The city of Mumbai is undergoing a complex social, economic, and political transition into an increasingly fragmentary and polarized metropolitan space. The tortuous flow of water through contemporary Mumbai presents one of the most striking indicators of persistent social inequalities within the postcolonial metropolis. We find that the city's dysfunctional water infrastructure has its roots within the colonial era but these incipient weaknesses have been exacerbated in recent years by rapid urban growth, authoritarian forms of political mobilization, and the dominance of middle-class interests within a denuded public realm. It is argued that the water and sanitation crisis facing Mumbai needs to be understood in relation to the particularities of capitalist urbanization and state formation in an Indian context.

Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai

This paper examines specific ways in which sanitation infrastructure matter politically both as a set of materials and as a discursive object in colonial and postcolonial Bombay. It reflects on a history of sanitation as a set of concepts which can both historicise seemingly ‘new’ practices and shed light on the contemporary city. It considers two moments in Bombay’s ‘sanitary history’ – the mid-nineteenth century and the present day – and elucidates the distinct and changing spatial imaginaries and logics of sanitation in their broad relation to urbanization and nature. The paper conceptualises colonial discourses of a ‘contaminated city’ and public health, and finds productive sites of intersection between these discourses and contemporary debates and practices in Bombay, including bourgeois environmentalism, discourses of the ‘world city’, and logics of community-managed sanitation infrastructures. It highlights an important role for urban comparativism, in the context of different imaginaries and logics, in both cases. By connecting infrastructure, public health discourses and modes of urban government, the paper traces a specific historical geography of cyborg urbanization that is always already splintered, unequal and contested. For the urban poor in particular, much is at stake in how the sanitary city is constructed as a problem, how the solutions to it are mobilized, and how improvement is measured.

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Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over-accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra-economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India’s privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non-productive economic activity and pre-capitalist forms of exploitation.

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

The ambition to develop Delhi as a global city is rooted in the liberalization reforms of the 1990s. Parts of the city region were integrated with the global economy, providing international firms with investment opportunities and outsourced services, while the metropolitan area emerged as a significant agglomeration of Export Processing Zones. The development of modern infrastructure, high-end residential complexes and exclusive shopping malls, in line with the rise of consumerism and middle-class ideology, has spectacularly transformed the urban landscape. This drive for global competitiveness involving image-building has had negative consequences, especially for the poor, through ‘cleansing’ the city of slums and other alleged undesirable elements, and has exacerbated socio-spatial polarization. Delhi's experience thus exemplifies the problematic implementation of a Western construct — the global-city model — in a metropolis of the South characterized by strong socio-economic inequalities as well as the ascent of urban entrepreneurialism and its translation into a ‘revanchist city’. Although Delhi's trajectory is not unique in this respect, the magnitude of the informal sector combined with the increasing assertiveness of the social groups who have benefited most from the economic reforms provides a context in which the imposition of a new economic model and urban aesthetics generates particularly tangible tensions. What also makes the case of the Indian capital remarkable is the conjunction of structural factors — the overriding power of the state and the decisive intervention of the courts in urban affairs — with an international event — the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Resume
L'ambition de transformer Delhi en ville globale est ancree dans les reformes de liberalisation des annees 1990. Certaines parties de la region metropolitaine se sont integrees dans l'economie mondiale, en fournissant aux entreprises internationales des possibilites d'investissement et de services externalises, tandis que l'aire metropolitaine apparait comme une agglomeration importante de zones franches. Le developpement d'infrastructures modernes, de complexes residentiels haut de gamme et de centres commerciaux elitistes, en conformite avec la montee du consumerisme et de l'ideologie des classes moyennes, a transforme le paysage urbain de maniere spectaculaire. Cette course a la competitivite globale, impliquant la construction d'une certaine image urbaine, a eu des consequences negatives, surtout pour les pauvres, par le biais de ‘nettoyages’ destines a debarrasser la capitale de ses bidonvilles et autres elements juges indesirables, et a exacerbe la polarisation socio-spatiale. L'experience de Delhi illustre ainsi la mise en œuvre problematique d'un concept occidental — le modele de la ville globale — dans une metropole du Sud caracterisee par de fortes inegalites socio-economiques, ainsi que la montee de l' ‘entrepreneurialisme’ urbain et sa traduction en une ‘ville revancharde’. Bien que la trajectoire de Delhi ne soit pas unique a cet egard, l'ampleur du secteur informel, combinee avec l'affirmation croissante des groupes sociaux qui ont le plus beneficie des reformes economiques, fournit un contexte ou l'imposition d'un nouveau modele economique et d'une nouvelle esthetique urbaine genere des tensions particulierement tangibles. Ce qui rend aussi le cas de la capitale indienne remarquable, c'est la conjonction de facteurs structurels — le pouvoir preponderant de l'Etat et l'intervention decisive des tribunaux dans les affaires urbaines — et d'un evenement international — les Jeux du Commonwealth de 2010.

The dream of Delhi as a global city

For over a decade, researchers have analyzed the effects of liberalization and globalization on urban development, considering the local political implications of shifts at the national and global scales. Taking the case of Mumbai, this article examines how the past 15 years of political reforms in India have reshaped property markets and the politics of land development. Among the newly empowered actors, local criminal syndicates, often with global connections, have seized political opportunities created by these shifts to gain influence over land development. The rise of Mumbai’s organized criminal activity in the 1950s was closely linked to India’s macroeconomic policies, with strict regulation of imports fuelling the growth of black market smuggling. Liberalization and deregulation since the early 1990s have diminished demand for smuggled consumer goods and criminal syndicates have since diversified their operations. With skyrocketing real estate prices in the 1990s, bolstered by global land speculation, the mafia began investing in property development. Supported by an illicit nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and the police, the mafia has emerged as a central figure in Mumbai’s land development politics. The article examines the structural shifts that facilitated the criminalization of land development and the implications of mafia involvement in local politics.

http://www.umsl.edu/~naumannj/professional%20geography%20articles/Mumbai%27s%20Development%20Mafias%20-%20Globalization,%20Organized%20Crime%20and%20Land%20Development.pdf

Mumbai's Development Mafias: Globalization, Organized Crime and Land Development

Shifting Cities: Urban Restructuring in Mumbai

﻿The belated entry of geographers into the field of analysis of international operations of large industrial organisations was initially marked by a stress on individual organisations and regional issues, gradually progressed towards combining structural issues with organisational researches. Interactive approaches and the incorporation of social theory were additions in the process. With the development of a political economy perspective, however, geographical research began to identify the underlying web of economic forces and social relations of the international industrial operations and hence could integrate industrial and development geography.

Industrial Geography and Studies on Multinational Corporations

This paper examines the evolution of the new development enclaves - special economic zones - in India in the light of the space relations of capital. The process of establishing sezs in India is essentially a classic unfolding of the process of "accumulation by dispossession" which is part of the recent strategy of global capital to overcome the chronic problem of over-accumulation. The paper throws light on the ongoing reorganisation of the space relations of capital in India.

Swapna Banerjee-Guha

Papers

Shifting Cities: Urban Restructuring in Mumbai

Industrial Geography and Studies on Multinational Corporations

Space Relations of Capital