Politics of Community-making in New Urban India

<p>This book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. It is based on an ethnographic study in Noida a city at the eastern fringe of the state of Uttar Pradesh bordering national capital Delhi. </p><p>The book demonstrates a flexible planning approach being central to the entrepreneurial turn in India’s post-liberalisation urbanisation whereby a small-scale industrial township is transformed into a real-estate driven modern city. Its real point of departure however is in the argument that this turn can enable a form of illiberal community-making in new cities that are quite different from older metropolises. Exclusivist forms of solidarity and symbolic boundary construction - stemming from the differences across communities as well as their internal heterogeneities - form the crux of this process which is examined in three distinct but often interspersed socio-spatial forms: planned middle-class residential quarters ‘urban villages’ and migrant squatter colonies. </p><p>The book combines radical geographical conceptualisations of social production of space and neoliberal urbanism with sociological and anthropological approaches to urban community-making. It will be of interest to researchers in development studies sociology urban studies as well as readers interested in society and politics of contemporary India/South Asia.</p>