The Neo-liberal City

A Critical Geography
Judith Whitehead

his edited volume brings the insights of critical geography to bear on the study of cities in south Asia; a few of the essays focus on Europe. In the past 25 years, critical geographers have produced cutting-edge analyses of the effects of neo-liberal policies on urban regions, in terms of their spatial transformations, changes in employment patterns, and the rescaling and reshaping of municipal governance. The editor of this volume, Swapna Banerjee-Guha, is a prominent member of the International Critical Geography Group, and so I picked up this volume with much anticipation. Banerjee-Guhas introduction skilfully summarises the multi-scalar and multifaceted forces shaping neo-liberalising cities in south Asia. These include not only the increased commodication of services, a decrease in formal sector employment, a retreat of the welfare state, and hyperexploitation of workers, but also new forms of governance that promote the entrepreneurial capacity of individual cities (p 1). In this race to the bottom, municipal governments have been reshaped to suit the needs of a marketdriven global economy, resulting in the withdrawal of the state from urban planning, increasing gentrication of particular neighbourhoods, and publicprivate par tnerships that provide generous public subsidies to private developers (p 2). In the process, as she notes, both space and labour become highly fragmented and dispersed through income polarisation and extreme differentiation in spaces of habitation. New forms of centrality and marginality emerge within cities, as capital seeks out the cheapest and most exible labour force, and the highest returns on real estate investment through increasing colonisation and differentiation of
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book review
Accumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order edited by Swapna Banerjee-Guha (New Delhi: Sage), 2010; pp 256, Rs 695.

space. The totality of these combined processes creates new forms of accumulation by dispossession, a process through which resources, lands, water, benets, rights, or knowledge that had previously been considered public goods or community property, become progressively commodied and privatised. Driven by the logic of nance capital, one of the effects of accumulation by dispossession is increasing income polarisation and class differentiation through multiple channels, a process now brilliantly condensed in the Occupy Movements main slogan, We are the 99%. Two Classic Essays The volume opens with two classic, general essays. The rst is David Harveys essay, Right to the City, which shows how investment in the urban-built environment has been a major means for capital to overcome the contradictions of over-accumulation, while at the same time engendering dispossession through creative destruction. Hence, while massive infrastructural projects and commercial real estate provide a spatial x to over-accumulation, they simultaneously cause wide-scale displacement. Drawing from historical examples, he argues that rights to the city involve more than rights of habitation; they also include the political right to shape the direction of urban development. The assertion of such rights in the context of continual spatial xes means that urban environments are contested terrains. Saskia Sassens essay focuses on the processes of dispersal and centralisation
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accompanying globalisation, i e, the dispersal of production to places that offer competitive advantage, and the concentration of managerial and nancial power in networks of global cities. This new geography of centres and margins produces the by now famous hierarchy of global cities and regional or gateway cities, and less integrated centres. These patterns are the result of the creation of nodes and networks of cities that function as command and control centres at various scales of the global economy. The two general essays are followed by studies of particular cities. Heinz Nissel examines the neo-liberalisation of planning in Vienna, Austria. Although often rated as one of the most liveable cities in the world due to its previous social democratic urban planning and cultural history, Nissel shows how increased disparity and income polarisation have resulted from Vienna being repositioned as a nancial gateway. With the liberalisation of east European economies in the 1990s, Vienna became a major nancial mediator between western Europe and the east European hinterland, with its much cheaper labour power. Simultaneously, it became a desired location for east European and Turkish migrants. Nissel analyses in great detail the changing spatial patterns of centralisation and marginalisation. The old city in the inner districts remains the cultural heart of the city, the location of the central business district, and the favoured locale of the very rich. Migrants are conned to privately rented housing in the outer districts, where disinvestment has been severe in recent decades. Hence, class and ethnic divisions have become increasingly mapped onto spatial divisions between the inner and outer districts. He concludes by making a plea that social policy must dominate the urban economy, and not vice versa. Nazrul Islam and Salma Sha detail changes in Dhaka, Bangladesh as it became integrated into global networks. The rise of garment manufacturing for transnational rms is the chief result of Dhakas integration into the global economy. Hence, the city has witnessed
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BOOK REVIEW

the proliferation of export processing zones and commercial high-end real estate, alongside slums and shanty towns that house low-wage garment workers and other city workers. Solomon Benjamin provides a thick description of the changes in urban governance in Bangalore, India, as a result of its rescaling into a major global information technology (IT) centre. Even software production requires large amounts of land, it seems. The manner in which Bangalores municipal government acquired land for large IT corridors, whilst dispossessing previous inhabitants provided a governance model for other Indian cities to follow. Benjamin, in my view, correctly identies e-governance, public-private partnerships, e-titling, biometrics, geographic information system (GIS)-based planning, and civil society partnerships as Trojan Horses (p 104) that produced a seamless rhetoric, easing and erasing the processes of dispossession. To give two telling examples, Benjamin exposes how e-titling and GIS planning in Bangalore simply erased previous customary users of the land that was later acquired for private industry. He also shows how public-private partnerships provided generous incentives for urban developers, and documents how only elite civil society groups were included within the newly revamped, net worked governance structure of Bangalores municipality. Umesh Varma Pakalapati, in a clear and incisive essay, discusses accumulation by dispossession in Hyderabad. He maps several projects of the Hyderabad Urban Development Authority that are pushing the poor out of the citys centre and its developmental orbit. He also documents the process of land acquisition in which farmers were compensated for only 10-15% of the market value for their land. He further documents violations of the Urban Land Ceiling Act, forced acquisition of land from slum-dwellers and the middle class under the Land Acquisition Act 1884, and the regularisation of encroachments of the powerful by municipal and state governments. Chapter 8 on Reconguring Power Relationships: Policies towards Urban Services in Mumbai examines the
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changing forms of urban governance in Mumbai through the lens of service delivery, i e, waste management, water and electricity provision. Marie-Helene Zerah documents the increasing commodication of services, which she differentiates from the process that others have described as creeping privatisation. She also shows how the subcontracting of municipal services appeals to the middle class while subverting the claims of the citys slum-dwellers to service provisioning. Darryl DMonte, in an essay reprinted from a 2001 seminar, focuses on changing transport policies in Mumbai. He documents how the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) municipal government bypassed the apex planning body, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), to vest future transport planning in the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), a purely engineering agency. In this way, it was able to subvert debates on the future of public transport for Mumbai. Public options included upgrading the existing train and bus systems, or new alternatives such as underground railways and sea ferries. Instead, the MSRDC, as a technocratic body, acquiesced in the planning and development of yovers, sea links and freeways. All privilege private over public transport, while increasing trafc congestion and causing environmental harm. DMonte mentions in passing a public hearing on the future Bandra-Worli Sea Link. Since the sea link has now been open for a few years, this statement is dated. A more recent discussion of the environmental damage to the sheries in Mahim Bay and to the slum-dwellers in Worli would help update this otherwise informative chapter. Banerjee-Guhas nal chapter, Revisiting Accumulation by Dispossession, shows how the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), while aiming to put Indian cities on a fast track to development, does precisely the opposite for large numbers of urban dwellers. This is because despite allocating 35% of total funds for Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP), the JNNURM advocates powerful neo-liberal policies that facilitate accumulation by dispossession. In a very telling graph, she summarises the
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similarities between the New Economic Policy, the New Urban Policy, and nally the JNNURM. With its emphasis on largescale gentrication and mega-projects, the privatisation of basic services and public funds, and the liberalisation of land and real estate markets, the exclusionary thrust of the JNNURM will almost certainly overwhelm its social provisions, producing more dispossession in its wake. Indeed, the JNNURM looks remarkably similar to the competitive city model analysed by Jessop (2002), Kipfer and Keil (2002), and Brenner (1999), as well as by Banerjee-Guha. This administrative model, or grid, has travelled relatively seamlessly from Washington and New York to London through New Labours Third Way, and from thence through multiple international fora and private consultancies such as McKinsey and Company, to much of rest of the world. Indias Planning Commission, too, seems to be a fan of this model. Careful Research Overall, this volume provides detailed and carefully researched articles on the effects of neo-liberalism on urban policy and changing metropolitan spaces in south Asia and elsewhere. The chapters by Banerjee-Guha offer insightful and original theoretical views on how nance capital is reshaping urban regions. Her discussion of spaces of difference, of the reshaping of centre and periphery in urban areas, and the hyper-differentiation of absolute space, not only draws from contemporary critical geography, but also extends its insights. In addition, it adapts much of this literature for a southern context by introducing imperialism as a category of analysis.
We can supply books published by Permanent Black. Postage free within India. Please contact: Ram Advani Booksellers Mayfair Building Hazratganj GPO Box No. 154 Lucknow - 226 001 E-Mail: radvanilko@gmail.com Telephone Nos. 0522-3060990/ 0522-2623511
vol xlvii no 13
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My only concern with the volume as a whole is that there is thematic unevenness across the chapters. Some utilise globalisation as the lens to examine new urban policy, others take neoliberalism as their focus, and only one author besides the editor explicitly discusses accumulation by dispossession, the title of the book. This is surprising given that the editors chapters provide a theoretical arsenal that could be easily woven into the various case studies. In addition, the chapters focusing on governance could have beneted from a closer reading of existing critical geography. For example, Peck and Tickells (2002) famous distinction between rollback and roll-out neo-liberalism, or Swyngedouws (2005) discussion of the authoritarian character of networked

governance, or Kipfer and Keils (2002) analysis of the competitive city model, to cite but three of many examples, would have claried some of the denser empirical descriptions of changing urban governance in south Asia. While such works are cited in Banerjee-Guhas chapters, they nd no mention in the other chapters. And while south Asia undoubtedly possesses specic metropolitan features, the ubiquitous nature of neoliberal urban governance deserves theoretical recognition and consideration. It seems to me that this can occur only when there is a circulation of and commentary on critical urban geography across national borders and national scholarship. Despite these caveats, this is an exciting and well-researched volume that will be of interest to planners, activists, and

social scientists working on urban issues in south Asia.

Judith Whitehead (whitja01@uleth.ca) is with the department of anthropology, University of Lethbridge, Canada.

References
Brenner, Neil (1999): Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The Rescaling of Urban Governance in the European Union, Urban Studies, 35(3): 431-51. Jessop, Bob (2002): Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical Perspective, Antipode, 34(3): 453-71. Kipfer, Stefan and Roger Keil (2002): Toronto Inc? Planning the Competitive City in the New Toronto, Antipode, 34(2): 227-64. Peck, Jamie and Adam Tickell (2002): Neolibera lising Space, Antipode, 34(3): 380-400. Swyngedouw, E (2005): Let the People Govern? Civil Society, Governmentality, and Governance beyond the State, paper submitted to Urban Studies, accessed on 29 February 2012, http://www.ru.nl/socgeo/colloquium/humboldt.pdf

Memoirs of a White Who Crossed the Line

M S Prabhakara

enalising legitimate dissent, let alone active political opposition to an entrenched iniquitous social and political order, is a near universal practice. Where such social and political inequities are institutionalised with all the coercive authority of the State, one can only imagine the violence let loose on democratic opposition. Dissidents and opponents of the regime are branded criminals, are routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed. Yet, no country ever admits that it does such things, that it holds political prisoners. Conquest and Expansion Apartheid South Africa presented one of the starkest examples of this phenomenon in practice. The country, more exactly the land that is now the state of a democratic South Africa, was colonised by European settlers in quick stages in the latter part of the 17th century. In the mythology of colonialism in this part of Africa this was done more by accident than by design when Jan van Riebeeck
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The Final Prize: My Life in the Anti-apartheid Struggle by Norman Levy (Cape Town: South African History Online), 2011; pp 478, Rands 275.

of the Dutch East India Company, founded two years after the founding of the East India Company, landed in Table Bay in what is now Cape Town on 6 April 1652 and established a victualling station there, without a clear design of occupation and conquest. However, within a week of his landing, the Fort of Good Hope began to be built; and less than a decade later the Dutch settlers, no more voyagers in transit, were ghting the Khoikhoi, the original inhabitants of the Cape, to occupy their lands and enslave them. The history of the land and its people over the next three centuries was one of the relentless spread of the colonial settlement, conquest and expansion, and violent suppression of native resistance which never died out. Further, the arrival of settlers and adventurers from other parts of Europe drawn by the
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opportunities of the colony, and later by the discovery of gold and diamond deposits, led to rivalries and the inevitable wars between different streams of the colonial settlers, extending the contentions of Europe to southern Africa. Everyone wanted a piece of action, a piece of territory. Eventually, after the conclusion of the two Anglo-Boer wars (or the Anglo-Transvaal War, 1880-81 and the South African War, 1899-1902), the contending Boer/Afrikaner nationalists and the English colonialists joined hands and signed the Treaty of Vereeniging (31 May 1902), whose objective was the joint dispossession of the lands of the overwhelming majority of the native black people, and the eventual establishment of the Union of South Africa eight years later, on 31 May 1910, as a dominion of the British empire, analogous to the old dominions like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, independent countries owing loyalty to the British crown. Three years later, and causally linked to the establishment of the Dominion of South Africa, came the passing, by a socalled parliament where the majority of the people were not represented, of the Native Land Act, 1913, effectively dispossessing millions of Africans of their lands. The formation of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912 was
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