Rajasthan. A twin-track approach was taken: fast-track projects that were focused on a variety of urban infrastructure projects; and reform-track projects that would take up deeper and systemic issues related to urban reforms. The revision of the Jaipur Master Plan 2011 began in mid-2006 as a reform-track project under SUARAJ. This paper examines the process of preparing the Jaipur Master Plan 2025.
Producing a meaningful, practical, and implementable master plan in a time-bound manner required two very different types of challenges to be addressed on priority: operational and strategic. The operational challenges included hiring good technical support, commissioning robust spatial data, putting in place the physical infrastructure, identifying working groups for consultations, allocating roles and responsibilities, etc. The strategic challenge was to decide how this master plan was to be prepared. Was it to be the same as in the past or should it be different from the plans of the past, and if so, how should it be different? The answer to this emerged from plenary visioning exercises designed and held with the political leadership and senior bureaucrats, and subsequent interactions with individual department heads.
The difference also emerged from important policy recommendations of the Federal Government—the Planning Commission’s Decentralised Planning Guidelines (DPG), and the Second Administrative Commission’s Report (SARC) on Urban Governance, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission’s (JNNURM) reforms on district level planning and public participation—and translating these recommendations into the spatial plan and policy.
The consensus goal was to convert the challenges of urbanization into benefits with a shared vision for Jaipur’s future. The master plan 2025 was to reflect this vision spatially. What also emerged was the consensus that Jaipur’s development could not be viewed in isolation, but in the context of the larger region. Preparing a Metropolitan District Development Plan 2025 was an important first step in the overall development of the Jaipur Master Plan. Beyond the plan preparation process, it was agreed that the failure of implementation and enforcement that has plagued past master plans also needed to be addressed. Hence a significant part of the challenge for the master plan exercise, was examining policies to make the plan a success on the ground. Participation and ownership of the plan by the people at the local level and their elected representatives, was envisioned as a key to the success of the plan. The strategic intent was translated into a “planning paradigm” and provided the guiding pole star for the preparation of the Jaipur Master Plan 2025.

PANEL 2: INFRASTRUCTURE AND LAND
Friday, April 29, 2011, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm

Access to Land and Housing for Slum Dwellers in Delhi: The Impact of Infrastructure Projects and Real Estate DevelopmentVéronique Dupont
The ambition to develop large Indian metros into global cities, which is rooted in the liberalization reforms of the 1990s, has led to major restructuring of urban space. As a capital city, Delhi has always received particular attention from governments and town planners and as the country’s showcase its image has been enhanced. More recently, urban renewal operations and major infrastructure works were boosted by the preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The implementation of these projects, including the construction of the athlete’s village, have been associated with large-scale slum demolitions.
Within this general framework, this paper will analyze the role of land reclamation and real estate development in slum eradication. To what extent has the land cleared from slums been used for infrastructure projects? What types of urban projects “in the larger public interest” have justified slum demolitions? The follow-up of a survey conducted in 2007 on sites of slums demolished since 1990 will provide some specific inputs.
In contrast to the destructive impact and threat, for the slum dwellers, from land-market pressure and real estate interests, we will also analyze the potential role of private builders in the slum rehabilitation policy initiated very recently in Delhi, which provides for re-housing programmes in blocks of flats built under public-private partnership. This is a model already implemented in Mumbai since 1990, and meant to become mainstream as part of the new national strategy for Slum-Free City Planning launched in 2010. Particular attention will be given to the inherent exclusionary effects of this strategy.

A Spatial History of Water at Bangalore’s Frontier: State Formation, Extra-Legalities, and the Peripheralized Middle-ClassMalini Ranganathan
Water is and always has been one of Bengaluru’s more dire concerns. At the outskirts of the city, most residents do not have access to piped utility-provided water and must instead negotiate unreliable groundwater resources—often exploited by collusive “mafias”—on a daily basis. To date, critical scholarly work has tended to portray such wide distributional inequities as an upshot of globalization, economic liberalization, and neoliberal infrastructure policies, suggesting that the city’s high-technology growth has proceeded at the expense of basic services for the marginalized. While contemporary policy drivers have no doubt exacerbated uneven geographies of infrastructure access, this paper adopts a more historical and spatial perspective on Bengaluru’s waterscape. Drawing on archival records and ethnographic fieldwork, it traces a longer history of colonial and post-colonial planning wherein different state actors sanctioned claims to unauthorized land by a growing middle class. The paper suggests that the uneven patterns of water access we see today can, in large part, be attributed to a spectrum of dubiously legal land tenure arrangements that were set in motion by historical processes of state and class formation. The paper further argues that an understanding of the politics of the peripheralized middle class—those occupying the unauthorized fringes of Bengaluru—is essential if we are to grasp how contemporary market-oriented reforms in the water sector are received, contested, and ultimately take hold in the city.

PANEL 3: THE CITY IN PUBLIC CULTURE
Saturday, April 30, 2011, 9:00 am - 10:30 am

The City, From a Different Angle: Re-visioning the Urban in Post-1947 Indian ArtRebecca M. Brown
This paper probes the image of the urban in post-1947 visual culture by situating it in a larger context of historical urban imaging, asking how and if the imaging of the city in the first decades after independence represents a shift in attitudes towards the city. Setting the stage with earlier Rajasthani images of urban space from Mewar and Bundi and colonial cityscapes by Indian and European artists in Patna and Dhaka, I examine post-1947 considerations of the urban and of human settlement seen in the work of artists such as F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar, Nasreen Mohamedi, Gieve Patel, and Bhupen Khakhar to draw out the ways in which their work produces a vision of the urban, one that challenges both singular national and internationalizing modern narratives, presenting us with alternative ways of conceptualizing what it means to live in a growing urban landscape. These paintings and photographs redirect our thinking from the South Asian megalopolis towards other considerations of the city, exploring a Varanasi emptied of people, the European-and-Goan town, middle-class Vadodara, and the small intimacies of Mumbai. Rather than celebrating or condemning migrations to major international cities, these artists focus our attention on the trace of the human in the cityscape, challenging the dominant narratives by taking a sideways glance at the urban. I engage these works not as passive representations of the city, but as active, critical interventions in the growing dialogue surrounding cities, urban development, and population growth in the decades after independence.

Terrorism, Conspiracy and Surveillance in Bombay’s Urban CinemaRanjani Mazumdar
This paper looks at the terrorist films set in Bombay to explore the relationship between conspiracy, surveillance, and the city. The films under consideration are: Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, Raj Kumar Gupta’s Amir, and Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday, all of which refer to various terrorist attacks of the last 20 years. The films work with an investigative cartography, mobilizing the city through narratives cluttered with evidentiary details, an aggressive marking and arranging of information and a constant presence of visual media as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge. Conspiracy works as the organizing principle through which urban paranoia, civil disturbance and political intrigue, find a voice. Conspiracy also produces the movement between the police, the interrogation room, the terrorist hideout, the site of death, government offices, the newsroom and public spaces. The films open out the events through re-enactments and precision style unraveling to generate “fantasies of knowing”. Thus a “mobile script” on terrorism is carved out to negotiate the relationship between paranoia and citizenship. If the social practice of paranoia is rooted in the belief that the truth is not fully available, then in these films, conspiracy is the form through which the spectator is provided a sense of comfort and control over contemporary events, the city of Bombay, and history.

PANEL 4: DESIRE AND BELONGING IN THE CITY
Saturday, April 30, 2011, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Public Space and Repertoires of Political ActionLisa Mitchell
Madras (Chennai), Bombay (Mumbai), and now Hyderabad, have all been subject to dramatic contestations over their control by different regional groups. This paper examines parallels and distinctions in the political tactics and uses of public space employed within the Telugu-Tamil battle over Madras (culminating in 1952), the Gujarati-Marathi battle over Bombay (culminating in 1960), and the current Telangana-Coastal Andhra battle over Hyderabad. Processions, bandhs, rokos, relay fasts, and fasts-unto-death are a few of the specific forms of political action that have made use of public space within these contestations in very particular ways. This paper traces the genealogies of these forms of political action to consider the role of the city in mobilizing collective imagination and representation, while at the same time reframing the history of democracy in the Indian subcontinent. Utilizing archival documents from the Indian Railways, political organizations, and the National Archives, as well as interviews with police, government officials, and political activists, this paper brings together theoretical approaches to the study of public space and the urban built environment, ethnographic approaches to the mapping of discursive, communicative, and political networks, and historical approaches to the significance of urban public space within the development of Indian democracy.

On the Delhi Metro: an Ethnographic ViewRashmi Sadana
With the arrival of Delhi’s new metro system over the last decade, we have all become ethnographers. The city is there for all to see in the long, sinuous trains, from the windows on the mostly over ground rails, and at over a hundred stations stretching to newly created limits radiating from a newly re-imagined “center” that is Rajiv Chowk (Connaught Place). This paper will explore the question of how the Metro is allowing Delhi’s citizens to negotiate anew their city, their place in it, and their view of others. In doing so the paper submits that the Metro is creating new cultural geographies of the city in terms of the new physical spaces (from the trains themselves to the stations and lines) and changes to the built environment, extending in a number of directions. What are the imaginative consequences—social, cultural, and political—of these new geographies, this new mapping and forging of the city? Do they in fact lead to a greater sense of belonging or diffuseness? If both, in what ways, are these manifest?
This paper will draw on debates over these questions that have long been at the center of writing about the city and modernity (Benjamin, Baudelaire, Simmel, Massey, Harvey) and the particularities of Indian cities in light of colonial and postcolonial urban planning, as well as differing notions of public and private, street life, and sociality (Chakrabarty, Kaviraj, Chatterjee, Appadurai, Prakash); but will also go beyond these debates in order to ask how contemporary urban practices and technologies are changing the questions we ask about cities and urban life. The Metro, for instance, could be compared to the Indian railways in terms of how the latter allowed people to cross caste lines in significant numbers for the first time, through physical proximity on trains themselves, but also in light of where and how far they traveled. In the twentieth century, the railways contributed quite concretely to the idea of being able to be an Indian. Might the Metro be doing something similar for the city, with people sitting side by side, across class, caste, gender lines, on trains going to far off neighborhoods and new areas of the city? And are there not other technologies—cell phones, the Internet, etc.—that are reinforcing this crisscrossing of boundaries and creation of new urban sensibilities? Yet, this assumes that people want or need to feel part of the city in some accepted notion of a singular public. What other notions of collectivity and belonging—or even its fracturing—might be imagined through this new built environment? In this vein, the paper offers insights into what is being aspired to, on, and through the Metro.

PANEL 5: LIVELIHOODS, MOBILITY AND URBAN INFORMALITY
Saturday, April 30, 2011, 2:00 pm -3:30 pm

Sentinels of the City: Private Security Guards, Urban Work Culture and Informality in IndiaNandini Gooptu
Private security services have emerged as one of the fastest growing generators of new urban employment, catering to both the private and public sectors and responding to a heightened need for protection and surveillance, at a time when the state’s policing and “law and order machinery” is unable to cope with the rising demand and perceived need for security. India’s private security guards are increasingly seen as the first line of defense against terrorism. At the same time, urban local councils as well as state and central governments have been actively promoting employment in the security industry as a means of tackling unemployment among poor, unskilled youth, including those from “backward” regions and areas of political unrest. Private security services are creating a new cadre of so-called “professional” staff, who are employed as low-paid, casual, contract labor and who work under a regime of organized informality, under the management of recruitment, training and placement agencies, and with the imprimatur of the state. Through a case study of security guards in the city of Kolkata, this paper will discuss new forms of urban informality and work culture, and address analytical issues germane to our understanding of emerging urban labor regimes.

Living in the Slums of Bangalore: Activities, Aspirations, and Achievements of 1,481 Households in 14 Slum CommunitiesAnirudh Krishna
A growing body of research shows that large cities, representing the frontiers of economic development in India, are characterized by increasing inequality. The lower end of the economic spectrum is stretched by growing slums, together with increasing numbers of pavement dwellers and seasonal migrants. Understanding the dynamics operating within these locations is important, for it can suggest ways of overcoming unequal opportunity structures. This study of fourteen Bangalore slum communities contributes to this larger effort by showing how slum dwellers have advanced economically, but the extent of improvement has been small in the majority of cases, and there have been many reversals of fortune. The urban setting does deliver upon the promises and hopes with which people come—but not in every case and not in a predictable manner. Aspirations for the younger generation are high within slum communities. Girls as well as boys are attending high school, but occupations tend to remain the same across generations. There are relatively few first-generation migrants from rural areas and the majority of these slum dwellers have lived in slums for multiple generations. A restricted-entry low-exit situation is brought about on account of high vulnerability combined with an impoverished set of prospects. Public policies can and should be put in place that can help achieve greater gains in the future.

PANEL 6: GOVERNANCE AND CITIZENSHIP
Saturday, April 30, 2011, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Illegal Landscapes: Governance and Citizenship on Mumbai’s StreetsJonathan Shapiro Anjaria
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has not issued a new hawking license since 1978, and yet today over 300,000 street vendors operate throughout the city, very often with the connivance of the authorities. Does this represent a failure of governance? A deviation from how modern bureaucracies should work? Or, as this paper argues, a reinterpretation of the possibilities of citizenship within a liberal democracy, one that is an outcome of a delicate balancing of middle class political assertion, globalizing urbanism and rights-based advocacy of the urban poor? This paper makes this point by exploring the unofficial arrangements among hawkers, police, municipal officials, and their staff: First, these connections, often written off as a “corrupt nexus”, in fact produces spaces of negotiation in which the basic premises of liberal democracy (e.g. what “the rule of law” means in practice, how citizenship claims can be made, and what is the content of civil society) are reconfigured. In this context corruption, while commonly assumed to be inherently anti-democratic, has the possibility to expand, rather than constrict, substantive citizenship rights. Secondly, this paper shows that for hawkers, the state is experienced less as an extension of disciplinary power than as a locus for the negotiation and legitimation of spatial claims—claims that, ironically, are often ignored in formal institutional contexts in the city. In contrast to writing on urban spatial conflict that implicitly ascribes to the state a coherent internal logic or ideological project, the emphasis here on unofficial arrangements explores the possibilities that emerge from the experiences of a grounded, and at times even intimate, state. Thus, more than just a corruption of how states ought to work, these unofficial arrangements enable substantive rights to city space, showing not only that power objectifies but also that it is dynamically inhabited.

Quality of Citizenship in Bangalore: Understanding the Role of Civic Literacy and Civic EngagementChetan B. Singai, Unna V. Govindarajan, Anamika Ajay
It is largely observed that citizen awareness and participation are important to ensure vibrancy of a good democracy. As observed by Lijphart (1997:1), “a participatory public is seen as crucial for democratic responsiveness and as an intrinsic democratic good.” Due to globalization and rapid urbanization, and related developmental challenges, there is a suggested paradigm shift from that of a more exclusive to inclusive urban governance. Given this context, the paper proposes to discuss the relevance and relationship between civic literacy and civic engagement, and its influence on citizen’s quality of life, through a Citizenship Index (CI) for Bangalore. By analyzing the case of Bangalore, the paper addresses the following research questions: why is it relevant to measure the awareness and engagement amongst citizens in urban India and what are the relevant variables to influence the creation of a Citizenship Index. The conceptual framework includes contextualized definitions of citizenship and quality of life; civic literacy as being comprised of two dimensions, political awareness and civic awareness; and civic engagement as being comprised of two components, political engagement and civic engagement. The scope of the study is to explore emerging conceptual anomalies also. The study is based on both qualitative and quantitative research methodology, which includes 3,960 survey responses across 99 of 198 Bangalore wards. The study methodology is intended for replication across major cities in India, to address the above-stated research questions, in order to generalize the research findings for a pan-Indian perspective. The research findings of the paper have potential to both inform the design of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy (JCCD) initiatives and contribute to the existing literature on citizenship and democracy.