Search

We look at Alappad in coastal South India’s Kerala and suggest the spatiality of power as a useful analytic to critique the trend towards nationalistic developmentalism. Recent recognition of the urban beyond metro cities is increasingly framed as a policy-heavy developmentalism. Here, central agencies, think tanks and non-governmental organisations reinforce this form of liberal perspectives, but also, such frames are reinforced by international collaborative projects with researchers of progressive ideological positions seeking to simplistically bring back the welfare state with little understanding of power structures on the ground. Here, groups termed at risk and marginal in line with ideas of southern epistemologies emphasise their political agency as particular constellations and varied material realms. To counter these ideas, we focus on the spatialities associated with various material practices. Without this, attempts to provincialise development in contexts such as Alappad are essentialising and de-politicising.

This paper describes a local-national conflict over a power generation scheme in Mangalore (India) in order to highlight two important issues. The first is that the planning of large projects by national and state governments in India often bypasses local government and, as such, avoids accountability to local populations. The second is that the politics of sustainable cities is in the institutional domain; in this instance, the conflict was between what was perceived locally as being sustainable as opposed to external interests that sought to exploit resources in response to larger markets. The paper describes the political organizations in a fishing settlement (Bengare) that falls within the boundaries of the city of Mangalore and how they worked with elected city corporation representatives to halt a scheme for barge-mounted power generation. It also describes how the city government of Mangalore has become more committed to participation.

This paper suggests that an understanding of poverty in cities such as Bangalore (often referred to as India’s Silicon Valley) requires more attention to the governance processes in which different groups compete for public investments and support. It describes the differences between the “local” and the “corporate” economies within Bangalore and their links with government. The local economies provide most of the population (including virtually all poor groups) with their livelihoods. They mostly develop outside the “master plan” areas, with diverse and complex economies and land tenure forms within which poor groups find accommodation and work. Their links with government are through local government - the City Corporation and its councillors and lower level bureaucracy. The corporate economies include the information technology industries for which Bangalore is well-known. Most of their links with government are with state and national parastatal agencies that control most of Bangalore’s development functions and have access to most government funding. But there is little local representation in these agencies. This profoundly disadvantages poor groups and the local economies in the competition for land, infrastructure and services. Rigid land use controls in the expanding corporate enclave areas exclude most pro-poor economic activity and threaten poorer groups’ fragile claims to land. Poor groups suffer demolition, resettlement, increased land prices and a governance system in which their local representative structure has little power. Meanwhile, the publicly sponsored “mega-projects” in Bangalore do little to support the local economies that are so important for the city’s prosperity; indeed, as this paper describes, many serve to disrupt them.