Abstract
Ghertner’s research has brought to light the issue of emergent urbanism and subject formation. This book uses a detailed ethnographic approach to examine how subjects are governed through the process of making Delhi into a world-class city. It is about how the speculative projection of a city (i.e., the circulation of images) reflects a crisis in urban economy. The book brings the different role the state plays in the everyday life of the urban poor into the picture. There have been recent works on this theme by Srivastava (2014) and Chatterjee (2004), in addition to works by Wacquant, which have dealt with the question of forms of power and how modern subjects respond to a new governmentality. The major question of the research is how do city planners and administration conceive the idea of a ‘world-class’ city and the ways in which the participation of the masses in this process is insured.
Sociologists have been interested in understanding the dynamics of order and disorder. Particular attention has been paid to deconstructing the notion of ‘social order,’ not just from what it ‘appears’ from the outside but also what ‘it is’ within. One hardly needs to recall Marx’s obsessive ideas on ‘form’ and ‘content.’ The author formulates the key problem in a similar way by asking how a ‘code of appearance’ comes to define the ‘aesthetics of the future city.’ More than what state procedures and bureaucratic rationality (as Weber has popularized) formulate, the city has become more of a conception based on ‘how it looks.’ Thus, ‘look’ becomes a central category for Ghertner for understanding the process of urban restructuring in cities such as Delhi. Spatial imagination then guides the planning and contributes to the organization of the public mind. It leads to the new definition of ‘legality,’ e.g., what looks good and clean (e.g., a mall) is labeled as ‘legal and rational’ and what does not (e.g., a slum) ends up being called ‘illegal and unplanned.’ This is not something drastically new, rather it has been part of the colonial state policies as well. Delhi therefore comes to be characterized by an ‘aspirational’ target the nation must achieve. The author brilliantly traces this journey from aesthetics as imagined by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) to slum demolition (Shiv Camp, a slum dwelling) in order to reach what he calls ‘sensory knowledge’ (p. 9) about the city planning.
It shows the manner in which the narrative of state, media, and the corporate sector pushes into the public mind so that the whole (speculative) project of Delhi as a ‘world-class city’ gains permanent ground. He discusses how this speculative urban project has contributed to land development and a boom in the real estate industry in the Indian economy. The broad link between the swelling of foreign direct investment in real estate and the state-led projection of a future city leading to a new conception of urban space in cities like Delhi is obvious. One cannot forget how the Delhi government rushed to cover the city with large boards during the Commonwealth Games to hide the ‘slum’ because it did not look good. The spatial divide becomes deeper with the state-defined agenda of making Delhi a ‘slum-free’ city. The state has participated in the project by focusing its energy on ‘visible infrastructure’ such as the Delhi Metro, overpasses, and new roads (p. 11). This speculative projection of future technology is a topic in the first chapter of the book. Ghertner deals with state plans such as Delhi Master Plan 2021, and reviews court judgments to analyze the creation of certain imagery of Delhi.
In Chapter 2, ‘Gentrifying the state,’ the author presents the emergence of new political bodies in the form of resident welfare associations (RWA) in Delhi and how their participation gained new direction with the state initiative ‘Bhagidari’ (participation). RWAs further fueled the spatial imagination of city by adding aesthetics of quality of life, public parks, and the demands of citizens to the gentrification of city. These ideas have been contested in existing works on urbanism. Ghertner merely reframes this question in finer detail.
The significance of the narrative can be understood by focusing on the ways in which slums get defined as ‘ugly, unhygienic, and a nuisance.’ According to the author, the aesthetic disposition formulated by the state then translates itself into the everyday sensibilities of the population. At another level, this brings us to class-specific habitus formation as discussed by Bourdieu. This symbolic domain then contributes to the state plan of creating a popular consensus that slums are not and cannot be part of the ‘future city’ and thereby gaining legitimacy in the drive for slum demolition. Not just this, this conception of space then enters judicial discourses as well. This aspect is discussed in Chapter 4, in which space is rendered via ‘aesthetic criminalization’ (p. 99).
After showing the process through which this aesthetic imagination is translated into action, the author presents another key issue for the readers. This is about how the urban poor and slum dwellers negotiate this sensibility produced by the state, political elites, and mainstream media. The question the author deals with is why do the poor participate in the new imagery of city in which they have no ‘space,’ so to speak? According to author, with the changing state view of ‘space’ and ‘city,’ different participants within the project also alter their vision of it. Likewise, slum dwellers also adjust their engagement with the state by appropriating this aesthetic imagination and thereby gathering legitimacy for their existence in the city. They might not actually believe in the symbolic narrative constructed by media or state actors, but their appropriation provides them a platform to claim, protest, or negotiate in a different way. However, the author could have elaborated this question differently. For example, one can think of the way in which the urban poor have engaged with state politics through patronage, and operated beyond ‘legality’ (see, e.g., Chatterjee, 2004). This leads us to the importance of land politics in cities like Delhi where, using court judgments, urban middle-class bodies (e.g., RWAs) aim to clean the space by demolishing slums (e.g., Shiv Camp). After a court order, the state had demolished hundreds of slums (jhuggis, as they are called locally), but apart from the usual protests and demonstrations, not much was resisted collectively. The author investigates the lack of collective protests in the case of Shiv Camp, and found that extant scholarship speaks of submission by the urban poor. The lack of protest may read like a failure of the subaltern politics, and the author examines the way urban subalterns have ‘given in’ to the state plans and aesthetic vision to further claim their stake in the future city. Thus, using the same aesthetic vision and city projection, they demand better urban infrastructure, shelter, and livelihoods, which Ghertner calls ‘geography of hope’ (p. 186). How far this ‘appropriation’ by the urban poor has succeeded so far in Delhi needs to be studied further.
Lastly, some questions to ponder. I wonder why the author did not connect the struggles (sangharsh, as they are called locally) of residence to those concerning work. Over the years, Delhi has experienced periodic efforts by state government to reinvent the concept of work through labor laws, and the rise of new working neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city. Had Ghertner made an attempt to locate the urban crisis within the field of ‘work,’ this book would have been more concrete. After all, the aesthetic vision appeals more to the middle-class Indians than to the poor. Finally, the book demonstrates what an academic work can achieve by connecting the ordinary lives of the urban poor with the larger political economy of postcolonial city like Delhi. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and lay persons who want to understand the nature of urban process today and how people are articulating their demand for a ‘right to a city.’