Sociological Bulletin 67(1) 1–19 © 2018 Indian Sociological Society SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0038022917751974 http://journals.sagepub.com/home/sob
1 Professor of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India.
Corresponding author:
Sujata Patel, Professor of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: patel.sujata09@gmail.com
Rethinking Urban
Studies Today
Sujata Patel
1Abstract
The article engages with the literature that has emerged since the 1990s in urban studies in India and in this context, discusses the nature of India’s urban modernity. It suggests that scholars in India participate and engage with the global discus-sion on urban studies by removing themselves from the epistemic confudiscus-sions of colonial episteme and of methodological nationalism that has bound sociology in India. It suggests that contemporary processes of capitalism have enveloped the entire territory of the country into an urban space with the mobile upper classes termed ‘middle classes’ and the state policies linking unevenly the so-called rural and urban areas through new forms of capitalist accumulation. These organise specific patterns of spatial inequalities and exclusions and in turn fuel contradic-tory processes of politics relating to gender, caste, ethnicity and religiosities. The focus of the urban studies should be to analyse the way the global intersects with regions and localities as these are being spatially constituted in the context of uneven urbanisation.
Keywords
Urban studies, modernities, spatial inequalities, informal sector, urban middle class
Introduction
We all know that the field of urban studies is woven around two master concepts, these being urbanisation and the city.1 The theories organising its perspective are
of classes, the mode of production, and geopolitical location and Max Weber had published The City in 1921, urban sociology and/or urban studies as a sub-discipline emerged in the social sciences only in the early 20th century as a consequence of the research and conceptualisations attempted in the USA.
From its commencement, urban sociology or urban studies was identified as being an interdisciplinary sub-discipline of the social sciences; it brought together a group of thinkers that ranged from sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, economists, historians to environmentalists, architects, planners and policymakers. Later to this group were added experts from literature, media, cultural and film studies. No wonder today, there remains a fuzziness regarding the demarcation lines between urban sociology and urban studies. Notwithstanding this interdis-ciplinarity, urban studies/urban sociology’s master concepts, that of urbanisation and the city, remained locked into 19th century Eurocentric social science epis-teme, that of the binary that postulated that urbanisation was an outcome of a linear evolution from the rural. Urbanisation and the city were juxtaposed from the village and its feudal processes and were considered as positive developments for the future of humankind. Urbanisation came to be associated with industriali-sation and migration, with entrepreneurship, working classes and the constitution of new modern city based on technological infrastructure, such as mass housing, city level management of sanitation and water systems.
No wonder, as urban studies grew and expanded as a field of specialisation, its focus shifted to the analysis of the city rather than urbanisation (as a process) with the latter being increasingly relegated to the background. As urban studies became city-centric, it was conceptualised as a spatial system (or as a spatial structure) that articulated a new and novel culture of modernity. The city came to be associ-ated with a utopian vision of new sociabalities that creassoci-ated novel inclusive rela-tionships and as a site wherein new communities/nations, citizenship rights and lifestyles could be reconstituted.
However, within the interstices of these utopias lurked fears, concerns and doubts: was this future possible? Will it decrease the negativities of the earlier feudal/rural epoch or will these be expressed afresh in new forms? Contemporary scholars explored the undesirable consequences of increasing density of popu-lation, of the many ways new inequalities were being constituted, of implica-tions of uneven division of resources and infrastructure on communities, naimplica-tions and citizens, of the contradictions built-in into the processes of individuation and individualism, of the problems that occur with alienation and of decentred exist-ence, and the consequences of the breakdown of solidarities and its articulation in ethnic/race conflict and gendered violence between and within groups. Some scholars wondered if the city did not represent a dystopia rather than a utopia.
monographs on western cities such as Chicago, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris and Rome. As cities came to be gazed and comprehended through the lens of a pre-defined urban Northern sensibility, cities of the South also replicated this gaze. In India authors studied and investigated metropolitan cities, such as Bombay/Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Chennai as cities which are moving from old rural traditions to new urban modernities. Urban studies thus rarely moved into critical and reflexive assessments about its received epistemic, methodologi-cal and theoretimethodologi-cal limitations and remained oriented to professional and policy concerns.
Recently, urbanists Brenner and Schmid (2011) has proposed a need for a revolutionary reorganisation of this sub-discipline. They suggest that the urban researchers reconstitute the field by displacing their gaze from the city and sub-stituting it with urbanisation because cities do not represent urbanisation, rather cities are mere part and parcel of urbanisation. Drawing from the earlier work of Henri Lefebvre, Brenner (2014) recommends an epistemic reconfiguration of the field of urban studies by dispensing with the urban/rural distinction and linear and evolutionary perspective that has long underpinned the major traditions of urban research, data collection and cartographic practice. Instead of arguing in terms of the rural–urban binary, he suggests a need to reorganise its episteme. Since the late 1970s, urbanisation represents a worldwide process in which all political-economic and socio-environmental relations are now enmeshed, regardless of the terrestrial location (as a village or as being part of rural areas) or morpho-logical configuration. This emergent condition, he and his colleagues have named as planetary urbanisation and they recommend that these spaces lie well beyond the traditional centres of agglomeration and/or dense populations, such as towns, cities and metropolises and includes shipping lanes, transportation networks and communications infrastructure, resource extraction sites, tourist enclaves, offshore financial centres, agro-industrial catchment zones, and erstwhile ‘natural’ spaces, such as the world’s oceans, deserts, jungles, mountain ranges, tundra and its atmos-phere. All these sites, Brenner insists are integral to a worldwide operational land-scape for capitalist urbanisation and thus are part of the urban process.
Robinson, using the South African cities as examples, urges urbanists to make a post-colonial critique of urban studies and thereby critically dissect the ways in which urban studies in its avatar as city studies has aligned the analysis of Southern and underdeveloped cities closely with that of city growth and moderni-ties of Northern cimoderni-ties. She contends that throughout the 20th century the found-ing questions of urban studies drew on a specific (Northern) version of urban modernity to define universal accounts of urbanity and thereby excluding many cities from other parts of the world and particularly from the South in contribut-ing to broader theorisations of the urban. Robinson believes that the cities of the South has had a peculiar and specific growth not common with the cities of the North and that this is related to colonialism which organised capital accumula-tion in distinct ways. An epistemic alliance that reduces the analysis of Southern cities to that of the North allows theorists, Robinson suggests to posit a theory of backwardness of Southern cities and thereby not explore the contradictory pro-cesses that structure both urbanisation, city growth and modernity in the South. She asks urbanists to reconstitute their episteme to develop new concepts and per-spectives to assess and examine the urban manifestation in the South and through this means, reconstitute global urban studies to comprehend the new geographies being constituted in the world.
This article builds on these two perspectives and my own earlier interventions on sociological traditions in India and on urban studies (Patel, 2006, 2014, 2017a) to ask how we should ‘think’ of urban studies both globally but also nationally, regionally and locally.
At this juncture, let me recall some of the contentions that I had made in my last Presidential address (Patel, 2017b). I had suggested that sociology in India was caught in the episteme of colonial modernity which valourised the ‘tradi-tional’ and defined this ‘tradi‘tradi-tional’ as being inhabited by villages where caste, extended family and religious orientation organised its ‘traditional’ lifestyles despite the fact that since the colonial period, capitalist colonialism and its dis-tinctive cultural modernity had already found its moorings. I had also suggested that in the post-independence phase methodological nationalism in the name of studying the modern nation-states was socialising a new generation of sociolo-gists to assess the ‘traditional’ in the form of the modern through a colonial under-standing. Thus, for long sociology in India studied the village and/or the rural in terms of received colonial perspectives. India was perceived as ‘village India’ and as being dominated by caste eschewed from contemporary capitalist inter-ventions that had in fact reformulated the caste system and reorganised kin and family lives and as well religious sect and movements. Thus, as is argued above by Brenner and Robinson sociology in India not only maintained but valourised the Eurocentric binary and the linear evolutionary perspective in assessing urban growth and city development.
It is important at this juncture to ask why this happened. Why urban sociology in India did not emerge from its epistemic trap? Given that the discourses of social sciences were enmeshed in nationalism not only in India but in other regions and nation-states in the world we have to turn an analysis of nationalism.
to develop a penetrating analysis on the exploitative rural and agrarian processes being organised during colonialism, it failed to do so in the case of urban studies. Thus, in the first decade after independence, critical agrarian perspectives fuelled both policy and professional research on rural India and in turn allowed agrarian studies to lead the international discourse on this theme, this was not so of urban studies. It is paradoxical and ironical, Prakash argues that though Indian nation-alist intellectuals were born and brought up in major towns and cities of India, which were going through revolutionary transformations during these times, the gaze of Indian nationalists was not on the contradictory and exploitative nature of India’s urban modernity, but on the conditions organising village life and the agrarian processes that exploited the peasantry. Contrarily in Europe and the USA he argues, the city has consistently served as a site to produce critical knowledge in sociology generally and in urban sociology specifically. As a consequence, in India, its urban experience has lacked critical and incisive enquiry making this field impoverished till recently.
In this article I discuss some significant literature on contemporary urbanisa-tion process in India being published today because of the recent ‘urban turn’ that has enveloped the discourse of urban studies in India. I am piecing together contributions in varied fields of the social sciences (demography, geography, eco-nomics, political science, sociology and anthropology) and other domains such as architecture, planning, environmental sciences, activism and even creative writing and film making, which have since the early 1990s are reflecting on India’s urban experience and thereby contributing to its knowledge. The address today is to review the new work being attempted and to understand the challenges that this research presents us to us in understanding the contemporary urban experience of India. This article is also asking whether following Brenner and Robinson we can put together some attributes of the contemporary urban experience in India.
I am suggesting that we participate and engage with the global discussion on urban studies by clearing ourselves from the minefield of epistemic confusions that colonial episteme and the specific variant of methodological nationalism have bound us in. I am suggesting here that not only do we need to transcend the binary and the linear evolutionary episteme that has structured sociology in India and more specifically urban studies but also accept that we need to reorganise the way we also think of rural and agrarian studies in context to the contemporary orientation of urban studies. We also need to assess anew how to comprehend new class formations that link the so-called rural and urban areas through capi-talist accumulation and reflect on how state policies are creating an overarching uneven urban process across the country. I suggest, these organise specific pat-terns of spatial inequalities and exclusions and in turn fuel contradictory pro-cesses of politics relating to gender, caste, ethnicity and religiousities. Not only do we need to assess these through the global constellation of forces impacting the country but also examine how these in turn affect the way the global intersects with regions and localities as these are being spatially constituted in the context of urbanisation.
assess recent material regarding spatial exclusions in context to caste, minorities and gender. I then turn to the nature of work and labour being organised because of urbanisation and assess how these intertwine with family, kin and caste group-ings. Lastly, I examine the nature of urban policy, planning and governance and explore how the aspirational middle classes of the country determine new spatial strategies of urbanisation. The urban process in India I am arguing expresses itself in variegated spatial manners within these above-mentioned characteristics of urbanisation.
Conceptualising the Urban Today
Every day we note new buildings being constructed even if these become dilapi-dated almost immediately, new roads being dug which with one rainfall spurt potholes, new pipelines being laid, however badly. All such initiatives I contend takes place in designated urban and rural areas. Our cities have become crowded and polluted with people jostling against hand carts, bicycles, motorcycles and cars and negotiating potholes. In the midst of all this, there are broken pavements, homes and slums, street markets selling goods and processed food and as well agricultural activities. Urbanisation is all over without our peasants becoming industrial working classes and discontinuing agricultural activities. This is accurate depiction of big and large cities or small and medium towns but also of villages which soon convert themselves into new satellite towns and merge with metro-politan ones creating a never ending urban corridor.
Scholars in India have presented two sets of hypotheses to capture contempo-rary urban expansion. The first hypothesis is that of rurbanisation (Kundu, 2017) (settlements having urban characteristics while retaining rural socio-economic base) which while continuing to use census figures together with the formal defi-nitions of city boundaries suggests that India is having a unique pattern of urbani-sation and that this is developing new variegated urban geographies. It highlights three such processes. First, it suggests that there is a real expansion in the periph-ery of highly developed regions because large cities have become exclusionary (Kundu, 2009). Consequently, there is relocation and outsourcing of enterprises to its outskirts, leading to migration and informalisation of work and housing, and simultaneously and paradoxically, the growth of gated communities. These trends of peripheral rurbanisation are evident in satellite cities and large urban agglomerations.
Second there is a decrease in in-migration and increase in out-migration with declining investments in small and medium towns in backward regions of the country as part of policy initiatives of central and state governments. A large number of small and medium towns (except a small minority which are university towns or are constituted around public-sector units) have sluggish growth, stag-nation and fluctuating agricultural economy (Kundu, 2011). Their rurbanisation is linked to regional integration. Third, there is a sharp increase of a number of census towns (almost 2500 more such have been declared in 2011 census) because these satisfy the demographic criteria but many of these have not been given statutory status by their respective state governments. As a consequence, these have not been provided with urban infrastructure (that is, sanitation facilities, tarred roads, water supply, etc.) and these thus remain rurbanised. The census, it has been argued, has not been able to capture the complex diversities in urbanisa-tion processes and has proved inadequate in comprehending these processes.
The second hypothesis titled, subaltern urbanisation has defined urbanisation as ‘autonomous, economically vital and independent of the metropolis’ and is perceived to be a process that comprehends cities as a system of interrelationships (Mukhopadhyay, Zerah, & Denis, 2017). Re-emphasising many of the processes highlighted above, that of morphological growth rather than population move-ment, that of small and medium town developments, that of growth due to trans-portation and historical reasons, the authors argue that subaltern settlements are those that have a significant population in cities just below Class 1. For example, about 41 per cent of India’s urban population reside in small towns with less than 100,000 population. The spatial spread of urbanisation can be located not only in the increase of census towns but also in what it calls settlement agglomerations. These territories have emerged due to economic and historical reasons and whose developments have not been noted in the census. If these geographies are taken into account, the urban population may be pushed up by another 10 per cent that is, India it declares is at least 39 per cent plus urban, if not more.
within what is may be officially called rural. In other words, official data have invisible-listed the urban as it has folded itself in villages and into the so-called rural. The second point of significance is that the urban need not be about density, numbers of workers doing industrial/urban work nor about the existence of official institutions of urban governance, such as the municipalities. Additionally, today’s economy does not have a strict distinction between work which is rural and that which is urban and thus it is possible that villages may have households where seasonal migrants may be employed in tertiary work and who may be also doing agricultural work. We all know that the Canadian geographer T.G. McGee has used Indonesian material to call this form of urbanisation the ‘desakota’ (I will be discussing this in detail later).
The third point is related to policy. In a large number of cases, it is because of the state’s classification system that many census towns have not been declared as statutory towns. This has had a negative impact on these settlements, for these have not been declared urban but consequently, they have not been provided full urban services and have been forced to remain ‘rural’. Fourth, in these circum-stances, it is important to accept that the present urbanisation process is articu-lating variegated and segmented geographies across the country. Thus, there is spatial segmentation and inequalities between settlements within India. Thus, not only will one perspective not fit all, but it demands a particular and specific his-toriographical comprehension to understand these uneven and variegated patterns being articulated by capitalist urbanisation. We thus need to ask: do we have tools to assess this? Fifth and lastly, it is difficult to continue to use the binary of urban as against rural any longer. Rather this discussion demands that we now have to reconstitute our deliberations regarding rural/agrarian/peasant societies in India. Unfree labour, casteism and patriarchy in employment and popular forms of eve-ryday culture related to these ideologies pervade the entire country and are being differently articulated given the variegated histories and geographies of settle-ments but they are and remain present in all parts of India.
Inequalities and Exclusions of Urban India
I have already highlighted the constraints in the existing data sets; these are related to conceptual incoherence. In these circumstances how do we fit the ground reali-ties which we can observe with the conceptual and discursive universe which is pre-given? We need a starting point and thus let me initiate the discussion on urban inequalities with a description of the slum which is regarded by economists, geographers and activists as the quintessential representation of the urban today and also of ‘southern urbanism’ (Rao, 2006). No wonder almost all UN docu-ments giving data on urban growth immediately slip into a discussion on slums as the problem characterising urbanism in the Global South.
poverty and further whether data on number of slums, size and regional spread will give us an idea of urban poverty in India and thus give us a peep into inequali-ties of living, housing and social services in India.
Unfortunately, to answer this question, we have to again go back to the census data sets, because these do give numbers for slum settlements across cities and towns of India. The census started collecting information on slums in early 2000. The 2001 census states that 43 million (i.e., 23%) of India’s urban population live in slums and by 2011 census, this number had increased to 93 million. Some cities such as Mumbai had, according to the census, nearly 50 per cent of its population living in slums while cities such as Chennai and Delhi had 19 per cent. However, the 2011 data does not record existence of slums in many cities and towns in India raising the question whether these have been enumerated and if so, whether these do not have slums. If it is the latter, then why do such cities not have slums? It seems that there is a problem in enumeration because on one hand a government report published in 2010 covering around 5,000 plus towns and cities gives the slum populations as being 75.3 million (26.3% of India’s urban population) and on the other the UN-Habitat report of 2001 states that Indian’s urban slum popula-tion was 158.4 million (55% of its urban populapopula-tion). But despite these confusing data if we have to assess the vulnerabilities faced by the slum population then we need to match the above statistics with the information in government records, that more than 30 per cent of those who live in slums have no tenure (legal right) over their land and house. In this context one can comprehend the insecurities in which this population lives (Dupont, 2011).
Further, if we incorporate slum or slum-like characteristics as an index for poverty, then it is possible that the numbers of poor may increase exponentially. For example, if we add the entire urban population living outside officially declared towns and cities then the number of such poor may be more. Also, ana-lysts have pointed out these numbers miss households that may be poor, but which have not been designated slums. This has led some commentators to examine the number of households which do not have access to services such as water and sanitation and relate these to household assets to determine poverty levels. Others have distinguished one room households with or without kitchens and tabulate these with access to water and toilets to create a map of spatial inequalities across the country. But what about people who live in non-urban areas which house them-selves in temporary, non-permanent and non-serviceable shelters and have little to no access to sanitation, drainage and potable water. Should we also not add these numbers? If we add these numbers to the general numbers mentioned above, the proportion of poor increases geometrically. No wonder, commentators (Jana & Bhan, 2013) suggest a need to move beyond the slums and examine access to services, particularly toilets and potable water as criteria for defining poverty. This as we know has huge implications for women and relates to their body and its security. As a consequence, I shift the discussion away from poverty to exclusions in the form of spatial inequalities and segregation (Bhan & Jana, 2015).
and simultaneously assess how spatial inequality is linked to segregation. There is evidence that a large number of SCs and STs who live in outer wards of the city may be suffering from segregation because of lack of access to urban services. Does this imply caste and tribe discrimination? A recent study (Vithayathil & Singh, 2012) suggests that caste and tribe segregation increases when equated with access to in-house drinking water and access to in-house latrines. This study also attests some mega-cities such as Kolkata are more segregated than Chennai (almost 20% more). Earlier, Roy (2008) had suggested that most of the urban poor stay in the urban periphery in Kolkata. It is important to note further that the degree of segregation increases in small and medium towns. Additionally, this study has suggested that in almost 60 per cent of Indian cities segregation has not lessened in the last two decades, rather it has worsened. This evidence alludes to the nature of post-1990s urban policies which I will discuss in the last section.
Data on segregation of religious minorities is difficult to get though one study does suggest that the Muslim minority and Dalit groups occupy on average 12.6 and 19.8 per cent less floor area, respectively, compared with the majority of the population. Some in-depth ethnographic accounts have also suggested that the services and conditions of housing have dilapidated in case of Muslim localities particularly in the post 2002 period as a consequence of bias or lack of interest in these groups by municipal authorities. This study is of Kolkata but there may be evidence for other cities such as Ahmedabad and Bombay. Additionally, there is evidence that in a large number of cities rented places outside these segre-gated areas are not available for minorities and dalit groups (Sidhwani, 2015). Urbanisation and modernity is supposed to filter pre-modern social affiliations such as caste and religiosities; in India these seem to be increasing.
Work, Labour and Its In-securities
What is the nature of employment structure and how does this affect spatial ine-qualities and segregation? Scholars have recognised for some time now that Indian economy has not transited towards industrial manufacturing and that a significant part of Indian work force—almost 85 per cent (Jha, 2016) are labour-ing as informal workers. Studies of increaslabour-ing informalisation and casualisation of the workforce in the manufacturing sector together with other studies that eval-uate occupations being practiced by various members of slum households draw our attention to the fact that most of the slums house workers that labour in urban informal low-end service economies such as garbage collection, small time retail-ing or as domestic servants. About one third of the informal workers are also self-employed. These studies have raised questions regarding the relationship of infor-mality of work and urban poverty (Jana & Bhan, 2013). Rather than poverty being related to the slum settlement, surely we have to ask whether inequalities and exclusions are not organically connected to the expanding informal economies of work and labour being organised in contemporary India.
in terms of caste and gender (Harris-White & Gooptu, 2001). Informal work is not restricted to the urban areas but is spread across the country and is enmeshed in all economic activities, be it agriculture or low and high-end service activi-ties. Informal work is present in large industries such as construction, quarrying, transport, hospitality and as well as in small micro manufacturing units and also includes the self-employed. It integrates individuals in semi-independent peasant households who may have some land, but also may own small family businesses, small assets and some household members could also be simultaneously petty commodity producers and traders and re those who migrate across all these activi-ties. These households exploit their own family members and also hire in and hire out their labour in various seasons.
Thus, it is clear that in India this economy is not confined to the urban arena and organised only within towns and cities as it is sometimes thought. Scholars argue that this economy combines some amount of regulation with extensive non-regulation in the use of natural resources, capital, technology and labour. They suggest that informal work and labour is being reproduced as an economy that is highly competitive, mobile, driven by short term profits combining various kinds of technologies (from primitive to mechanised to informational), relations of pro-duction together with control and discipline of labour (from unfree/bondage/slave labour to free and self-employed) and sites (households, sweatshops, small scale industrial units, agricultural land) in variegated places. Thus, a household/family may have members doing agriculture work, fishing, home based production, participate in sweat shops activities, and also do retailing across time and territories in so-called urban and rural areas (Patel & Jadhav, 2011). In this context within India commentators have redefined the notion of urban commons. Its definition is no longer restricted to public gardens, sea faces or clean air. Urban commons are sites such as ponds where fisher people fish or land where peasants households grow vegetables and flowers or graze their livestock and where they sell these products for retail marketing to supplement their everyday income (Parthasarathy, 2011). These are not private areas but community areas and can be everywhere in cities and towns and also in officially designated non-urban area.
creates islands/places of culturally distinct spatial systems of economy, social and communication networks integrated to each other and yet dispersed across the country geographically having variegated networks depending on the legal and political jurisdiction it is located within.
Given its unregulated and non-legal orientation, these informal economies push labour to reproduce themselves in highly insecure vulnerable conditions of work and housing. This vulnerability represents itself as a slum in urban areas that is when these labourers construct temporary and non-permanent households built with recycled material pieces of wood, cardboard tarpaulin and corrugated sheets. These are later defined by policy makers as slums. It is my argument that slums of urban India do not necessary represent this economy; rather it is the nature of the economy that creates such settlements, and these are to be found in both towns and cities and in villages across India.
A combination of intermediate classes control this economy in a maze of out-sourcing processes that organise production, distribution, consumption and repro-duction of commodities housing and services together with the reprorepro-duction of households and families. The flexibility of the system demands that work and living is intermittent leading to high levels of insecurity with wages and security of tenure almost never providing real-food equivalence and continuity of repro-duction. This affects most negatively the vulnerable strata of the populations: women, children and caste/ethnic groups (Harris-White & Gooptu, 2001).
The conflicts in such a system are between various competitive fractional intermediate class groups who control the market of labour, commodities (includ-ing that of consumption and services) and capital. They control labour through a combination of class and pre-modern ideologies of caste/ethnicity/religious, gender and sexuality, thereby segmenting labour. Thus, rarely do we see in this system the classic capital–labour conflict. Rather in most instances the strug-gle over resources is organised in terms of ethnic or religious confrontations. The distinctiveness of this new economy in the way it organises the ideologies of pre-modern sociabilities to structure in uneven and diverse ways the places of production, distribution, consumption and reproduction. As a consequence, we see the growth of both individual (gendered and caste) and collective (communal) violence in which the state (at all levels of administration) participates through acts of commissions and omissions instigating on one hand competitive politics among and between the poor and on the other pogroms by the rightist storm troopers. In the last decade individual and collective violence of this kind has increased and is taking place in all parts of the country—in cluster of villages, small towns and medium sized cities and in metros.
Urban Policies, Governance and the New Middle Class
I have presented two propositions in the earlier part of my presentation: the first suggests that until recently there was an uncritical rendering of the urban experi-ence in India by professional social sciexperi-ences and whenever some effort was made in this direction, it was biased towards an analysis of India’s big metropolis and mega cities and towards its elite. It is only recently that we are seeing a reflective assessment of the urban outside large cities which examines small and medium towns and has been shown in the earlier sections focuses on the living conditions of the poor, the marginalised and the excluded. Second, I have also suggested that policy formulations were also caught in a similar time wrap; the census is a prime example of this discourse. In this section I take a stock of the critiques made of urban policies which have been variously termed disconnected, changing continu-ously without any rhyme or reason, formulated in fit and starts, myopic, opaque and chaotic and constituted through discursive incoherence (Shaw, 2008). I discuss and elaborate on three themes: first, the inconsistencies in the content of urban policies, second, paradoxes regarding decentralised governance and the impact of economic reforms and the new middle class on policy making and governance (Mehra, 2017).
Urbanists have shown how during the last seven decades, urban policy went through three phases of contradictory reformulations. These contradictions were related to the lack of clarity about what to emphasise and which class interest to support. On one hand, the state showed interest in developing urban pockets that benefitted the middle and upper income groups and simultaneously used banal and un-thought of socialist policies to cater the urban poor. This can be seen in all three phases of its development during the plan periods from 1951 to 2012. In the first phase of the initial three plan period, the focus of the government was to create industrial towns around public sector manufacturing units and to settle refugee populations. The model that they used was that of UK’s ‘new town move-ment’ wherein towns were purposefully planned to remedy overcrowding and congestion. Thus, in the early years after independence, new towns and cities sud-denly emerged wherein low and middle class housing was promoted. Examples of this are Rourkela, Bhillai, Durgapur, Bokaro and Faridabad (for refugees). Second, urban policy had a general mandate to provide housing and services to those sites in large cities where slums had developed. Lastly, there was an attempt to promote regional development through urban land regulation and the use of master plans to provide housing, clear slums and rehabilitate the population.
later withdrawn. In the last phase that is from the 7th to the 12th plan period the urban economy was opened to private participation and to planning mechanisms. The state inaugurated new housing policy for the involvement of the private sector and repealed the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation Act). Other programmes and schemes allowed market based regimes to be introduced displacing earlier subsidy based infrastructural projects in areas such as health and education. This is the time the state also introduced the 74th Constitutional Amendment cre-ating mechanisms for democratic decentralisation in the local bodies promoting further inconsistencies in the execution of policies and governance (Shaw, 2008).
The conflicts and contradictions outlined above in urban policy also found reflection in the various administrative mechanisms that governed local bodies. Available literature attests that by and large the principle of decentralisation was missing in urban governance even though since the colonial period there have been attempts to transfer many functions of governance to local municipalities and corporations and after independence these rights were provided to rural India. The colonial legacy had given power to the elite citizens, that is those who owned land and paid property tax, and this has not changed in recent times when through the 74th Constitutional amendment act, for the first time an attempt to devolve powers was made. But many states have subverted the implementation of this Act (Mehta & Mehta, 2010). For example, except in Shimla there is no direct elec-tion of Mayors and Deputy Mayors. State governments which have always deter-mined the functions, power and finances of the municipalities have not allowed its implementation and have postponed municipal elections or had them when these are convenient to them politically.
Also the state and central governments have formed supra state agencies which have controlled the decision making regarding services, such as slum boards. And sometimes the centre and the states have given powers to more than one ministry and department to handle services. For example, three ministries handle water supply in India and it is demarcated from sanitation. This has resulted in confus-ing, uncertain situation of governance, where penal action coexists with toler-ance, service provisions exist without norms and entitlements, and institutions are expected to maintain infrastructure and deliver services without financial con-tribution. Overlapping domains and the uncertain fixation of responsibility and accountability have meant that, on the one hand, the disempowerment of urban local governments while, on the other, a culture of politicised institutions, poor service standards, opacity and non-accountability also thrives, resulting in apathy and alienation towards local governments (Bhide, 2017).
The question that we have to ask thus is how these inconsistencies do and contradictions in policy and governance play out since the 1990s when economic reforms were initiated. I would contend in the 1990s through structural reform, the India state conceptualised a coherent urban policy and put in place economic and administrative instruments to realise it. There was a vision here of what kind of India the state wanted to create and there was a clarity of the instrument that its wants to promote to constitute it—the middle class. Let me elaborate.
areas of the country into the urban form. Second, since the 1990s, the Indian state reorganised its economic and fiscal policies to not only encourage private invest-ment in the tertiary sector, such as in physical infrastructure, but also in construc-tion and housing, in hospitality and tourist businesses, in professional/service sector education and health and integrated these with information and communi-cation technologies (ICT). Third, the goal has been to ensure continuous expan-sion and circulation of commodities and of the money market by speeding up the information systems of this sector and thus make their use efficient and rational. Fourth, to aid this process, the state created new institutions, changed legal instru-ments, introduced new policies of privatisation, and created an economy of real estate and land market as also of other services, such as electricity, sanitation, roads, education and health. Reforms have also commoditified markets in natural resources which have limited circulation such as water and then promoting its privatisation. If the political economy discourse during the post-1950s phase was incoherence of policy and an unstated belief that industrialisation would power urbanisation and development programmes would aid poverty alleviation, today it has changed radically; it is that of private consumption economies stimulating growth and a belief that this growth would alleviate poverty. As a consequence, the state’s priorities have shifted. It is to encourage the growth of middle class which will fuel the consumption economy and thereby enlarge the market.
It is now recognised that the growing visibility of the ‘middle classes’ marks the emergence of a wider national political culture of liberalising India. The middle classes represent the cultural symbols of the nation. Fernandes (2004) has argued that the new political culture promoted by the middle classes, shifts the earlier ideologies that promoted poverty alleviation and a form of asceticism and in urban areas allowed middle class housing to co-exist with slums to a new ideology where it represents the nation. She suggests that this new discourse is not about emptying places or regions but of ‘forgetting’ the discourses that assessed how economics and politics structures the marginalisation of groups and about forgetting intellectually and emotionally the poor and the working classes. It is about sanitising and naturalising the Indian society and representing it as a group of people climbing the ladder of mobility; it was about being an aspiration class and leading an aspirational nation. As a consequence, this class has now built various strategies of ‘spatial purification’ to erase the presence of the poor from its gaze.
The new middle classes were initially created by redefining their lifestyles. The availability of commodities such as cell-phones, colour televisions, washing machines and cars was made initially and these became status markers that dis-tinguished this social group. Later, leisure became a critical social space for the production of such social distinctions and huge investments were made in this industry. If large dams and steel plants were the icons of Nehruvian India, that of bowling alleys, ice-skating rinks, video parlours, restaurants, malls and amuse-ment parks, beauty salons, religious monuamuse-ments are the icons of the new India of the liberalising middle class.
the country, fractions of the middle classes have evolved political strategies to control and extend its influence over the urban space. If part of the city has been taken over to install gated communities, the other part has beautification pro-jects in public spaces and cleansing propro-jects to remove dirt and ugliness embod-ied in the slums, and those represented by the pavement hawkers. This assertive middle-class identity is articulated both in public discourses as well as in a range of cultural and social forms such as the development of new urban aesthetics and claims on public urban space through the emergence of new civil and community organisations.
Commentators have suggested that chaotic, myopic and opaque, incoherent state policies (which I have discussed above) have helped this identity formation. The ambivalences of policy and inconsistencies within governance have allowed the middle classes to use the local state bodies to take over the public spaces and privatise them, be it the sea beach, gardens, promenades, maidans or streets. This collaboration between the state and the middle class has provided a critical model of ‘urban livability’ today that actively excludes marginalised social groups. Thus, it is no surprise to note that with the middle classes has converted themselves as the ‘common man’ in the public discourse. The ‘other’ has been variously identified as the slum dweller. For them the ‘other’ is the slum dweller or the poor, the illegal migrant or the Muslim minority who they argue accesses through illegal means all public services which are meant for them, the real citizens of the country.
Srivastava (2014) who has dissected this discourse for Delhi has called it post-nationalist. He suggests that the middle class once it identifies itself as a common man, finds it easy to use the radical language of nationalist politics designed in an earlier period to confront colonialism now in a new context. For Srivastava, post nationalism is associated with framing of the new middle class and with it a national ‘family’ as being a nuclear family who combines modern values with ‘traditional’ concerns and thus tries to project itself as the new Indian. Politically this class questions the subsidies given to the poor alleging that the poor are constantly accessing illegally public resources. In this new political culture, the slum dweller/poor/minority is perceived as a criminal and a threat. It is in this context one has to examine the new Smart City policy of the present government which aim to have completely isolate sections of the new cities for the inhabita-tion of the middle and upper classes of India.
Towards a Conclusion
ways. I have argued that contemporary urbanisation is creating variegated and uneven geographies and these geographies are related to the way capital accumu-lation, led and deepened by state policies creates representationof spaces which groups makes into places (settlements) through spatial practices.In this article I have outlined four attributes for study of contemporary urbanisation: intersections of class, caste, gender and ethnicity in the constitution of inequities and exclu-sions of spaces; relations of these inequities with informalisation of work, labour and services including housing, water and sanitation; neo-liberal state policies and its discourses together with its politics through the formation of the new middle class and lastly the growth of individual, collective and state violence in context of these changes.
I am also suggesting that the present policies will not decrease these spatial inequalities and its variegated geographies, it will only increase them. Any inter-vention for decreasing these has to specially target and include the informal labouring population and involve them in reorganising themselves as sustainable economic and cultural communities that have opportunities to be mobile and who are not excluded and made into the ‘other’. The present strategies adopted by the state and the middle classes and which have now found support in local bodies will perpetuate discourses of cleavages. Given that we live, work and organise out lives in and through the urban habitat and have an interest in its sustenance culturally, socially, ecologically and politically, I think we need an open, frank and a critical discussion on these matters. We need to collectively intervene in these processes at various levels to counter the hegemonic project that is being implemented today in the name of the urban.
Note
1. Presidential Address in 43rd All India Sociological Conference held at Lucknow University, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh on 10 November 2017. The final version of the Presidential Address was received on 1 December 2017. Sections of this article were presented in longer versions as the Satynendra Nath Sen Memorial Lecture for the Asiatic Society in January 2017, Kolkata and as A.R. Desai Memorial Lecture at the University of Mumbai in March 2017.
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