Abstract
This is a timely book, attempting to document, in the context of India, the gradual shift from a managerial to an entrepreneurial approach in urban management and governance. While the broad outlines of such a shift would bear similarities to what has happened in other parts of the world, namely, a shift in city government’s preoccupation with the provision of services and other facilities to urban residents to a more commercial and competitive local government focused on economic growth, India’s specificities anchored in its regional and cultural complexity and its stark inequalities require separate treatment. Smitha’s edited book, comprised of 10 chapters, attempts to fulfil this need through interesting essays on urban policy, institutions and practices as emanating from the top such as from government, the private sector and international institutions on the one hand, and on the other, on the incompleteness of reforms and project implementation due to various reasons including resistance and contestations from the ground. Twenty-five years after the official starting of economic reforms, it is indeed important to understand the nature of the changes taking place in the management of Indian cities and the effects of opening up on urban governance and liveability. The book is divided into three parts: the first dealing with the rules, regulations, norms and new policies underlying contemporary urban governance in India, the second is on the political economy of urbanization; and the third is focused on urban inclusions and exclusions.
Based on a wide ranging review of the literature, the editor in the opening essay attempts to provide a framework to understanding entrepreneurial urbanism in India and explains the purpose of the book which is to ‘contextualize the entrepreneurial urban initiatives and projects produced within local context’ (p. 25). In Chapter 2, Kundu and Krishna note three ways by which urban local governments in India have become entrepreneurial, namely, through a change in function from delivering social welfare to promoting economic development, the wide use of public–private partnerships to boost local economies and the prevalence of practices and discourses that are business friendly. Their article provides an overview of recent central government programmes such as Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, Smart City Mission and AMRUT. Sudhira, in Chapter 3, examines the nature of entrepreneurial governance in Bengaluru using terms such as ‘political entrepreneurship’ and ‘bureaucratic entrepreneurship’ to highlight the role of political leadership and state government organizations such as KUIDFC in facilitating the city’s transformation into ‘a beacon of the globalizing world’ (p. 69).
In the second part of the book, Mohan, in Chapter 4, provides an interesting case study in her article ‘From Hierarchy to Heterarchy: Moving beyond Entrepreneurial Governance’. Using the concept of ‘heterarchy’ which refers to the networks of collaborations between the public sector, private sector and civil society, she analyses the Municipal Reforms Programme (MRP), an e-governance programme of the Karnataka government that was launched in 2002. While noting the success of the pilot phase, she points out the problems of its scaling up during 2006–2012 when the ‘fluidity’ or relational contract among the various nodes of the heterarchy could not be facilitated by the state and there was little ownership of the reforms. Raman, in Chapter 5 entitled ‘Speculative Spaces: The Material Practices of Urban Entrepreneurialism’, examines the land development policies and practices of Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) and Delhi Development Authority (DDA). Focusing on three smaller towns in the NCR-extended area, she examines the activities of both large and smaller developers and their relationship with HUDA, while in the second case, DDA’s attempt at slum redevelopment of Kathputli colony is explored. Both cases reveal the active role of the urban development authorities as land brokers for private developers, how speculative practices drive the actions of major stakeholders and how projects, at the local level, can be ruptured by ‘unpredictability in local politics’. In Chapter 6, on ‘The Politics of Entrepreneurial Vision Group Plans and their Impact at the Local (Government) level, Bengaluru’, Baindur follows the increasing corporate influence on urban governance in Bengaluru and its consequences, namely the prioritization of infrastructure growth against basic needs. He concludes that ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘hybrid’ governance is having a ‘predatory impact’ as these infrastructure projects are excluding the poor while dislocating and displacing them.
Part 3 on urban inclusion and exclusion starts with Chapter 7, entitled ‘Remaking the “Mohalla”: Muslim Basti-dwellers and Entrepreneurial Urbanism in Mumbai’ by Contractor. Attempting to break away from stereotypes and present a nuanced and changing perspective, the article while situating the trajectory of Mumbai’s Muslims as a marginalized urban community, also, describes ‘the efforts of Muslim basti dwellers at finding infrastructure solutions as bottom up approaches to urban entrepreneurialism…’ (p. 142). But these examples are limited and do not address larger concerns such as spatial segregation, state negligence and discrimination in the mainstream housing market. Chapter 8 entitled ‘Fragile Entrepreneurialism: The Mumbai Airport Slum Redevelopment Project’ by Ren also attempts to break out of existing ways of thinking and go beyond the two dominant perspectives that have marked critical work on urban governance in India, namely, the framework of neoliberalism and the post-colonial perspective. Her focus is on ‘graduated forms of citizenship obtained in the contestation over urban development’. Using this in her case study, she shows how entrepreneurialism in urban India is different from that in the post-industrial cities of the West. Here, it is a ‘fragile entrepreneurialism’ due to the extreme fragmentation of state power at the urban scale. Every large project requires a new coalition of stakeholders and prior success does not guarantee smooth alliance building in the future even with the same stakeholders involved. Thus, while two pilot projects of resettling slum dwellers to expand Mumbai Airport’s runways in 2000–2002 were successful, the same stakeholders could not reassemble themselves for the main project (2007–present) of resettling around 400,000 slum dwellers.
Chapter 9 by Dhananka on ‘Planning their Homes in Entrepreneurial City: The Capacities of the Urban Poor and the Constraints of Public Policy’ is a comparative study of two poor communities assisted by the same NGO to access adequate housing in Bengaluru. One community was covered by the central government’s Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP), while the other was not covered and continued to live in an informal settlement and build its own housing. Findings indicate the success of the latter community where construction was completed to the residents’ satisfaction in contrast with the unsatisfactory state of delivery of the BSUP units where participatory planning had not been done, and buildings were of poor quality. In the last chapter, Chapter 10, entitled ‘Spatial Reproduction of Poverty in Entrepreneurial City: Bengaluru, India’, Smitha, on the basis of a socio-economic survey of the dwellers of two relocated slums, attempts to show how they renegotiate city spaces for employment and income.
Several interesting insights into the specificities of entrepreneurial urbanism in India are revealed through the articles of this book. One is the success of projects at the pilot phase, such as, Karnataka’s MRP and Mumbai Airport’s slum rehabilitation and their stalling or unsatisfactory performance at a more scaled-up level. The causes and ways to avoid this situation of early success and subsequent failure or slowing down should be of great interest and are a part of the narrative of these cases. A second issue that emerges is of the continuing need of the state to act as coordinator and facilitator in the multi-organizational networks that are increasingly characterizing urban infrastructure projects. An overtly hierarchical and dominant state agency, however, is unlikely to succeed in such a role. More critically, is an issue that has been touched upon by several authors and it is the impact of entrepreneurial urbanism on the poor and marginalized in the city. Current urban policies and practices have been regarded by them as favouring the elite and being ‘predatory’ in its unconcern for the poor and in using the land that houses and sustains the poor for infrastructure projects. However, some authors have also pointed out effects that have been somewhat moderated by subaltern agency at the ground level. In this view, the poor too are ‘entrepreneurial’ seeing in the city opportunities and possibilities for economic and social mobility and seizing them to actively remake their immediate environment.
The book as a whole, however, highlights the fragile and fragmented nature of urban entrepreneurialism in Indian cities, beset with numerous overlapping organizations that do not coordinate effectively for the city’s betterment. When they do, as in the case of Bengaluru, it is to promote an elite vision of city growth. In fact, another feature of the first 25 years of entrepreneurial urbanism in India is the continued lack of an inclusive vision in the urban planning process. Planning by an elite cabal of government bureaucrats, private sector consultants and civil society organizations that represent the middle and upper middle classes continues to leave out an important stakeholder, namely, residents of slums and squatter colonies. Their voice has to be configured in the planning process. Leaving them out is one of the major causes of project delays and non-implementation of plans that could improve the city. Here, the government has to play a just and neutral role thinking of the larger interests of society rather than the narrow interests of the corporate and real estate lobby. Without the hope of improvement in their lives via slum-upgrading programmes where they rather than developers actually benefit, irregular settlement regularization, social rent initiatives and self-help housing projects controlled by community associations, as was the case in Brazil from the mid-1980s, urban infrastructure building in India will continue to be challenged by ground level opposition, making it slow and costly. More proactive and humane state and city governments, prioritizing an agenda that balances the growth of the city with the basic requirements of its poor for livelihoods and decent housing, are clearly needed. It is this inclusion and balance that must be worked at in the next 25 years.
To conclude, there is much of value in this edited book, in particular, several fresh and interesting case studies. However, some of the book’s shortcomings need to be mentioned as well. One is the fact that of the 10 chapters, 5 of them are on a single city, Bengaluru. This has resulted in quite a bit of repetition of the information on urban governance organizations and policies and reduced the scope of the book. A second shortcoming is the lack of careful editing and numerous errors, both typos and grammatical, in the text which make the reading of some articles less smooth and even confusing. A glossary of acronyms at the start of the book would have been helpful as well.