Globalization and Slum Growth in India: Elements for a Theorization

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to develop an account of the links between the dynamics of globalization and slum growth in developing-world cities. It examines how globalization has fostered changes to housing and slums in the case of India. In order to do so, it examines several cases of urban change within India, situating them within globalization-related mutations to urban political economies and then drawing connections back to a broader theoretical account of denationalization and reterritorialization within network society. It employs a framework drawn from Castells' 1983 investigation of urban social movements, The City and the Grassroots. He conceives of city spaces - from slums to business districts - as the products of particular urban meanings. In other words, housing availability and shelter deprivation within Indian cities is related to the goals that those cities have been assigned to accomplish both with respect to their inhabitants and within wider networks of trade and finance. Furthermore, urban meanings are constantly being contested by various grassroots and elite groups that use the city. These groups are seeking to establish their “right to the city”. This thesis employs this approach to draw connections between processes of urban change occurring within cities and the broader dynamics of the global political economy. It begins with an examination of three cases of urban change in globalizing India: community-based slum upgrading projects pioneered by a prominent grassroots slum-dwellers' movement, the contested redevelopment of Asia's largest slum, Dharavi, Mumbai, and the construction of “new town” developments on the outskirts of Kolkata. Subsequently, it discusses the effects of four globalization-related changes within Indian cities on those cases. It completes the movement from local to global by setting the changes to India's urban political economies within a theoretical account of globalization that draws upon Saskia Sassen and Castells' accounts of global cities and network society. Finally, it concludes with a brief discussion of the implications for citizenship rights. It suggests that new forms of citizenship, based on the right to the city, may be emerging from political contestations over slums and housing in Indian cities.