This paper uses an analysis of key dynamics of sociospatial change in Indian cities to offer a sympathetic critique of recent efforts to extend gentrification theory into the Global South. Despite ...the postcolonial overtures of this new, Southern gentrification literature, the paper argues that the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification of its analytical specificity that it loses both its explanatory power and its political potency. The paper shows that gentrification theory operates on four implicit presumptions, which fail to characterize the primary dynamics of urban change in India. These include: (1) the presumption that lower-class displacement is driven by a reinvestment of capital into disinvested spaces; (2) a property centrism; (3) an agnosticism on the question of extraeconomic force; and (4) the presumption that land from which lower classes are displaced finds a ‘higher and better use’. A priori commitment to the gentrification analytic thus overlooks key features of urban change in contexts, like India, with property, planning, and legal systems different from the postindustrial geographies from which gentrification theory developed. The paper suggests that ‘urban revolution’, ‘enclosures’, and ‘accumulation by dispossession’, while equally abstract terms, more clearly allow for the comparative analysis of displacement.
This article urges a consideration of the atmospheric afterlives of fossil-fueled imperialism as not just accumulated gases and particles but also durable spatial dispositions governing how ...atmospheres are felt, arranged, and imagined. Focusing on the contemporary air pollution crisis in India, it analyzes how governmental responses to death-dealing airs today draw from colonial logics of bodily sequestration from outside threats, partaking in a climate of enclosure. Using archival, legal, and media sources, it excavates the imperial traces of three atmos-spheres, or spaces within which air is imagined, contained, or governed. The first is the Indian lung, an object of exoticized medical interest since the late nineteenth century. Tracing the reemergence of racialized claims of "deficient" Indian lung capacity, the article shows how a colonial epistemology of tropical otherness produces a strategic imperceptibility of today's pollution-induced illness. The second is the colonial hill station, where colonial theories of medical topography shape present-day discourses of "lung-cleansing" hill vacations, casting atmospheric vulnerability as a natural condition of the tropical plains-the only solution to which is escape. The third is the privatized air offered through air pollution masks and purifiers, which draw from colonial practices of architecture and dress premised on a presumption that "the outside" is a zone of inherent biophysical risk. These three atmospheres together confirm that until the climate of enclosure is challenged, investments in sequestration will supersede structural efforts to produce air otherwise. The article also urges consideration of non-European atmospheres to understand how normative racial categories are reinforced through models of atmosphere.
: This paper examines the narratives through which associations of private property owners in Delhi depict slums as zones of incivility and “nuisance.” In tracing how this “nuisance talk” travels ...into and gains legitimacy in popular and state visions of urban space, the paper shows the role of discourse in justifying and enacting exclusionary urban imaginaries. As a lay term, nuisance is widely used to identify forms of aesthetic impropriety. But, as a primary element of environmental law, nuisance operates discursively as a catchall category allowing diverse private grievances to be expressed in terms of environmental welfare and the public interest. The widening depiction of slums as nuisances hence reworks the public/private divide, inserting once local codes of civility into the core of public life. By examining how nuisance talk circulates between property owners' associations, the media, and the government, the paper shows how slum demolitions have become widely read as a form of environmental improvement.
This article argues that the theoretical invisibility of non‐privatized land tenures constitutes a failure of the urban imaginary, which restricts the ability to forge less commodified urban futures. ...The article explicates two attributes of non‐privatized land—fungibility and combinatoriality—that produce an urban land nexus capable of fostering pro‐poor agglomeration economies and generating socialities that exceed the model of the separative self that is hegemonic in more propertied settings. Fungibility, it shows, externalizes supportive economies of production and reproduction into surrounding neighborhoods by shifting the boundaries and terms of usufruct without cadastral oversight or regulation. Combinatoriality—a hybrid formulation of combined territories and combined territorialities—describes overlapping forms of access to land or demarcations of legitimate land use, either competitive or reciprocal. Together, these two attributes of non‐privatized land systems produce a propinquity requirement for economic production, or a social density and liveliness more limited in privatized land markets. Through a diagnostic analogy with the simple reproduction squeeze characteristic of subsistence agrarian settings, it charts how an urban spatial reproduction squeeze—felt globally in dense, rising‐rent environments across the global North and South—generates subsistence needs that mixed‐tenure environments are uniquely capable of fulfilling and that can provide inspiration for radical housing struggles elsewhere.
This article examines how the law codifies infrastructural risks into the farm-labor relation, subjecting farmworkers living in U.S. migrant labor camps to conditions considered illegal in otherwise ...similar residential geographies. To do so, it explores how the labor camp operates as an infrastructure to maximize harvest, arrange labor availability, and embed overlordship-the power to direct other human potentialities through control of their total environment-in a contained geography wherein access to water, shelter, and bodily security is conditional on the employment relation. Using case law pertaining to labor camps in New York, it analyzes the racializing effects of mundane technicalities such as how heating and water systems are inspected, sanitary code is enforced, and housing is classified. Building on insights on infrastructural forms of racial power, it shows how housing and utility systems cement overlordship into the operational landscape of U.S. agriculture and food systems via both the broader immigrant surveillance apparatus and farmworkers' exclusion from the common-law protections "ordinary" tenants enjoy, such as locally enforced building codes and safety standards. It finds that geographic isolation, infrastructural disconnection, and uneven code enforcement materialize "a pattern of physical restraint" and "real or threatened harm," components of the legal definition of involuntary servitude. In doing so, it (1) advances a theory of racial overlordship as an infrastructural relation maintained via uneven standards of human treatment, (2) traces the material durability of postemancipation racial overlordship into the present, and (3) demonstrates the powers of camps to variably confine and banish disposable workers.
Recent scholarship has highlighted the central role of India's ‘new middle class’ in gentrifying and ‘cleaning up’ its cities. According to this literature, this class experienced a political ...awakening in the 1990s and began mobilizing to reclaim urban space from the poor. Using the example of Delhi's Bhagidari scheme, a governance experiment launched in 2000, I argue that urban middle‐class power did not emerge from internal changes within this class itself (as is commonly argued), but was rather produced by the machinations of the local state. In particular, I show how Bhagidari has realigned the channels by which citizens can access the state on the basis of property ownership. In so doing, it has undermined the electoral process dominated by the poor, and privileged property owners' demands for a ‘world‐class’ urban future. By examining the ‘new state spaces’ it constructs, I show how Bhagidari has effectively gentrified the channels of political participation, respatializing the state by breaking the informal ties binding the unpropertied poor to the local state and thereby removing the obstacles to large‐scale slum demolitions. In making this argument, the article introduces a unique approach to mapping state space that aims to reveal the relationship between state form and political participation.
Résumé
Des recherches récentes ont souligné la place centrale de la ‘nouvelle classe moyenne' dans la gentrification et ‘l'assainissement' des villes en Inde. D'après ces études, cette classe s'est éveillée sur le plan politique dans les années 1990 et s'est mobilisée peu à peu pour récupérer l'espace urbain occupé par la population défavorisée. En examinant le programme Bhagidari de gouvernance expérimentale lancée à Delhi en 2000, ce travail affirme que le pouvoir de la classe moyenne urbaine n'est pas né de mutations internes à la classe elle‐même (comme avancé généralement), mais résulte plutôt des manæuvres de l'État local. Il montre en particulier comment Bhagidari a réorganisé les canaux d'accès des citoyens à l'État en se fondant sur la propriété immobilière. Ce faisant, le programme a non seulement sapé le processus électoral dominé par les pauvres, mais aussi privilégié les demandes des propriétaires immobiliers en faveur d'un avenir urbain ‘d'ordre international'. En examinant les ‘nouveaux espaces de l'État' qui se sont créés, cet article montre comment Bhagidari a bien ‘gentrifié' les canaux de la participation politique, redéfinissant l'espace de l'État en rompant les liens informels entre les pauvres non propriétaires et l'État local, ce qui a éliminé les obstacles à une démolition à grande échelle des quartiers défavorisés. Cette démonstration présente une approche unique de la cartographie spatiale de l'État visant à dévoiler le rapport entre configuration étatique et participation politique.
This essay analyzes embodied experiences of enclaving. It argues that by tracking revolutions in built form that gating enacts, urban geography has simultaneously tracked revolutions in urban ...subjectivity. It highlights three enclaved “body types” within existing literature: securitized bodies in fortressed cities, performative bodies in consumptive enclaves, and hygienic bodies in purified zones. It then offers three ethnographic scenes of gating related to new crises of personhood: metabolic illness, atmospheric breakdown, and resurgent ethno-nationalism. Attention to the psychic forces behind gating, it finally argues, can further show the gender, class, and ethnic underpinnings of what appear as generic architectural zones.
This article looks at the manner in which knowledge of slums in Delhi has been collected, assembled and circulated in two different moments of urban improvement to explore the relationship between ...calculation and governmentality. Based on an extended study of slum enumeration and the politics of slum demolitions in Delhi, I show that each of these two moments relied on an epistemologically different set of calculative practices - one statistical, the other aesthetic - to render the slum intelligible and secure rule. I specifically show how the statistically rigorous calculative practices of the first moment encountered various technical difficulties and political challenges in producing a governing intelligibility, thus leading to the unruliness of slum space. In response, a new set of governmental techniques operating through the dissemination of aesthetic norms and codes re-secured rule over slums. I describe this shift in governmental technique to demonstrate that the dissemination of aesthetic norms can be both more governmentally effective and practically implementable than the statistical deployment of governmental truths. This suggests the need to expand our understanding of the epistemology of government to include attention to a more diverse array of governmental technologies, some more aesthetic than strictly calculative.
This paper explores the framework of 'city drafting' used in this Special Feature to highlight the inscriptive and documentary processes underpinning property making in South Asia. It considers two ...senses of drafting: as provisional and iterative writing process that sees texts as objects in motion, and as the technical art of drawing, notation, and inscriptional verification. It argues that the papers in this Special Feature, through their focus on city drafting, demonstrate the continuity of what Raman 2012. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press calls 'document raj,' or a colonial bureaucratic system that grounds the logic of property in documentary possession and that administers property through specific dispositions to writing. How property is known and hence possessed rests on a certain grammatology of the state, which can be understood through three ethnographic objects: scripts, or the historically specific orthographic and inscriptive rules for how property is written; scribes, or the bureaucrats and associated technical experts whose graphical and grammatalogical knowledges shape how property is made and unmade; and scribbles, or the notations, jottings, and markings that indexically draw land and documents into different relations. This Special Feature's ethnographic focus on these three objects reveals the embeddedness of contemporary property and city making mechanisms in colonial documentary practices, thereby showing the epistemological limits of private property both in global metropolitan theory and as fungible economic form.
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