Development as Urban Imaginary: Post-colonial Planning and Heteroglossic Cities of India

Abstract

Contemporary India’s tryst with development continues to revolve around cities, and the latter remain the locus of India’s development narrative. But instead of seeing the city as already constituted or as a backdrop for economic activities, the present article proposes to implicate the city as a producer and product of social relations as well as a site of resistance and conformity. While doing so, it moves away from conventional modernist paradigms of imagining the city as the highest rung of development geography or the Marxist/subaltern studies formula of reading the city as a space of unredeemable inequality leading to the insurgency of the marginalised. What is proposed here is that the idea of city is emergent which expresses itself neither through its official representations nor through the radicalism of dissent but through multiple unstructured articulations of everyday life as well as the contingency of power and resistance. This is corroborated by drawing upon the experience of Thyagaraya Nagar (T. Nagar) which provides a representative Indian urban experience and where social and political relations spill out of institutional planning templates.