Between violence and desire: space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi.

State-making is a process of creating subjects and places, in order to produce and perpetuate relations of power that facilitate projects of rule. Viewing development as a particular form of state-making, scholars and activists have highlighted the coercive and often traumatic nature of the displacement that development induces. This paper suggests that the power of the development discourse stems not only from its repressive apparatus, but also from the multiple ways in which it is able to address the desires of different social groups for better lives. Violence and desire are fused together in the practices of development and displacement. This argument is made ethnographically, through an analysis of the conflicts around planned urban development and environmental improvement in Delhi, the capital of India. This paper describes the making and unmaking of Delhi as a "clean and green" city, and the powerful contestations around the making of urban place and personhood. It examines state attempts to control and restructure urban space and argues that, through strategies of compromise as well as resistance, working class struggles to secure housing and employment reconstitute the relationship between environment and development that urban planners and the bourgeoisie seek to impose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]