Development in the City: Growth and Inclusion in India, Brazil, and South Africa

Abstract

In this paper I explore questions of development, state capacity and democracy through the prism of urban transformation. Focusing on the challenges of urban governance, I argue that despite similar legacies of exclusion and shared pressures of marketization the modal mega city in India, South Africa and Brazil has taken a distinct form. The Indian city is a characterized as a growth cabal, in which economic and political elites have exploited institutional failures to extract enormous rents from the city. This has come both at the expense of inclusion and of the sustainability of growth. Despite tremendous political pressures and significant local capacity for more inclusionary policies, I show that the South African city has become a classic growth machine, supported and sustained by a stable political coalition and relatively effective forms of governance. But in the absence of links to civil society, efforts to promote inclusion have failed and the state now faces a crisis of legitimacy. The Brazilian city has been exposed to the same pressures of a globalizing world. But it has also developed new capacities to promote inclusion, earning it the label of the social city. I argue that the different urban regimes have emerged from two constellations. On the one hand, Central-local state relations have been critical in determining the capacity and substance of urban transformation. On the other hand, the dynamics of democratization, and specifically the relationship between the local state and civil society (shaped in no small part by extra-local institutional arrangements), largely explains the extent to which the local state can effectively reverse the dynamics of urban exclusion. 1 I am grateful to all the participants in the conference from which this volume emerged for the vigorous debates and richness of comparative perspectives that have driven this project. I am especially grateful to Jeremy Seekings, Peter Evans, Maria Herminia, Atul Kohli, Partha Mukhopadhyay and Michael Walton for their comments on this paper.

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