Journal ArticleDOI
Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City
TLDR
In this article, the authors explore the process of making Bangalore, India into a "world city" by focusing on specific world-city projects, the parastatal government agencies managing them, the explosive IT industry as the putative engine behind this world city making, and the interurban dynamics across world cities such as Dubai and Singapore.Abstract:
This article explores the process of making Bangalore, India into a ‘world city’ by focusing on specific world-city projects, the parastatal government agencies managing them, the explosive IT industry as the putative engine behind this world-city making, and the inter-urban dynamics across world cities such as Dubai and Singapore. Most of these activities are linked to the highly remunerative challenge of transforming rural economies into urban real estate. Land speculation and active dispossession of those working and living in the rural periphery, on land upon which the new world-city projects are being built, is the main business of government today in Bangalore. This article suggests that this temporary ‘state of exception’, with both its attendant suspensions of civil and human rights as well as their institutionalization into government practices, reflects a shift into new forms of ‘speculative’ government, economy, urbanism and citizenship.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares?
TL;DR: The reality in all of these cities stands in stark contrast to the glass-box towers, manicured lawns and water features on developers' and architects' websites, and the most likely outcome of these fantasy plans is a steady worsening of the marginalization and inequalities that already beset these cities as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws, and 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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Rethinking Informality: Politics, Crisis, and the City
TL;DR: In this paper, a conceptualisation that conceives informality and formality as forms of practice is proposed, and three conceptual frames for charting the changing relations of informal and formal practices: speculation, composition, and bricolage.
Journal ArticleDOI
The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that existing theories of land grabs do not adequately explain why dispossession becomes necessary to accumulation at particular times and places, and seek to reconstruct Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession to adequately account for it.
Journal ArticleDOI
Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India
TL;DR: The authors reconstructs David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India, where the accumulation generated by this dispossession 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.
References
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Book
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
TL;DR: The Neoliberal State and Neoliberalism with 'Chinese Characteristics' as mentioned in this paper is an example of the Neoliberal state in the context of Chinese characteristics of Chinese people and its relationship with Chinese culture.
Book
Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought
TL;DR: Powers of Freedom as mentioned in this paper is an approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways and argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources.
Book
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
TL;DR: The Mystery of Capital as discussed by the authors is one of the most influential books in the history of the world, and it has already led the cognoscenti to put him in the pantheon of great progressive intellectuals of our age.
MonographDOI
The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo
TL;DR: Sassen's seminal work as discussed by the authors chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes.