“A World Class City of Your Own!”: Civic Governmentality in Chennai, India

Ellis, Rowan

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00958.x

Cited by 34 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…5 Schemes such as 'Singara Chennai' (translated as Beautiful Chennai) by the DMK in 2006 (Ellis, 2012) were re-packaged as 'Ezhilmigu Chennai' (translated as More Elegant Chennai) by the AIADMK in 2011 (Kotteswaran, 2013). 6 MRTS (Mass Rapid Transit System) in Chennai is an elevated railway line that was conceived in the seventies and has been in operation since 1997.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Shifting approaches to slums in Chennai: Political coalitions, policy discourses and practices

Saharan

Pfeffer

Baud

2018

Singap J Trop Geogr

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Slums pose a persistent challenge for fast growing urban areas in the global South, despite several decades of policy intervention. While Chennai has adopted several strategies ranging from upgrading to reconstruction, the city has been unable to deliver its target of 'clearing' slum settlements. Through an analysis of four enumeration reports and a look at the evolving political contexts and subsequent practices, we illustrate the evolution of slum policy approaches in Chennai since the 1970s. The analysis shows slum practices in Chennai continue to be characterized by an underlying continuity, with relocation as the dominant mode of operation since the nineties. However, approaches to slums have also evolved from paternalistic socialism with in-situ development in the seventies, to approaches characterized by affordability and cost recovery in the eighties, to the aesthetics of global cities in the nineties, to the technology driven, to slum-free 'smart city' discourse currently in vogue.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Schemes such as ‘Singara Chennai’ (translated as Beautiful Chennai) by the DMK in 2006 (Ellis, ) were re‐packaged as ‘Ezhilmigu Chennai’ (translated as More Elegant Chennai) by the AIADMK in 2011 (Kotteswaran, ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting approaches to slums in Chennai: Political coalitions, policy discourses and practices

Saharan

Pfeffer

Baud

2018

Singap J Trop Geogr

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Here, governance is not examined by tracing the circuits of power through which citizens are controlled, dominated, or oppressed by the state and related institutions, nor is it treated as a force that operates unidirectionally to inculcate citizens as self‐monitoring subjects of economic regimes that foist responsibility and risk onto the poor and working classes in the service of the interests of the elite (Thrift ; Gandy , ; Meehan ; c.f. Ellis ; Uitermark ; MacKinnon ; Roy ). Rather, this work focuses on the momentary and the commonplace, highlighting the ambiguity, ambivalence, indecision, and opportunity in which new realms of being emerge through the formation of new associations among governing subjects and the world around them.…”

Section: Governing Urban Space and Urban Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Political Ecology: Environmental Imaginary, Governance, and the Non‐Human

Gabriel

2014

Geography Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Urban political ecology (UPE) has established a firm foothold as urban environments have become increasingly relevant for both academics and for the broader environmental movement. Over the last decade, UPE has established a position that took as its starting point the tightly interwoven status of “socionature”, coupling a critical stance on urban environments through a theorization of society in which the “urban” is a distinct historical expression of capitalism. More recently, some in UPE have voiced the concern that this approach places too heavy an emphasis on structural capitalist forces and have begun to reexamine and push further UPE's engagement with post‐structuralism and post‐humanism. This paper explores three such moves: the first is a resurgence in interest in environmental imaginaries; the second is a closer engagement with the extensive literature on urban governance; the last is a new form of engagement with post‐humanism, specifically the theoretical implications of including non‐human agency into accounts of urban political ecologies.

show abstract

“…The new middle class is increasingly politically assertive, and on the one hand it remains skeptical of the government (Chatterjee ) while on the other hand its associations enjoy privileged access to government officials (Ellis ; Ghertner ; Ranganathan ). The political empowerment of the new middle class has come at the expense of the poor's political influence, whose participation in formal politics is often dismissed by critics as “vote bank politics” (Benjamin ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Making of “World-Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Schindler

2013

Antipode

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter-class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero-sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so-called "world-class" city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization-one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence-is what is at stake in contemporary inter-class relations.

show abstract

“A World Class City of Your Own!”: Civic Governmentality in Chennai, India

Cited by 34 publications

References 32 publications

Shifting approaches to slums in Chennai: Political coalitions, policy discourses and practices

Shifting approaches to slums in Chennai: Political coalitions, policy discourses and practices

Urban Political Ecology: Environmental Imaginary, Governance, and the Non‐Human

The Making of “World-Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About