Metropolitan democracy from below: participation and rescaling in Delhi

Abstract

The concept of ‘metropolitan democracy’ is crucial to understanding the political dimension of cities. But while this concept has strong normative value, its ability to describe a reality is less obvious. This paper argues that metropolitan democracy is defined by a multiplicity of scales, legitimacies and actors, and that the development of participatory practices offers a privileged standpoint to analyse the competition (and sometimes the cooperation) between them. Observing metropolitan democracy ‘from below’ indeed reveals two heuristic features of this concept: it sheds a light on rescaling processes and their implications in terms of distribution of resources; and it questions the tension between the different types of legitimacy that are at stake in such processes. The argument is based on an empirical study of four participatory experiments implemented in the Indian city–state of Delhi in the past two decades. The paper shows that the development of such participatory practices increases the competition between multiple scales, legitimacies and actors, and that it results in a new, partly unpredictable, dispersion of power through the redistribution of two power resources, namely: voice and visibility. However, the Delhi case also makes clear that such dispersion of power is not necessarily synonymous with democratization.

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