ABSTRACT
This chapter examines links between spatial development strategies and rescaling processes in metropolitan Delhi. Engaging with the literature on state spatial rescaling and metropolitan development, it investigates the extent to which policies aimed at enhancing economic growth and competitiveness in India’s National Capital Region are contributing to the construction of a metropolitan scale. The starting point is the observation that strategies deployed by actors situated at varying spatial scales increasingly target the metropolitan region, suggesting it forms a spatial frame a reference. Mobilizing empirical case material from two distinct policy areas, public transport and industrial development, this paper discusses the implications of these policies for constructing metropolitan space and the scope for this space to exist as an effective scale. A further aim is to understand which actors, situated at which spatial scales, are driving these processes and the implications for metropolitan governance.
The case of the metro rail system and its current extension into the metropolitan region illustrates how actions driven by the central government, via ad-hoc agencies, are contributing to the spatial integration of the metropolitan region. Increased mobility and connectivity between places afforded by mass transit are constructing the metropolitan scale as a lived space. The second case focuses on policies drafted at various levels of government that aim to promote economic development in the metropolitan region, such as the national law on Special Economic Zones. We show how Haryana, a State with considerable territory in the National Capital Region, designs policies to take advantage of its proximity to the agglomeration, including incentives to attract private capital and making strategic public investments in infrastructure. By shaping the investment climate in the metropolitan region, such policies contribute to the social production of space.
To the extent that both sets of policies are gradually constructing metropolitan space as an arena with social and political texture, it is occurring without the parallel construction of a political entity. This observation appears to contradict a number of hypotheses advanced in the literature on rescaling and more broadly on the restructuring of economic geographies in metropolitan regions. In particular, it suggests a significant departure from theory that postulates a relative enhancement of the local state within the administrative hierarchy of the nation-state. On the basis of the evidence provided here, we argue for the need to differentiate between political rescaling and spatial rescaling, which appear to be disconnected processes in India, at least for now. The central state asserts a preeminent position over space within Delhi State, although to a lesser extent in the National Capital Region, which includes peri-urban and even rural spaces. Here, State governments appear as potential counter-weights, at least on some issues. Both the dominance of the central state and the will of State governments to wield unrestrained power over their territories may well act as deterrents, in future, to the emergence of a metropolitan-scale political entity.
