Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossession and Corruption Narratives in Urban India

Doshi, Sapana; Ranganathan, Malini

doi:10.1080/24694452.2016.1226124

Cited by 56 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Because of the boon to developers as well as their dubious tactics, the SRS has been attacked in recent years as a thinly veiled land grab (Doshi and Ranganathan, ). While these criticisms are well‐founded, it is a mistake to characterize SRS solely in top‐down terms.…”

Section: The Political Ecology Of Uneven Development and Slum Rehabilmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is anybody's guess that the developer who constructs multi‐story towers is very much part of the elaborate gameplan’ (Viju B, ). This is a common narrative of corruption perpetuated by elites, middle class environmental activists, and state agents whereby slums become discursively disconnected from the housing and livelihood needs of the poor to enter into a murky conspiracy theory of corruption (Doshi and Ranganathan, ).…”

Section: Enabling Environmental Improvement Through Slum Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Greening Displacements, Displacing Green: Environmental Subjectivity, Slum Clearance, and the Embodied Political Ecologies of Dispossession in Mumbai

Doshi¹

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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In Indian cities, informal ‘slum’ settlements have long been targeted for removal as an environmental improvement strategy, despite their relatively low impact. Slum clearance has escalated with the combination of speculative development and environmental change, creating uneven precarity throughout Mumbai's neighborhoods. State agents play a direct role in slum evictions, but they do not act unilaterally. Diverse lower‐income and middle‐class residents seeking better living conditions have sometimes converged in their embrace of slum clearances and resettlements that advance elite development interests. In other moments, the dispossessing effects of market‐based and elite‐biased slum rehabilitation have fomented contestation. This article analyzes how differently situated groups emerge as ‘environmental subjects’ that embrace or contest improvement projects. It suggests three dimensions of subject formation: governing logics and discourses of urban environmental improvement, the territorial politics of informality, and differentiated embodied experiences of precarity and dispossession. Environmental subject formation is explored through two interventions that entail slum clearance—mangrove and green space conservation and an urban transport infrastructure project. Findings suggest that the connection between displacement and improvement cannot be explained through theories of environmental gentrification but require attention to the simultaneously inclusive and dispossessing regimes of postcolonial development.

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Section: The Political Ecology Of Uneven Development and Slum Rehabilmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Enabling Environmental Improvement Through Slum Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Greening Displacements, Displacing Green: Environmental Subjectivity, Slum Clearance, and the Embodied Political Ecologies of Dispossession in Mumbai

Doshi¹

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…Everyday Life, Poverty, and Comparison" and Doshi and Ranganathan's (2017) "Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossession and Corruption Narratives in Urban India" are exemplars for thinking through this growth.…”

Section: "The City"mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Enduring Struggle for Social Justice and the City

Heynen¹,

Aiello

Keegan³

et al. 2018

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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“…In doing so, we speak to theoretical debates about the postpolitical and the broader questions about the specificity of politics to which those discussions have been joined (Beveridge and Koch 2017;Bond et al 2015;Davidson and Martin 2014;Derickson 2017b;Dikeç and Swyngedouw 2017;Leitner and Strunk 2014;Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014). We turn to Doshi and Ranganathan's (2017) work on political narrative and to MacLeod and McFarlane's (2014) writing on the "grammars of urban injustice" to emphasize how the frameworks through which we understand urban politics are never the province of critical scholarship alone, and we suggest the value of approaches that can sensitize us to the ways that politics-and its meaning-can itself become a problem as the relation between compassion and politics becomes an object of debate and struggle. As such, we argue that the meaning of the compassionate city can be determined neither in relation to the, likely, benevolent intentions of its advocates nor to scholarly critiques of compassion as a singular logic, but instead emerges as the contingent outcome of political action and claims-making in a plural and uneven world.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘There is no political agenda’

Ruez¹,

Parekh

2019

City

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This paper examines the emerging trend for city governments to declare themselves compassionate. Opening up the 'compassionate city' as an object of critical scrutiny, we outline some of the key ways that compassion has been approached in critical scholarship before turning our attention to the politics of these urban commitments to compassion as they are enacted in practice. Focusing on the city of Louisville, where the 'compassionate city' imaginary has been taken on both by politicians and by economic, migrant and racial justice activists, we examine the potential of compassion as and in relation to other political grammars, and consider the polyvalent nature of the compassionate city as it has shaped public debate and political struggle in the city. We argue that this turn toward compassion should be evaluated and understood neither in terms of the good intentions of compassion proponents nor exclusively through analyses that reduce compassion to a single logic to be critiqued, but, instead, in terms of its contingent politics. In doing so, we respond to recent debates about the specificity of the political by emphasizing that the meaning of politics and the political grammars through which we understand urban problems are never the province of critical scholarship alone, and we highlight the value of approaches that can sensitize us to the ways that politics-and its meaning-can itself become a problem as the political nature of the compassionate city is called into question.

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Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossession and Corruption Narratives in Urban India

Cited by 56 publications

References 29 publications

Greening Displacements, Displacing Green: Environmental Subjectivity, Slum Clearance, and the Embodied Political Ecologies of Dispossession in Mumbai

Greening Displacements, Displacing Green: Environmental Subjectivity, Slum Clearance, and the Embodied Political Ecologies of Dispossession in Mumbai

The Enduring Struggle for Social Justice and the City

‘There is no political agenda’

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