Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the role of designed landscapes in contemporary Indian cities and how politics of aesthetics dictate the development of these public open spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary Indian cities are facing great challenges as unprecedented urban growth is exerting tremendous pressure on urban infrastructure on one hand and new found economic growth and neoliberal agendas are dictating the physical developments of the urban areas on the other. Landscape design is used in the large scale development projects for semiotic manipulations and identity creations. Landscape architects' involvements with large scale urban development projects are heavily influenced by larger political, economic, social, cultural and environmental power plays which need to be balanced by the professional group. This paper explores how the politics of aesthetics drive urban environmental changes in contemporary India by analyzing designed urban public open spaces from four metropolitan cities and critically examine the role of landscape designers within the whole political system.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses interviews with actors, scholarly literature, press and visual documentation to examine and analyze how recent development projects at water bodies in Ahmedabad have utilized narratives of ‘modernization’ to produce policed sites of consumption and exclusion as ‘public spaces’.

Paper long abstract:

Public water bodies in Ahmedabad have been host to conflicts in which coalitions of a variety of actors have reconfigured patterns of social relations, land use and regional hydrological regimes. This paper uses Hajer's (1993) discourse-coalition approach to investigate how city administrators, state-championed technocrats and planners, city elites, displaced residents and civic associations have mobilized for or resisted urban development projects through rhetoric of ecology, environment, society and publics. Field-based research suggests that storylines of 'beautification' and 'sanitization' of water bodies has constructed a local form of 'ecological modernization' discourse in Ahmedabad (Mathur 2012). Such narratives have mobilized an active anti-poor stance and transformed water bodies into commodified leisure spaces with increased surrounding land values favoring elites. The privileging of entrepreneurial governance has normalized the role of technical actors such as private design and construction consultancies. In turn, other actors have aligned around notions of 'ecological crisis' or 'forced displacement' (of biophysical ecologies, people, habitat and livelihoods) to contest processes and outcomes in globalized city-making in Ahmedabad. Recent projects such as the Sabarmati Riverfront rely upon policing and narratives of the 'sanitary city' to socially discipline the urban poor into accepting hydrological landscapes as territories for leisure and Ahmedabad's ruling and middle classes (Diwadkar 2013). In this paper, we rely upon interviews with actors, scholarly literature, press and visual documentation to examine and analyze how recent development projects at water bodies in Ahmedabad have utilized narratives of 'modernization' to produce policed sites of consumption and exclusion as 'public spaces'.

Paper short abstract:

The research unfolds the micro-politics of land and its tenacious effect on the ecological performance, a case of Bangalore city in India. It seeks to position the city’s urban history, the conflicts of land and water, in its evolution from a feudal agrarian community to capitalist global city.

Paper long abstract:

The complexity of Indian urban ecology, continue to characterize an apparition of rural setting. Land has been an enduring subject of contention in the exploration of urban history of these ecologies, the administration and control of which appropriated as a political entity prompted specific spatial practices. Land and its micro politics have deteriorated the condition of the urban ecological regimes transforming them to realms of economic rationalisation and hydraulic engineering science.

The symbiotic relationship between the ecological regimes of land, water and people has undergone a series of conflicts in its transformation to an urban setting gathering momentum during the colonial times, a governance model prompting a participatory mechanism to shift to a centralized mode. The paper raises questions on the trajectories of ecological, institutional and technological dimension of land and water governance resulting in ecological imbalances, unsustainability and inequity of natural resources and on the differences between an ecological approach and an engineering approach of land water management.

The study, on Bangalore city in India, seeks to position the city's urban history, the conflicts of land and kere (tank) systems, in its evolution from a feudal agrarian community to capitalist global city. The epiphenomenal or the passive stance to ecological systems perhaps urges an accurate understanding of current resource use regimes and a common property framework beyond a mere political decentralisation process. The discussion concludes by reckoning the vulnerability of urban ecologies, the regenerative capacities of landscapes of socio political processes and the dichotomies of the idea of decentralisation.

Paper short abstract:

By analysing the role of local environmental NGOs and environmental think tanks working towards the conservation of the river Yamuna in Delhi, India, the paper explores the diverse informal/formal means environmentalists directly/indirectly influence urban environmental governance.

Paper long abstract:

While the rejuvenation of India's rivers is a major future challenge for sustainable urban development, large-scale riverfront development projects across India indicate that the riverbed is often seen almost exclusively as real estate ripe for development. In Delhi, channelization of the Yamuna and riverfront development has been discussed since the late 1970s based on models of European riverfronts. Recently urban mega-projects have been realized on the river's floodplain resulting in a wakeup call for environmentalists emphasizing on the ecological integrity of the river and the close relationship between the river and the city. These developments and the hybrid character of Yamuna's riverscapes - landscape/waterscape, urban/rural, natural/anthropogenic, flow/extraction, purity/pollution - evoke various questions of socio-environmental sustainability and justice. In contrast to the well-described environmentalism of the poor, recent scholarship on Indian

environmentalism has focused on the conflicting outcomes of middle-class conservation agendas and beautification movements - commonly termed bourgeois environmentalism. Although critically engaging with middle-class activism in general, this paper challenges this seemingly clear dichotomy

by analysing the different roles of local environmental NGOs and environmental think tanks (e.g. CSE, WWF India) in urban environmental governance. Based on interviews with environmentalists and officials (2010-2013), this paper stresses that especially small and locally-based environmental NGOs - although middle-class dominated - do not exclusively strive for middle class interests, but rather endeavour ecological sustainability and social justice. By focusing on their day-to-day practices and networks the paper explores the diverse informal/formal means environmentalists directly/indirectly negotiate with the multi-layered state - always balancing between protest, petitioning, and policy counselling.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing insights from political ecology the article unpacks emerging socio-spatial relations of water pollution in urban and peri-urban Delhi, and uses empirical evidence to argue for an elaborated understanding of the diverse patterns of emergence of pollution and its significance for different groups.

Paper long abstract:

Political ecology offers a framework that can support critical explorations of the role of knowledge, and provokes deeper thinking on the power and competing value systems that govern human-environment interactions. This paper draws insights from political ecology thinking to unpack emergent socio-spatial relations of water pollution in urban and peri-urban Delhi, and offers a deeper analysis of how these relations become dynamically co-constructed by multiple actors in both material and subjective ways. Thus the 'extremes' of pollution witnessed today in several 'world cities' of the Global South, are treated as not purely symptomatic of flawed state driven policies and interventions, but partly as a consequence of the wider political, economic and technological forces driving contemporary urbanisation and peri-urbanisation. Urban water pollution is often (misleadingly) assumed to present (more or less) the same impact across urban (and peri-urban) social and ecological landscapes. However, in this article, and based upon rich empirical evidence from interviews and document analysis in Delhi, it is argued that knowledge brokering between different actors, the intertwined nature of the material, cultural and policy dimensions of water pollution, as well as the varying degrees of exposure of different social groups to pollution, suggests the emergence of new socio-spatial relations. A deeper understanding of these relations, becomes essential as cities in the Global South continue to grow.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the historical and contemporary structural arrangements facilitating the politics behind spread of water- and vector-borne diseases in an Indian city. Drawing on urban metabolism, urban political ecology and anthropological studies the technopolitics of urban water is explained.

Paper long abstract:

Water supply and sanitation in urban India is highly politicized. The paper explores the structural arrangements facilitating these politics, which significantly breeds water- and vector-borne diseases in cities. It draws on urban metabolism, urban political ecology and anthropological studies to examine the how the urban water is managed to give differential access to water supply and sanitation, which leads to breeding of water- and vector-borne diseases in the two case study wards in Ahmedabad city in India. The paper takes case of two administrative ward (each governed by the ruling party and an opposition party) to examine the historical rootedness of the politics, and exploitation by the contemporary players who attempt to gain urban citizenship this rapidly urbanizing economy. Drawing on secondary information and primary information from structured and open-ended interviews, the paper spatially analysis the quality of the urban water infrastructure, its settlement pattern, and socio-economic factors driving the access to water supply and sanitation in the two wards. The paper analysis the techno-politics of water infrastructure by drawing on the analytical approach of urban metabolism, interweaving the social and biophysical process in shaping urban space by the urban political ecology, and micro-analytical approach of anthropology to analyze the flow of water in segregating the settlement pattern, in differential access to water supply and sanitation scenario, and in breeding health inequality in the wards.

Paper short abstract:

To contribute to debating environmental politics in urban South Asia, I will share findings from my doctoral research on the Indian temple town Puri. How can the local politics of access/exclusion to governmental support for slum improvement be analysed? What are key discourses and positions?

Paper long abstract:

To contribute to exploring the political processes of and discourse around the governance of the urban environment in South Asia, I will share the case of the Indian temple town Puri and its emerging urban fabric. In this historic town at the Bay of Bengal, built around and dedicated to Lord Jagannath, the socio-spatial fabric always was intrinsically linked to the religious socio-economic system. Many of Puri's "old bastis" were outside the temple town, while today, they are urban villages surrounded by the growing city. The former dominant classes, the higher castes, still occupy important positions for example in local politics, as priest-politicians. Yet, multiple change processes are transforming Puri and its urban environment. In the context of the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) or "Slum-Free Cities"-Mission, Puri's "new slums" -the heterogenic "mixed neighbourhoods" of migrants from Orissa and beyond- are receiving attention by the formal authorities. The two biggest of these often "illegal" slums occupy a large section of Puri's beach and sweet water zone land. Typically, they are conceived as spaces of illegality and crime in the grip of the "nexus" and as "vote banks" of political leaders.

To this panel's debate, I will contribute, firstly, reflections on the meaning of "slum" in Puri. Secondly, I will present two cases shedding light on what makes slums successful to accessing governmental resources, through RAY. In this way, I will offer insights on the complex relation between local and state politics and urban governance when it comes to slum (re-)development programmes.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss plans to construct a vast water diversion scheme in Kathmandu. Its main question is how the Melamchi Water Supply Project (MWSP) is produced, reproduced, maintained and contested by different stakeholders on a technical as well as on a discursive level.

Paper long abstract:

The Melamchi Water Supply Project is supposed to relieve the citizens of Kathmandu from decades of severe water shortage and substantially improve the quality of the water provided. Mainly funded by the Asian Development Bank, the scheme is an ambitious plan to divert most of the Melamchi River's water through a tunnel to the city. Additionally, its proponents claim that through the increased amount of water available, the project will also improve the condition of the city's rivers. The project, however, is far from uncontroversial. On the one hand, water activists and experts doubt the economic viability of the scheme and the very fact of a water shortage, as even official sources estimate more than 60% of leakage in the city's ailing water network. On the other hand, residents of the Melamchi valley to the north of the city have become more and more suspicious about the intentions of the government and its contractors after decades of delay. When their demands for prompt compensation and the relocation of the water intake were not met, on several occasions groups of people have obstructed the construction for months. Against this backdrop, my paper will investigate the newly emerging 'waterscape' of the MWSP as a 'global assemblage' that will bring the residents of Kathmandu and the Melamchi valley in relation with employees, consultants and contractors of the ADB, an entity that has so far attracted far less interest by social scientists than other international development organizations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the politics around urban environmental governance in two small Indian urban agglomerations. While bureaucracy-based governance in Navsari (Gujarat) led to city beautifications, in Bardhaman (West Bengal) political and civil society appear to leave urban space less enclosed.

Paper long abstract:

Urban environmental governance has recently been reshaped in India through decentralization, neoliberal policies, central urban renewal (infrastructure) programs but also an increased political involvement of an emerging urban middle class. While recent research on India's metropolitan areas indicates growing social polarizations and the marginalization of the urban poor as a consequence of city beautification schemes, very little is known about the political processes underlying urban environmental governance in small urban agglomerations with less than 500,000 inhabitants, where more than half of India's urban population lives. This paper examines the politics around urban environmental governance in two small urban agglomerations: Navsari in Gujarat and Bardhaman in West Bengal. It is based on ethnographic field research with diverse political actors, including municipal bureaucrats and engineers, local councilors and politicians, representatives of civil society organizations and ordinary residents. Our research points to different political processes and socio-environmental changes in the two cities. In Navsari, the municipal bureaucracy has strong influence on urban environmental governance with effects that resemble the beautification processes in the metros. Green spaces are created in public-private partnerships, and other urban spaces are enclosed. In Bardhaman, it is rather the local councilors, political society and the numerous local clubs that shape urban environmental governance. A mix of formal and informal rules continues to regulate access to urban space, such as water bodies, and spatial exclusion processes are less evident. The type of environmental politics in Navsari and Bardhaman seem to reflect the different political trajectories of the two Indian states.