ABSTRACT
One of the most profound effects of India’s shift since the 1980s from a developmentalist state to a neoliberalising one has been to fundamentally transform the role and the form of its cities. If, following in the footsteps of Gandhi, India’s villages were long thought to hold the key to the country’s identity, values and future, today India’s cities are not only growing phenomenally – fed by migrants and commuters from rural hinterlands across India – but have become sites for cutting-edge global innovation in urban capital extraction, deregulated planning, informal living, insurgent and gated citizenship and fierce contests between an emergent middle class with world-class aspirations and the poor whom many would like to expel in the name of the city beautiful (Roy 2009; Roy 2011b; Benjamin 2008; Weinstein 2008; Holston 2007). Highly dynamic, creative, productive and conflicted, these are cities, as Ananya Roy (2011a) remarks so incisively, in which neither neoliberalism nor justice are guaranteed to be the outcome.
