Displacement, Revolution, and the New Urban Condition: Theories and Case Studies - Hardcover

Chatterjee, Ipsita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8132116607 ISBN 13: 9788132116608

Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd, 2014

Synopsis

Displacement, Revolution, and the New Urban Condition provides a window into the global urban contradiction through the lens of a Third World city. It is not a book on urban India, or a book on Ahmedabad city, or even a book on the Sabarmati River Front Development (SRFD) project, but it is a book that uses all these lenses to conceptualize urban exploitation. 

The author develops a dialectical praxis of theory transfer that takes us from the First World to the Third World and back again. In the process, the arrow of theory transfer is not reversed, because theory cannot be transferred by simply changing the direction of the arrow; instead, an attempt is made to (re)produce and (re)inform different conceptual worlds by juxtaposing it with the SRFD project in Ahmedabad city. 

This book is, therefore, as much about the poor people of Ahmedabad as it is about global urban displacement and the politics of resettlement and resistance―theory and practice are always inflected, and the chapters demonstrate this inflection deeply and clearly. The point is to change the world, and to do so we must relentlessly struggle to better the concepts that we use to understand it with. This book is such a struggle.

About this title

About the Author

Ipsita Chatterjee is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, University of North Texas. She has also served as an assistant professor at the Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin, from 2009 to 2013, and a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University. Chatterjee’s research focuses on the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization, displacement, violence, and class/ identity-based urban exclusions. She has authored articles in Urban Studies, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Geoforum, Gender, Place and Culture, among others. 

Review

An insight into various problems and challenges that displaced people face throughout their lives. Rehabilitation and resettlement of displaced persons pose major challenges for the government and citizens....this book has lucidly interfaced the theories revolving around urban policies and development by studying the Sabarmati River Front Development (SRFD) and the people of Ahemdabad. It would help geographers, planners, policy makers to internalize that urban change is not a simple process of renewing idle spaces but it is at the same time an exploitative mechanism to displace people and their labouring landscape. Author: Social Action, Vol 65

The book informs "new urban politics"- a policy shift in urban governance that challenges the notion of the city as a place for redistributive justice by appealing to entrepreneurial capital, through two mutually inclusive concepts....This book can also be read as a people’s history of development in Gujarat, whose characteristics have been replicated in large-scale development projects all over India...It is a gleaming of entrepreneurial urbanism, marking a shift from social urbanism.
Author: Economic & Political Weekly, 1 August 2015

This is a valuable book that grapples with differing narratives of development, resistance and community present in the SFRD project. Chatterjee’s work is most powerful when she challenges homogenous narratives of resistance and lends a theoretical gaze to the aftermath of resettlement. Her account, though at times dense, also importantly links theory exchange between the Global North and the Global South, demonstrating how the SFRD is not just about a riverfront community in Ahmedabad, but about global urban displacement.

Author: Kavita Ramakrishnan, University of East Anglia

"Chatterjee’s book is an ambitious project for providing a comprehensive theory of contemporary urban transformation, in short compass.... Chatterjee’s strength lies in showing how urban exploitation destroys the landscapes and lifescapes of labor but "reproduces the landscapes and lifescapes of accumulation"."

Author: Pacific Affairs, December, 2016

This book is recommended for whoever is interested in urban development or non-secular urban governance and especially for students, as Chatterjee provides, apart from her own interesting analysis, her lucid readings of crucial theories and concepts...her book is a creative and politically important theoretical undertaking and should find a broad audience in this capacity.

Author: Social Change, Source: Vol 46 (Issue 4), December 2016

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 8132116607
• ISBN 13: 9788132116608
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176