Book

The Politics of Community-making in New Urban India: Illiberal Spaces, Illiberal Cities

This book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. It is based on an ethnographic study in Noida, a city at the eastern fringe of the state of Uttar Pradesh, bordering national capital Delhi.

Author

Ritanjan Das, Nilotpal Kumar

Date

17 April 2023

Links

Publisher: Routledge

The book demonstrates a flexible planning approach being central to the entrepreneurial turn in India’s post-liberalisation urbanisation, whereby a small-scale industrial township is transformed into a real-estate driven modern city. Its real point of departure, however, is in the argument that this turn can enable a form of illiberal community-making in new cities that are quite different from older metropolises. Exclusivist forms of solidarity and symbolic boundary construction – stemming from the
differences across communities as well as their internal heterogeneities – form the crux of this process, which is examined in three distinct but often interspersed socio-spatial forms: planned middle-class residential quarters, ‘urban villages’ and migrant squatter colonies.

The book combines radical geographical conceptualisations of social production of space and neoliberal urbanism with sociological and anthropological approaches to urban community-making. It will be of interest to researchers in development studies, sociology, urban studies, as well as readers interested in society and politics of contemporary
India/South Asia.