New Delhi: Sage Publications India, 2014. xvi, 158 pp. (llustrations.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-81-321-1660-8.
Chatterjee’s book is an ambitious project for providing a comprehensive theory of contemporary urban transformation, in a short compass. It engages with theoretical developments as well as an empirical case study in an effort to “reverse the arrow of theory transfer” (xv). In doing so, Chatterjee reengages with the theories that originate within the context of Euro-America, including gentrification, new urban politics, municipal neoliberalism, and the right to the city. Chatterjee is invested in the Lefebvrian ideal of revolutionary transduction—the urban revolutionary praxis emanating from conceptualization and empirical observation. Like Lefebvre, the process of conceptualization remains the cornerstone of revolutionary spatial transformation for her. In her schema, conceptualization is not merely an intellectual exercise but a deeply embodied, affective, and political act. Thus, Chatterjee advances an activist and public intellectual claim for making connections across the globe for democratic politics.
Her starting point is the subject of displacement, which lies at the heart of urban exploitation and contemporary global conditions. Chatterjee steers clear of the wide-ranging body of postcolonial literature and varieties of urban theories emerging in the global South. Thus, the book is a Marxist meditation on what she argues is the estrangement of labor from the laboring spaces. According to her, labor estrangement is coterminous with spatial estrangement as “labor produces herself through space” (xiv). She takes up the specific case of Sabarmati River Front Development (SRFD) in the city of Ahmedabad to analyze the dialectical process of urban exploitation through displacement and resistance to it. Chatterjee conceptualizes the simultaneous displacement and exclusion of some and the emplacement and “development” of others as these processes define the urban/global condition of the contemporary world. She argues that the rapid urbanization that has become characteristic of the global condition takes place through a process of “territorialization of exploitation” and “deterritorialization of a people” (4). She also provides an account of the strengths and weaknesses of phenomenologists in addressing the issues of place-making, historical memory, and the production of identities. Her debt to the Marxist lineage of thought is obvious as she brings a political economy analysis to analyze place-making in the light of displacement and exploitation. However, she does not fully engage with some key theorists of phenomenology nor with the related work of David Harvey (“From Space to Place and Back Again,” in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference [Blackwell Publishers, 1996, 291–326] and The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change [Blackwell Publishers, 1990]). Her primary theoretical resource is the body of literature concerning New Urban Politics (NUP). She argues, however, that NUP literature that focuses on the shift from redistributive policies to entrepreneurial strategies of urban governance falls short on two counts. It neither sufficiently engages with the overlapping municipal neoliberalism literature, which emphasizes the examination of actual local entrepreneurial strategies enshrined in neoliberal models of governance, nor does it take into account the cultural strategies and spectacles analyzed within the place promotion literature. She builds on the conceptual parameters noted above to address the inadequacies within each body of literature in order to provide a comprehensive theoretical apparatus for investigating urban exploitation.
Apart from her case studies on “estranged spaces,” she makes original contributions with respect to “scientific mysticism,” “plebeianization,” and the varieties of struggles to claim the “right to the city” propounded by multiple constituencies. In particular, she proposes the concept of scientific mysticism to illustrate how ethno-religious discourses are spliced with entrepreneurial strategies for the scientific management of urban space. For instance, performative urban governance strategies such as Rath Yatra (chariot processions) of Hindu gods accompany modern techniques of enumeration, inscription, and cartography. Thus, the cultural tropes of religiosity and ethno-phobia are conjoined with entrepreneurial strategies of capital accumulation in the service of urban exploitation. Here, the shift towards profit-making within what she calls a “farewell [to] welfare approach” only guarantees minimal redistribution (34). She proposes the concept of plebeianization to examine the simultaneous processes of displacement, gentrification, and resettlement. Thus, while she sees gentrification as “the territoriality of class displacement” (9), her focus is on the containment of the plebeian classes through the process of resettlement. In particular, she analyzes how poor Muslims are contained within resettlement sites through ethno-religious exploitation. Further, she updates the Lefebvrian theory of the “right to the city” by analyzing varying conceptualizations on the part of three different constituencies. For example, in the social movement attempting to include all communities under the banner of Sabarmati Nagrik Adhikar Manch, the activists claim resettlement, Muslims demand the right to stay put, fearing ethnic violence in resettlement sites, and Hindus demand the right not to live with Muslims, thereby advocating ethnic “purity.” She makes an important point here in noting that the call for a variation on transduction or right to the city may not always yield emancipatory or truly revolutionary results.
While it is a delight to read her reviews and revisions of a range of theorists, the book lacks coherence as a whole. The ethnography is unfortunately thin. Thus, while she mentions the reclamation of old mill lands, caste and religious differences, and the controversial lottery system concerning resettlement, we do not get much detail about the shifts in the political economy of labor and industrial relations, the mechanics of displacement and subsequent resettlement in redeveloped mill areas, the conflicts along the lines of caste, community, and gender, or the struggles for eligibility. Her argument also appears reductionist in applying a Marxist analysis to explain the cultural tropes of entrepreneurialism. In fact, her empirical example of ethno-phobia raises important questions about ethnicity, spatial containment, and planning theory. Oren Yiftachel has produced certain interesting conceptualizations on these themes (“Re-Engaging Planning Theory? Towards ‘South-Eastern’ Perspectives,” Planning Theory 5, no. 3 [2006]: 211–222). Further, an engagement with state secularism, policies towards minorities and inter-caste/community conflicts shaping plebeian urban aspirations in a postcolonial democracy, could have opened up an interesting path of analysis (see also Thomas Blom Hansen, Violence in Urban India: Identity Politics, ‘Mumbai’, and the Postcolonial City [Permanent Black, 2005]). It is also notable that she does not engage with Partha Chatterjee’s influential work, which has provided important perspectives to rethink capitalism, democracy, and subaltern politics—the concerns that occupy the author (Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy [Permanent Black, 2011]). The processes of habitation, displacement, and resettlement are often the consequence of protracted struggles. Thus, what is required is a critical examination of modernity and democracy, caste and ethno-politics, and informality and capital accumulation in the global South in order to understand urban transformations. While she has used ethnography, interviews, and oral history to build a narrative on Ahmedabad, a review of the history of planning and an account of the specific roles of the Ahmedabad Development Authority and the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation are missing. This lack is particularly significant as Chatterjee has the grand vision of understanding the “global political economy of urbanism” as a comprehensive process (13). Along with understanding capitalist trends, patterns, and shifts of planning, it is also important to analyze historical legacies, cultural meanings, and the operation of social structures and institutions that shape urban transformations.
Chatterjee’s strength lies in showing how urban exploitation destroys the landscapes and lifescapes of labor but “reproduces the landscapes and lifescapes of accumulation” (5). Further, her innovative attempts yield important insights into “scientific mysticism,” “plebeianization,” and “farewell welfare approach.” In other words, perhaps only partial universalisms—to use an oxymoron—obtained with respect to capital accumulation and the neoliberal entrepreneurial spirit. As the book shows, theory has to emerge from context-specific realities and from comparative research across spaces and scales.
Sanjeev Routray
Northeastern University, Boston, USA
pp. 923-926