ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the problematic spatial imaginaries that underwrite the idea of community in policy discourse today. It explores the role of a state besieged by fiscal and political crises in producing a community. The chapter argues that the community envisioned by the new community participation laws runs the risk of producing serious spatial injustice particularly in the urban areas by providing new rationalisations for withdrawal of public spending and forcibly making localities responsible for their own well-being. The urban community which is often equated with Ward Sabhas and Area Sabhas in the current versions of municipal law is part of a continuum of responses to crises that the Indian state began to experience in the early 1990s. The notion of ‘community’ as a central category of governance in Andhra Pradesh was born in the context of intense reforms and restructuring of the state.
