Private Sector and Waste Management in Delhi: A Political Economy Perspective

Due to their size and rapid growth, large cities in developing countries are increasingly challenged by burgeoning waste generation. Waste management, however, has traditionally provided employment opportunities to the many urban poor in the informal sector. These traditional models, working largely in parallel with state?led interventions, are under pressure because they fail to address the waste management crisis. This failure, coupled with the lack of capacities of local governments, has paved the way for formal private sector participation. We examine the case of Delhi where a complex interplay of competing approaches have accompanied efforts of urban local bodies, civil society and the private sector (informal and formal) at finding a sustainable working solution. Our analysis of the complex relationship within the private sector players, and between private and public actors, provides novel insights into potential contribution of public–private partnerships for effective waste management in developing countries

Producing localized commodity frontiers at the end of Cheap Nature: An analysis of eco-scalar carbon fixes and their consequences

There is no single ‘great’ commodity frontier whose exploitation under current socio‐technical conditions could fuel capital accumulation at the global scale. According to Jason Moore, this represents the ‘end of Cheap Nature’ and signals a terminal crisis for capitalism as we know it. In this article we complicate this assertion by showing how, in the context of global environmental governance frameworks of carbon control, a diverse range of actors situated at multiple scales are intensifying the use of cities and their hinterlands for the production/transgression of localized commodity frontiers. We draw on scholarship on uneven geographical development, state‐led restructuring and eco‐scalar fixes to present two case studies from different segments of the carbon cycle in the global South. The first case demonstrates how the introduction of waste‐to‐energy technology in Delhi facilitated the generation of ‘carbon credits’ while waste matter itself became a commodity. The second discusses attempts by the Brazilian state of Amazonas (Amazônia) aspiring to shift from rainforest exploitation to financialized conservation supported by the ‘green global city’ functions of metropolitan Manaus. These cases demonstrate that although the global carbon‐control regime may enable accumulation, implementation remains speculative, and localized commodity frontiers provoke social resistances that jeopardize their durability

Population Dynamics in the Walled City of Delhi (Old Delhi Planning Zones, 1951-1981)

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Distribution of Wholesale Shops in the Walled City of Delhi (Old Delhi Planning Zones 1981)

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Rule by aesthetics: world-class city making in Delhi

This project addresses the cultural and environmental politics of slum demolitions in the making of a "world-class city." If "modern" cities are supposed to be built through techno-scientific procedures of urban planning and government--such as maps, censuses, and surveys--the conspicuous absence of such techniques in the world-class redevelopment of Delhi raises the question of how rule there is achieved. Based on an ethnography of the judiciary, state, and property owners' associations, I find that what I call a world-class aesthetic--an idealized vision of a privatized, "green," and slum-free city assembled from transnationally circulating images of "global cities"--has replaced these techniques as the key instrumentality of rule in contemporary Delhi. To explore how this aesthetic regime of planning operates, I begin by demonstrating how the city's new "good governance" initiative, called Bhagidari, has reconfigured state space, providing property owners' with privileged channels of access to the judiciary and bureaucracy. By tracing the circulation of key representations of the slum through and beyond these channels, I show how discourse depicting slums as "nuisances"--i.e., as illegal environments--constructs an aesthetic grid that demarcates the "world-class" on the one hand, and the "polluting" on the other. I further reveal how the judiciary has codified this world-class aesthetic through a reinterpretation of nuisance law, recalibrating the axes of legality and planning such that those spaces appearing polluting and dirty (e.g., slums) are deemed unplanned and illegal, regardless of their statutory basis in planning law or actual environmental impact. Conversely, spaces that have a world-class "look" (e.g., shopping malls, sports stadia), despite violating land-use codes and environmental standards, are deemed planned and legal. More than just reconfiguring state power, this aesthetic regime of planning alters how citizens see and engage the state, as well as how they envision their place in the city. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a Delhi slum, I show how residents have begun to shift the basis on which they advance citizenship claims away from an earlier idiom of historical entitlement to public land and toward one of potential self-improvement via home ownership. This shift, however, cannot be reduced to an overarching neoliberal rationality, but must rather be located in residents' changing affective ties to place and city. Specifically, I trace how a series of political technologies--including government-run slum surveys, media campaigns, and a broad set of changes in the meaning of landscape--train slum residents to see the city through the lens of world-class aesthetics. In arguing that projects of rule are secured as much through embodied practices and aesthetic dispositions as through reason or ideology, the dissertation argues for the importance of everyday aesthetic practices as a key terrain on which political possibilities and urban visions are produced