ABSTRACT
India’s first masterplanned company town Jamshedpur appears to stand out as an urban success story, emblematic of a model of benevolent ‘welfare capitalism’. Although comprehensive masterplanning was the sine qua non of India’s company towns, planned housing and infrastructure rarely sufficed for the mass of unskilled and semi-skilled workers employed at these sites. Deconstructed, the company town/proprietary city model comprises several discrete but related elements that bear close kinship to an emerging policy architecture for greenfield and private urban development in India in the new millennium. While the notion of the proprietary city suggests a valuable lens to examine the Jamshedpur case, it is equally important to consider its history in light of the longer lineage of company towns round the world. Empirical data provides remarkable testimony to the durability of the exclusions built into the company-town model. These exclusions continue to be mirrored in the unequal provisioning of social and physical infrastructures in emergent shadow settlements.
