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AIMING FOR THE ‘GREEN’: (Post)Colonial and Aesthetic Politics in the Design of a Purified Gated Environment

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  • Devra Waldman

Abstract

This article investigates the politics of the design of a golf‐focused gated community in Gurgaon, India. It considers the aesthetic uses of golf and architecture that go into the production of a purified urban environment to explore the relationship between urban development, environmental aesthetics and spatial purification in contemporary India. I demonstrate how an architectural focus on golf reproduces the ‘distribution of the sensible’ by attempting to delimit the field of view: who and what is seen, and what an individual can or cannot see. I show how golf is political—deeply connected to and inseparable from legacies of colonial environmental and spatial purification and exclusion, as well as contemporary aesthetic‐political regimes that justify spatial segregation, cleansing, and the protection of beautiful environments away from the urban poor. The aesthetic emphasis on a beautified, green and empty environment that characterizes the production of golf highlights the aesthetic terms on which environmental selves are imagined and how environmental images are constructed. This is an aesthetic premised on the creation of shared viewership combined with the power to be(long) in a place where one can be with others but not mixed up with them.

Suggested Citation

  • Devra Waldman, 2022. "AIMING FOR THE ‘GREEN’: (Post)Colonial and Aesthetic Politics in the Design of a Purified Gated Environment," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(2), pages 235-252, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:46:y:2022:i:2:p:235-252
    DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.13077
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    1. Cowan, Thomas, 2018. "The urban village, agrarian transformation, and rentier capitalism in Gurgaon, India," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 89699, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Sanjeev Routray, 2014. "The Postcolonial City and its Displaced Poor: Rethinking ‘Political Society’ in Delhi," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(6), pages 2292-2308, November.
    3. Srivastava, Sanjay, 2014. "Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198099147.
    4. Véronique D.N. Dupont, 2011. "The Dream of Delhi as a Global City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(3), pages 533-554, May.
    5. Shoshana R. Goldstein, 2016. "Planning the Millennium City: The politics of place-making in Gurgaon, India," International Area Studies Review, Center for International Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, vol. 19(1), pages 12-27, March.
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