Space, Planning and Everyday Contestations in Delhi (Exploring Urban Change in South Asia)

This insightful volume examines the politics and contestations around urban space in India’s national capital, Delhi. Moving beyond spectacular megaprojects and sites of consumption, this book engages with ordinary space and everyday life. Sites and communities analysed in this volume reveal the processes, relations, and logics through which the city’s grand plans are executed. The contributors argue that urbanization is negotiated and muddled, particularly in the spaces occupied by informal labour, resettled communities, and small-scale investors. The critical analyses in this volume shed light on the disjunctures between planning and ideology, narratives of growth and realities of immobility, and facades of modernity and the spaces and practices produced in its pursuit. The book is organized in four parts – (I) Dis/locating Bodies, (II) Claims at the Urban Frontier, (III) Informalization and Investment, and (IV) Gendered Mobility. The studies report current empirical work from a variety of sites, investigating the dynamics of capital investment, state planning and citizen response in these spaces. These studies, set in ordinary spaces in Delhi, reveal a subliminal disarray of thought and action, stemming from the impetus to make the city attractive to capital, while having to manage marginality and reorganize welfare functions. The volume provides fresh insights into the nature of urban planning and governance in an Indian megacity two decades after the neoliberal shift.

Surajit Chakravarty, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at ALHOSN University, Abu Dhabi. Surajit holds a PhD in Policy, Planning and Development (University of Southern California) and a Master’s in Urban Planning (University of Illinois). His research focuses on the politics of urbanization and the production of space. He is particularly interested in themes of informality, civic engagement, housing, and planning for diversity. His ongoing projects are based in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi and Delhi.

Rohit Negi, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Human Ecology at Ambedkar University Delhi. Rohit has a PhD in Geography (Ohio State University) and Masters in Urban Planning (University of Illinois), and his research interests span the intersections of capitalism, urbanism and ecology, with regional specialization in Southern Africa and South Asia. Negi’s work has been published in journals including Geoforum, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Economic and Political Weekly, and in popular publications like Himal Southasian, The Hindu and The Tribune.