Outsourced urban governance as a state rescaling strategy in Hyderabad, India

International audienc

Greenfield Development as Tabula Rasa. Rescaling, Speculation and Governance on India's Urban Frontier

International audienceGreenfield urban development can be seen as an enduring idiom of politics in India, with state initiative from precolonial times to the present day responsible for establishing iconic capital cities such as Jaipur, Kolkata, or Chandigarh. However, a renewed interest in building new cities, variously labelled “smart,” “green” or “integrated,” is now accompanied by an increasing tendency to instrumentalise the urban in pursuit of economic growth and a competitive drive to attract global financial flows. Situated at the intersection of several recent literatures from speculative urbanism to theorisations of rescaling and bypass, the papers in this special issue foreground the struggles over land that animate debates about these greenfield sites while looking beyond these concerns to question the urban futures they presage. Synthesising the insights from these papers, this essay flags critical issues for the politics of urban development and sketches pathways for future research

La démocratie locale en Inde

Cet ouvrage d’un chercheur du Centre de sciences humaines de New Delhi propose une lecture critique de l’expérience indienne de décentralisation, à travers les institutions de gouvernement local, dites « panchayati raj ». Le terme panchayat renvoie au conseil villageois traditionnel composé de cinq (panch) membres, institution historique réifiée pendant la période coloniale et érigée en idéal par les avocats de l’autogestion villageoise (gram swarajya), dont, au premier rang, le Mahatma Gandh..

Stratégies spatiales de l’État en Inde. Le réétalonnage de l’État au travers de la politique des zones franches

Introduction En mobilisant la théorie du réétalonnage de l’État (state rescaling), cet article propose d’analyser la politique des zones franches en Inde comme une stratégie de redéploiement spatial de l’État, pour mettre en place de nouvelles géographies économiques, mais également de nouveaux espaces réglementaires (Brenner, 2004). Le point de départ de ce corpus théorique est le changement d’échelle qui s’opère au sein des États nationaux dans le contexte des restructurations politiques et..

The Co-production of Space, Politics and Subjectivities in India’s Urban Peripheries

Introduction In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2017) deploys the concept of “peripheral urbanization” to conjure “a problem-space that allows us to investigate logics of the production of the urban that differ from those of the North Atlantic … as a means of exploring processes of both socio-spatial formation and theory-making” (p. 4). Along similar lines, in this special issue, we invoke the concept of the per..

A systematic review that evaluates the extent and quality of involving childhood abuse survivors in shaping, conducting and disseminating research in the UK

Despite a well-established understanding of the mental and physical health consequences associated with exposure to childhood abuse, the active voices of survivors are rarely present in shaping, conducting and disseminating research. To explore the extent and quality of involvement with adult survivors of childhood abuse in the UK, we performed a systematic review of research conducted ‘with’ or ‘by’ survivors, and analysed involvement against a new instrument, the Survivor Research Involvement Ladder, which was co-produced drawing from the principles of the Survivors Voices Charter. A search of relevant grey and peer-reviewed literature was conducted, which retrieved 662 sources after removing duplicates. Of these, 116 full-text articles on adult survivors of childhood abuse in the UK were subsequently assessed for involvement (beyond participation as ‘subjects’), of which only 15 (12.9 per cent) reported activities led, co-produced, advised or consulted on by survivors, and these were included in the review. From evaluations and analysis using the ladder, consumerist models were found to be the dominant form of involvement, with survivors filling advisory roles at isolated stages. Survivor-led research was scarce but emerged when survivor-researchers planned, conducted and disseminated their work. This review finds considerable opportunity for improvements in the level, quality and subsequent reporting of research activities involving survivors. The use of the instrument needs replication, validation and further field-testing.</jats:p

CEIAS – Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud

Blandine Ripert, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, Aurélie Varrel, chargées de recherche au CNRS Dynamiques contemporaines en Asie du Sud Destiné avant tout aux étudiants de master, ce séminaire a pour objectif d’apporter des éléments de compréhension de l’Asie du Sud contemporaine, dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire. Nous avons examiné un certain nombre de phénomènes sociaux et politiques contemporains, à différentes échelles. Ce séminaire s’est appuyé sur des exemples tirés des recherches en ..

CEIAS – Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud

Blandine Ripert, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, Aurélie Varrel, chargées de recherche au CNRS Dynamiques contemporaines en Asie du Sud Destiné avant tout aux étudiants de master, ce séminaire a pour objectif d’apporter des éléments de compréhension de l’Asie du Sud contemporaine, dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire. Nous avons examiné un certain nombre de phénomènes sociaux et politiques contemporains, à différentes échelles. Ce séminaire s’est appuyé sur des exemples tirés des recherches en ..

Engaging with Sustainability Issues in Metropolitan Chennai

Publication en ligne, City report series (Chance2Sustain) - ISSN 2309-8198Chennai is the largest metropolitan city in South India (8.7 million in 2011) and the provincial capital of the large state of Tamil Nadu (population 72 million in 2011). Before that, under British rule, the city was the capital of the Madras Presidency, and was known as Madras until 1996, when the name was officially changed to Chennai. Located on the east coast of India, on the Bay of Bengal, sea trade has been an important aspect of the regional economy since at least the colonial period. Still today, the city combines political functions with economic command functions for both manufacturing and services, reflecting the region's diversified economy. The Chennai metropolitan area has witnessed strong growth over the last 20 years in automobile manufacturing, software services, hardware manufacturing, healthcare and financial services (CDP 2009). However, it should be noted that only 30% of total employment in the city takes place in the formal sector i.e., is covered by contracts and labour laws, the remaining 70% falls in the informal sector. This underscores the importance of small and micro enterprises and self-employment for providing goods, services and livelihoods in the local economy

Consistency Analysis of Redundant Probe Sets on Affymetrix Three-Prime Expression Arrays and Applications to Differential mRNA Processing

Affymetrix three-prime expression microarrays contain thousands of redundant probe sets that interrogate different regions of the same gene. Differential expression analysis methods rarely consider probe redundancy, which can lead to inaccurate inference about overall gene expression or cause investigators to overlook potentially valuable information about differential regulation of variant mRNA products. We investigated the behaviour and consistency of redundant probe sets in a publicly-available data set containing samples from mouse brain amygdala and hippocampus and asked how applying filtering methods to the data affected consistency of results obtained from redundant probe sets. A genome-based filter that screens and groups probe sets according to their overlapping genomic alignments significantly improved redundant probe set consistency. Screening based on qualitative Present-Absent calls from MAS5 also improved consistency. However, even after applying these filters, many redundant probe sets showed significant fold-change differences relative to each other, suggesting differential regulation of alternative transcript production. Visual inspection of these loci using an interactive genome visualization tool (igb.bioviz.org) exposed thirty putative examples of differential regulation of alternative splicing or polyadenylation across brain regions in mouse. This work demonstrates how P/A-call and genome-based filtering can improve consistency among redundant probe sets while at the same time exposing possible differential regulation of RNA processing pathways across sample types