ABSTRACT
Kolkata’s north-eastern fringe has been steadily changing in the past decade. Intricate networks of villages, agricultural fields and water bodies have given way to dense, concrete high-rise apartments, steel and glass malls, large offices, convention halls, international and local hotel chains connected through concrete roads-all in different stages of construction. Now and then, there are a few village pockets, temples, mosques, cultivated farm lands and herds of cows that puncture the glossy new urban landscape. White-collar workers sip cups of tea at the roadside shacks manned by erstwhile cultivators. This is New Town, Rajarhat-one of the most visible spatial manifestations of economic liberalization and reforms undertaken by the erstwhile Left Front Government (LFG) in West Bengal in the 1990s.1 Rajarhat New Town, spread over 37 square kilometres and billed by the state as West Bengal’s first “green, eco-friendly, self-sufficient, and smart city” (Chakraborti 2014) with a projected population of a million people, reflects the changing trajectory of urban development. This chapter argues that the shift towards a market-based urban development model (Bose 2012, Roy 2003) has significantly reconfigured political ties and social relations across the urban periphery in violent, contested and intractable ways. Politics around land possession and dispossession is central to these contestations and fleeting coalitions.
