Urbanizing Citizenship: Contested Spaces in Indian Cities

Abstract

This book provokes a critical discussion on urbanism(s) in India using urban citizenship as a lens of interrogation. Bringing together an interdisciplinary and emerging group of scholars working on India, this book looks at six cities – Ahmedabad, peri-urban Bangalore, Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai and Varanasi – and examines a range of processes: urban renewal, participatory slum resettlement, municipal reforms, city imagineering, urban environmentalism, squatting politics, urban protest, and civil violence. The volume provides a fresh understanding of the multiple arenas and practices through which citizenship(s) and urbanism(s) are co-constituted in India. Collectively, the chapters interrogate a range of spaces in the city – such as the squatter settlement, the slum resettlement site, the refugee colony, the mohalla, the city street and the urban mega-event – as sites of citizenship. They show how each of these spaces is made and transformed through particular spatial imaginaries and modes of control, regulation, and governance as well as through different forms of negotiation and claims-making by subaltern groups. This reveals the myriad implications of urban processes for citizenship in Indian cities and vice versa. The chapters also show that urbanism and citizenship in India are shaped by various constellations of the local, regional, national and transnational. Through ethnographies and histories of the urban, the chapters unsettle theories generated in the Euro-American context to show how urban citizenship might be differently practiced, understood, and reconfigured within the Indian context.

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