The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India, in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws. First, I argue that Dholera smart city is part of a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning that emerged as a response to the challenges of development and modernity in post-independent India. Second, that Dholera highlights a shift towards an ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in a regional state interested in scaling up a ‘Gujarat model of development’ for emulation at the scale of the nation. Finally, that in Dholera ‘speed’ is a ...

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New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat

Recent scholarship highlights that accumulation by dispossession creates surplus populations who must sustain themselves outside wage labor, often through informal work. This article theorizes a different aspect of the relationship between the informal economy and accumulation by dispossession by analyzing how the state and capital seek to capture new spheres of accumulation created by informal workers. Drawing on Searle's theorization of social ontology it explores how reclaimers at a Soweto garbage dump reconceptualized trash as holding potential value and transformed the landfill from a commodity cemetery into a resource mine. The attempt to enclose the landfill therefore required appropriating not only the materials at the dump but the very framing of these materials as valuable. Reclaimers' grievance over this “epistemic injustice” fueled their successful opposition to the enclosure, demonstrating the centrality of “epistemic dispossession” to accumulation by dispossession. Highlighting the epistemic and social agency of informal workers considered the epitome of “human waste” establishes the need to recognize all informal workers as producers of knowledge and social reality and facilitates more nuanced understandings of accumulation by dispossession, how and why it is contested, and how alternatives can be forged

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263775815600058

Accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy – Struggles over knowledge, being and waste at a Soweto garbage dump

We analyze findings from a large-scale survey of around 5000 respondents across 12 states of India, conducted during the months of April and May 2020, to study the impact of COVID-19 pandemic conta...

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Pandemic, informality, and vulnerability: impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods in India

Developing countries like India are under international pressure to sign a legally binding emissions treaty to avert catastrophic climatic change. Developing countries, however, have argued that any international agreement must be based on historic and per capita carbon emissions, with developed countries responsible for reducing their emissions first and funding mitigation and adaptation in other countries. Recently, however, several scholars have argued that Indian government climate change discourses are shifting, primarily by recognizing the “co-benefits” of an alignment between its development and climate change objectives, and by displaying increasing “flexibility” on mitigation targets. This study investigates the factors driving shifting Indian discourses of climate change by conducting and analyzing 25 interviews of Indian climate policy elites, including scientists, energy policy experts, leading government officials, journalists, business leaders, and advocates, in addition to analysis of articles published in Economic and Political Weekly (a prominent Indian policy journal), and reports published by the government and other agencies. Our analysis suggests that India’s concerns about increasing energy access and security, along with newer concerns about vulnerability to climate change and the international leadership aspirations of the Indian government, along with emergence of new actors and institutions, has led to plurality of discourses, with potential implications for India’s climate change policies.

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Shifting discourses of climate change in India

are two contradictory views on the impact of globalisation on labour activism. It is widely argued that globalisation has considerably weakened labour movements all over the world. With labour tied to specific geographical locations, increasingly footloose capital has made economies, especially the developing ones, vulnerable to capital strike the threat of capital moving out to places more attractive in terms of wages and standards, thus unleashing a race to the bottom. Labour, unlike in the second half of the 20th century, now has to passively adapt to the terms dictated by freely mobile global capital. This view, however, has not gone uncontested. There is a counter perspective in which it is asserted that while globalisation has undoubtedly undermined the conditions that made traditional trade unionism associated with Fordist mass production possible, the very forces of globalisation themselves have opened up new terrains where radically new forms of labour activism can be imagined. Globalisation may have created conditions that are debilitating for labour in the traditional sense of working class power but, at the same time, it has potentially empowered the working class in ways that the 20th century pre-globalised world did not allow. As Silver (2003) and Webster et al (2008) argue, the complex global network of production based on outsourcing and subcontracting that is emerging and consolidating is actually making global capital more vulnerable than before to disruptions in the global circuit of production and circulation, thus increasing the bargaining power of the working class. In this otherwise illuminating debate, labour, it must be noted, is characterised as wage-labour, and employment as wageemployment. In other words, it focuses exclusively on employment based on capitalist production relations that are rooted in the separation of capital and labour. The reality of developing countries today, however, does not answer such a monist characterisation of labour. It is now well known that developing economies are marked by the existence of an overwhelmingly large volume of economic activities that fall within what is described as the informal sector. It is an economic space in which workers engage in economic activities in ways that are very different from the capitalist organisation of production. In particular, the prevalent form of labour in the informal sector is self-employment, which is different from the usual wage-based employment resting on the alienation of labour from capital. Decades ago, Theodor Shanin, in introducing A V Chayanov's The Theory of Peasant Economy, wrote,

Beyond the Factory: Globalisation, Informalisation of Production and the New Locations of Labour

According to the India: Urban Poverty Report, the urban population in India is growing at a rate faster than the total population, and by 2030, 41% of the country’s people will live in cities and towns (GOI 2009). This will create immense pressure on India’s urban economies with their already massive deficits in infrastructure and civic amenities. Moreover, the big cities in India are growing faster than small and medium towns. The government has responded to this coming crisis by promoting new townships close to Indian metropolises in an attempt to decongest them (Wang, Kundu and Chen 2010). However, the development of new towns functions less as a means to decongest the older metropolitan centres than as a means to bypass them. This is the new face of urbanisation in India; it relies on the “bypass” approach to urbanisation instead of the urban regeneration approach one finds in western cities. In the urban regeneration approach, comprehensive action is taken to overhaul the physical, social, economic and environmental character of an urban space that has degenerated over time. More often than not, the idea is to reclaim a position in the global economy as a reinvigorated centre for business, professional assemblage and tourism. To this end, cities are transformed into “entertainment machines”, where high value-producing workers “make ‘quality of life’ demands, and in their consumption practices can experience their own urban location as if tourists, emphasising aesthetic concerns” (Lloyd and Clark 2001: 357). The new face of western cities is largely explained by the decline of the industrial economy in the cities and the rise, in its place, of a new economy that revolves around finance, producer services, entertainment, information technology, media, and so on, which is referred to as the “informational economy” (Castells 1989), postindustrial economy (Sassen 2001) or even postmodern economy (Hardt 1999). In contrast to an industrial proletariat, the workers in this new economy, who assert their quality of life demands on the city, are producers of symbols, simulations and information. Their quality of life demands have triumphed over the logic of social reproduction that constituted the urban space in the Fordist era, leading to the gentrification of cities and the exclusion of disadvantaged urban populations and the traditional working

Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-colonial Urbanisation

Dualism in the Informal Economy: Exploring the Indian Informal Manufacturing Sector

There are two contradictory views on the impact of globalization on labour activism. It is widely argued that globalization has considerably weakened labour movements all over the world. It is observed that, with labour tied to its specific geographical locations, increasingly footloose capital has made economies, especially the developing ones, vulnerable to capital strike — the threat of capital moving out to places more attractive in terms of wages and standards — unleashing a race to the bottom for developing countries. Labour, unlike in the second half of the twentieth century, now has passively to adapt to the terms dictated by mobile global capital.

Kalyan Sanyal

Papers

Beyond the Factory: Globalisation, Informalisation of Production and the New Locations of Labour

Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-colonial Urbanisation

Dualism in the Informal Economy: Exploring the Indian Informal Manufacturing Sector

Beyond the Factory: Globalization, Informalization of Production and the Changing Locations of Labour