ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of urban development in Noida. It commences with a broad historical overview of the development of the city via a close reading of its successive Master Plans and then proceeds to discuss three segregated social spaces – the urban residential zones, urban villages and jhuggi jhopdis – spread across its entirety. It examines how these spaces have been produced in time, the fractious boundaries that demarcate them and the politics of contestations that they give rise to. The analytical point that the chapter advances is that neoliberal urbanisation in India can potentially create – as evident in the case of Noida – segregated spaces and contested boundaries in which the state engages differently with the affluent middle classes, villagers and jhuggi residents. While this in itself is not a new observation insofar as gentrification being a common theme in the contemporary urbanisation literature, the chapter draws attention to the fact that such spatial segregation is not merely physical, but has significant social and political connotations. Once this form of urbanisation takes root, the politics that emerges becomes about perpetuating the segregated character of this space.
