The Tenth Delhi: economy, politics and space in the post-liberalisation metropolis

Recent studies of the post-liberalisation Indian metropolis have largely followed a theoretical framework from contemporary urban sociology in the West, drawn from David Harvey, Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, among others. These studies show the contemporary city being shaped by global transnational capital—which accumulates wealth through dispossession—resulting in a clearing of the poor and marginal from central urban areas to the periphery, and replacing them with middle- and upper-class newcomers. Concomitantly, new jobs in these cities have shifted from industrial manufacturing to post-industrial services for large transnational firms connected through international networks of global capital. These theories suggest that in the neoliberal city the welfare state has receded, surrendering its role of protecting working-class housing and employment to the interests of transnational capital. We argue that by identifying processes that unfold in New York or Paris in New Delhi, these studies only capture a small part of the picture of urban transformation in contemporary India. In the case of New Delhi, we show how Economic Liberalisation has fundamentally restructured India’s capital city, producing a new iteration of the ancient metropolis, which we call the “Tenth Delhi”. However, the new order does not, for the most part, resemble the above-described Western-derived theories. Instead of jettisoning its poor, Delhi has become a magnet for the working classes from across India. There are now more migrants each year to Delhi than to any other Indian city. Instead of the periphery, or squatter settlements on the urban edge, the influx of migrants is found in the oldest settlements of the city, the so-called Lal Dora areas or “Urban Villages”, where new forms of rental housing have emerged. The cases of displacement and dispossession in Delhi are well documented, but little has been written about the more large-scale phenomena of “regularisation” where hundreds of the “Unauthorised” housing colonies that exist across the city have been formally regularised. Through a case study of one neighbourhood called Taimoor Nagar, which contains a patchwork of multiple types of spaces, populations and economic activities, this paper seeks to understand how things work at a small scale to explain a larger system, and to identify patterns that repeat across urban space in terms of spatial ordering, informal norms, economic relations and political change. We argue that capital-intensive dispossession has not been the primary form of urban transformation in post-Liberalisation New Delhi. The liberalisation of state control over spaces and types of economic activity and the expansion of democratically elected representation in this period has also been dramatically important. When most of the economy is unregulated, and most of urban space is unplanned, democratic politics mediates the relationship between urban citizens and the rule of law.