Engineering Formality: Flyover and Skywalk Construction in Mumbai

This article investigates the engineering of elevated transport infrastructure in contemporary Mumbai. It argues that the conception, construction and implementation of flyovers and skywalks in Mumbai over the past 20 years has been part of elite efforts seeking to instil a more free‐flowing, predictable and regulated city. The techniques, routines, standards and visualizations comprising these engineering schemes have promised ways of reshaping the socio‐material configurations and everyday landscapes of Mumbai into a more knowable, functional and integrated realm. The article suggests that this can be understood analytically as a means of trying to establish and maintain ‘formal’ ideals, citizens and spaces in Mumbai against wider urban contexts perceived as increasingly ‘informal’. The article thus emphasizes the importance of exploring how the ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ are actively produced and imagined against each other through material practices and procedures, and the central role of urban engineering in attempts at reconfiguring the social and political dimensions of urban life.     

Futures of Crisis,Futures of Urban Political Theory: Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities

Coastal megacities across Asia have experienced devastating floods in recent years. Studies project dramatic increases in populations prone to chronic flooding and potential permanent inundation of densely populated urban areas in future decades. The uncertainties presented by future flood risks disrupt prevalent state visions of globalization‐driven prosperity. The emerging reality of a shift in relationship between water and urban settlements has begun driving recalibration of power relations around a range of issues, including longstanding contestations over infrastructure delivery, housing, land rights and political representation. Flood mitigation efforts have played out in debates over displacement and eviction, and distributional concerns about the costs and benefits of these initiatives. This article develops a conceptual framework for assessing the implications of projections of flood risk for urban political theory. The article begins by identifying political contestations that emerge around the varied ways water intersects with urban processes—through dynamics of permeability, flow and drainage, aquifers and pipes, and coastal defense. It then explores how projections of the crisis of flooding have reshaped three contemporary debates in urban politics: those around property rights and the question of ‘informality’; around neoliberalization and financialization; and around the rescaling of the state. Finally, it briefly deploys this framework to examine the case of Jakarta.     

Demolishing the Present to Sell off the Future? The Emergence of ‘Financialized Municipal Entrepreneurialism’ in London

This article introduces a new mode of urban entrepreneurialism in London through a study of the state‐executed, speculative development and financialization of public land. In response to an intensifying housing crisis and austerity‐imposed fiscal constraints, municipalities in London are devising entrepreneurial solutions to deliver more housing. Among these ‘solutions’ can be found the early signs of the state‐executed financialization of public housing in the UK with the use of speculative council‐owned special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that replace existing public housing stock with mixed‐tenure developments, creating ambiguous public/private tenancies that function as homes and the basis for liquid financial assets. Drawing together parallel literatures on the financialization of urban governance and housing, and combining these with original empirical research, we situate these developments in contrast to earlier modes of governance, identifying a distinct mode of entrepreneurial governance in London: financialized municipal entrepreneurialism. The local state is no longer merely the enabler—limited to providing strategic oversight of the private sector—but financializes its practice in a reimagined commercialized interventionism, as property speculator. This article concludes that while the architects of this new mode of entrepreneurialism extol the increased capacity and control it provides, any such gains must be set against longer‐term financial, democratic and political risks.     

Mumbai’s Mysterious Middle Class

Mumbai forms the décor to an interesting set of relationships among economic liberalization, globalization, class restructuring and an unprecedented housing construction boom. The much talked about new Indian middle class is primarily an urban phenomenon and seems nowhere more salient than in India’s commercial capital and largest city. This article seeks to undo some of the mysteries that surround the new middle class: how it can be empirically defined, whether and how it is growing, how class restructuring in Mumbai conforms (or not) to Western arguments about social polarization, and how any such class restructuring can best be explained. The empirical analysis employs existing data from various sources on income and consumption in Mumbai (and India at large) and reports on selected findings from a recent survey by the author on housing, class and upward mobility among households in newly constructed homes in Greater Mumbai. Data on the distribution of household incomes show that the upper‐middle income classes have grown relative to the total, that the lower‐middle income classes have shrunk, and that the ranks of the poor have expanded slightly. Survey data among new home buyers in Mumbai suggest little upward mobility. Discourse about the ‘new middle class’ tends to focus on consumption rather than income and additional findings indicate that much of the growth in consumption is credit‐based.     

“Ministering to the Social Needs of the People”: Samuel Jones,Strong Mayor Government,and Municipal Ownership, 1897–1904

Debates in the Progressive era between supporters of the franchise system and supporters of municipal ownership provide an example of conflicting views of appropriate models of state development. The former wanted to continue the public‐private partnerships that characterized much of 19^th‐century state building, while the latter maintained that this system inevitably led to corruption and exacerbated inequality, calling for a new system of publicly run programs. Mayor Samuel Jones of Toledo worked to expand municipally owned utilities and transportation. Jones argued that granting franchises for the provision of public services enabled private companies to accrue profits that belonged to the people. He actively promoted an alternative model based on his faith in the potential of government, through a program of public ownership, to exemplify a sense of community, brotherhood, and love. Yet obstruction by the city council and lack of mayoral power blocked his efforts. As a result, he attempted to secure a “strong mayor” charter that would enable him to enact his program. The voters, however, rejected the plan, fearing centralization of power and loss of popular accountability. This outcome highlights the importance of the relationship between electoral structures and functional expansion in American political development.     

Rewriting China’s Recent History: Fluctuations in State Economic Control, 1949–1984

China's political and economic systems are often discussed in combination. It is generally believed that under the political system of centralization, the economic system had to be a state monopoly. This article challenges that view by providing an economic perspective. The period 1949–1984 is selected to explore the causes of successive periods of strengthening and weakening of the state's monopoly power over the economy. Scholars have generally assumed that the period of state monopoly originated from socialist ideology or the personal will of the leaders. But economic conditions severely limited the options available. After the new China was established, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not try to create a fully socialist economy in the short run. Instead, the CCP formulated a New Democracy platform that pragmatically allowed many types of enterprise to function side by side, including private industry, household ventures, and state‐owned enterprises. The original plan of the CCP was to allow private enterprise to develop in order to build up capital to rebuild the war‐damaged economy so that a strong foundation could be established for creating a socialist economy. But the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 and an influx of Soviet capital caused a shift from a mixed economy to state capitalism by 1956. From that point on, Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders had to change course again and again as fiscal crises limited available options. A reversal occurred in 1958 when the Soviets withdrew both their advisors and their capital subsidies, leaving the state capitalist system weakened. The crisis in the Chinese economy from 1959 to 1961 required decentralization of economic authority and efforts to promote rural capital formation. The next shift occurred after 1963 as the economy was organized to prepare for a possible military invasion. The required mobilization of industrial resources in remote regions of China inevitably reinforced state management of the economy. The final reversal occurred in the late 1970s, when imports of Western technology and equipment created another fiscal crisis for the central government, which then had to shift the burden of capital formation from the state to private entities. The reform of the rural household contract system, the adjustment of economic structures, and an increase in exports to gain foreign exchange all took place as part of “de‐monopolization” reforms. The reforms that occurred after 1979 were not an aberration or a radical break from the past. They were part of a pattern that evolved from 1949 to 1984, with fluctuations dependent on the weakening and strengthening status of state finances. The shifts that occurred during this period have either been ignored by observers, or they have been misinterpreted as being motivated by ideology. In fact, new policies were created to enable the government to adjust to changes in the internal and external environment.     

The Engineer and The Plumber: Mediating Mumbai's Conflicting Infrastructural Imaginaries

Two decades ago, the rules governing the provision of piped municipal water supply in Mumbai became linked to the policy frameworks governing eligibility for a property titling scheme. This article outlines the ideological basis and practical implications of the shift, as well as the contradictions of the new regulatory regime. The article demonstrates how these contradictions have been mediated by the material and practical knowledge, embodied expertise, local authority and wide‐ranging socio‐political work of two sets of actors: municipal water engineers and a cast of characters known locally as ‘plumbers’. The social, political and hydraulic imaginaries animating the work of ‘plumbing’ are bound up with a temporal and spatial imaginary distinctly at odds with the network‐flow conception of hydraulic engineering within which the work of water supply planning and distribution in Mumbai is conceptualized, materialized and institutionalized. The hydraulic and legal contradictions of these clashing infrastructural idioms––of flow and event––have rendered the regulatory framework highly unstable. These contradictions eventually erupted in Mumbai's waterscape, leaving the city's water infrastructures suspended in a highly politicized state of limbo between dueling infrastructural imaginaries.     

Birth of the Modern Corporation: From Servant of the State to Semi‐Sovereign Power

It is widely known that large business corporations have accumulated enormous political and economic power since the early 20^th century. They not only create barriers to entry to small firms in the economic domain, they also pose a serious threat to democracy by dominating public discourse and occupying a wide range of public spaces. Efforts to halt or reverse the growth of corporate power have been largely ineffective, in large part because they have been entirely reactive. In order for citizens to reclaim the economy and politics, a new strategy is necessary, one that starts by analyzing the source of corporate power. The method of analysis in this article is historical, specifically the history of changes in the United States of the legal instruments of incorporation and their relationship to emerging conditions in the economy and business. In the first half of the 19^th century, corporations were chartered by state governments to carry out public benefit activities, particularly infrastructure projects. These mixed corporations lost favor during the depression of the 1840s and were replaced by private for‐profit corporations that continued using the same debt financing instruments employed by states. They were also still regulated by the states that issued their charters. When corporations sought to avoid competition by creating cartels, they had difficulty maintaining discipline and discovered they needed new rights in order to gain permanent control of markets. In the 1890s, they were granted the status of “natural persons,” with the legal protections of citizens, but they also gained the right to buy other corporations, thereby solidifying their market power and making them largely autonomous from public control. Each transition was contested, but when it was completed, it seemed to the public as if corporations had always had their new powers. In order to regain the power to hold corporations accountable to the public, those old contested issues need to be brought back into public discourse, so that citizens might decide for themselves how much power corporations should have.     

CHALLENGES OF MIXED‐ECONOMY SOLUTIONS IN HEALTHCARE: THE EXAMPLES OF SWITZERLAND AND SINGAPORE

In the search for improved healthcare systems able to cope with rising costs, policy‐makers are likely to turn to mixed‐economy solutions. The lure of integrating ‘the best of both worlds’ generally leads to a blend of public and private providers, high regulation density as well as legal constraints on consumers based on top‐down political prerogatives. The Swiss and Singaporean healthcare systems perfectly exemplify this strategy. Both combine market features and government planning. They differ significantly, however, when it comes to the specific policies being implemented and the scope of private sector involvement in each country. This article discusses the Swiss and Singaporean healthcare systems and highlights the dissimilarities between the two countries.     

The Neoliberalization of Municipal Land Policy in Sweden

In Sweden, local governments’ practice of the ‘municipal land instrument’—that is, the use of public land ownership as a tool for facilitating urban development—has a long tradition. In the post‐war era, public land ownership constituted an important component of state‐led housing production, which had both a productive and a redistributive purpose. Departing from a political economy perspective, this article demonstrates how the redistributive aspect of the municipal land instrument has been dissolved under neoliberalization, and discusses why the use of this instrument is problematic from both a democratic and ethical point of view. Based on a case study in Helsingborg, the article argues that, in using public land to leverage private investment in urban development, local decision makers adopt an interest in supporting rent extraction from tenants and housing owners, while subsidizing investment costs for developers. The dual role that municipalities assume as landowner‐developers and planning authorities enable them to facilitate urban development effectively, but it is also problematic because it transgresses the public–private law divide inherent to Swedish law. Assuming this dual role, municipalities place themselves in a biased position that risks undermining the legitimacy of governmental actions in general, and the planning system in particular.     

Insurgent Building: Emerging Spatial Politics in the Bedouin–State Conflict in Israel

In the conflict between Bedouin representatives and government authorities in the southern Israeli Negev, the term ‘insurgent building’ refers to the construction of buildings erected in the full expectation that they will be demolished by the Israeli police shortly thereafter. This article analyses how insurgent building is employed as a spatial practice by emerging political actors to claim contested Bedouin landownership. Importantly, insurgent building relies on the ability of media and advocacy organizations to mobilize behind the issue. Most of the relevant scholarship takes the interpretative categories advanced by these actors at face value. Following anthropological debates regarding objectification and categorization, I examine the context of a specific case of insurgent building. Emerging political actors who employ insurgent building often rely on predefined ethnic categories and clear‐cut people–state polarities. This case demonstrates the need for a more differentiated understanding of multilayered local dynamics than the one offered by mainstream linear interpretations. At a more abstract level, political actors contribute to the reproduction of the very categories against which they mobilize.     

Reproducing low‐wage labour: capital accumulation,labour markets and young workers

Drawing on evidence from Greater Manchester, this article examines how structural changes in capital accumulation have created particular labour market outcomes, which have led to young people becoming a source of cheap labour for the growing low‐wage service economy. Greater Manchester has been selected as a case study because of the sectoral composition of its labour market and because levels of low pay for young workers are above the national low‐pay average of 40 per cent. The research reveals that it is necessary to move beyond sociological explanations that concentrate on the ‘essential youthfulness’ of young people and instead draw on analytical categories from political economy in order to understand the structural causes of young people's material circumstances.     

Becoming a Slum: From Municipal Colony to Illegal Settlement in Liberalization‐Era Mumbai

This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipal housing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context of liberalization‐era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary that posits the unplanned, illegal and informal ‘slum’ as the self‐evident conceptual counterpoint to a planned, formal, ‘world‐class’ city. The story of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political and highly unstable nature of this binary — and thus insists upon an account of the shifting political and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood's emergence as an illegal slum has been mediated by the liberalization‐era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood's water pipes — dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of the neighborhood as a discursive effect.     

The Structural Origins of Territorial Stigma: Water and Racial Politics in Metropolitan Detroit, 1950s–2010s

This article develops the concept of territorial stigma by analyzing how it can be cultivated at the level of political institutions across administrative divides. I consider the case of Detroit's regional water department, which until 2016 was owned and operated by the city and served over 120 suburban regional municipalities. I start by examining the cooperative city–suburban water system expansion in the 1950s and then analyze the rise of Detroit's first black‐led administration in 1974, after which the water authority became a key regional institution that provided an opportunity for white suburban leaders to organize against the city. I find that suburban leaders advanced their immediate goal of mitigating rate hikes by declaring the city to be greedy and inept, instead of acknowledging structural conditions that increased operational costs. This had the effect of reproducing racialized stereotypes at the political level, which had enduring effects. The argument builds on the existing literature on territorial stigma by (1) identifying state institutions as sites for the propagation of stigma and (2) considering stigmatized places in relation to their non‐stigmatized neighbors. The analysis integrates material‐structural and cultural‐symbolic factors in order to understand the perpetuation of regional urban inequalities.     

The Dynamics of Influence in Corporate Co‐Evolution

This paper aims to offer new theoretical and empirical insights into co‐evolutionary development. Theoretically, it advances a political perspective which focuses on the role of power and how this can be translated into influence as an evolutionary driver through the relational framework between an organization and external parties. Empirically, the paper elaborates this perspective by reference to how China's largest container terminal evolved within a changing environment, and how its evolution in turn impacted on the evolution of its sector. In this case, the key relational framework was that between the organization and government institutions. Application of a political perspective to the case study suggests a theoretical model that can inform future research and practice.     

Fast Parallels? Contesting Mobile Policy Technologies

This article extends recent examinations of incomplete or disrupted policy mobility by examining the politically volatile case of policies to manage the regional impacts of decarbonization in Australia. The article's extended case study shows how political interests differently incorporated figments of circulating policy into longstanding debates and how more‐than‐local political networks defeated an antipolitical, technocratic exercise in ‘new regional’ governance. ‘Follow the policy’ methods could not have revealed the complexities of this case. The article concludes that mobilities approaches need to be more attentive to institutional arrangements, to the contested politics of policy formation and to the ambiguities of perceived policy likenesses. This case highlights the importance of considering how antipolitical institutional architectures facilitating policy mobility relate to established political power networks.     

Negotiating Social Mix in Toronto's First Public Housing Redevelopment: Power,Space and Social Control in Don Mount Court

This article examines the experience of social interaction in Toronto's Don Mount Court community, the first socially mixed public‐housing redevelopment site in Canada. Similar to the American HOPE VI program, redevelopment involved the demolition and mixed‐income reconstruction of the community to include both public housing and new market condominiums with a neo‐traditional redesign. Based on participant observation, this article describes four struggles that emerged over the course of a series of mixed‐income community governance meetings intended to promote social inclusion. These struggles related to (1) unequal power relations in shaping local priorities; (2) the power to brand the community and define its aesthetic characteristics; (3) the power to define and use public space; and (4) power over modes of surveillance and exclusion. The findings challenge the myth that the ‘benevolent’ middle class will use their political influence and social capital to the benefit of their low‐income neighbors in mixed neighbourhoods. Instead, the research found that public‐housing tenants were often on the receiving end of antagonism. It is argued that policymakers intent on ameliorating problems related to residence in disadvantaged communities should focus on funding for social programs and transformative change, rather than on public‐housing demolition and state‐driven gentrification via mixed‐income redevelopment.     

Governing ‘Sustainable Urban Development’ Through Self‐Build Groups and Co‐Housing: The Cases of Hamburg and Gothenburg

This article critically examines the governing of ‘sustainable urban development’ through self‐build cohousing groups in Gothenburg and Hamburg. The two case cities have been selected because both are currently involved in major urban restructuring, and have launched programmes to support self‐build groups and cohousing as part of their emphasis on promoting urban sustainable development through this process. Departing from a theoretical discussion on advanced liberal urban governance, focusing in particular on the contemporary discourse on sustainable urban development, we examine the interaction between political institutions, civil society and private actors in the construction of cohousing as a perceived novel and alternative form of housing that may contribute to fulfilling certain sustainability goals. Questions centre on the socio‐political contextualization of cohousing; concepts of sustainability; strategies of, and relations between, different actors in promoting cohousing; gentrification and segregation; and inclusion and exclusion. In conclusion we argue that, while self‐build groups can provide pockets of cohousing as an alternative to dominant forms of housing, the economic and political logics of advanced liberal urban development make even such a modest target difficult, particularly when it comes to making such housing affordable.