Contradictions of Neoliberal Urbanism in Mumbai, India
Open Access
- Author:
- Parikh, Aparna Uday
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 30, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Melissa Wright, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Melissa Wright, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Brian Hastings King, Committee Member
Lise Kirsten Nelson, Committee Member
Gabeba Baderoon, Outside Member - Keywords:
- neoliberalism
urbanism
gendered urbanism
Mumbai
India
South Asia - Abstract:
- The growth of the neoliberal service sector in Mumbai, India, has transformed historically urban peripheries of Malad and Powai into hubs for call centers and symbols of modern Mumbai. In these areas, groups such as fisher folk, marginalized service providers, and women working night shifts in call centers make a significant contribution, even as they face exclusions from these very spaces. Using a global intimate analytic, I examine everyday experiences of these groups to articulate contradictions underwritten in Mumbai’s neoliberal development. Based on qualitative field-based research supplemented with document analysis, I focus on fisher folk to make sense of the portrayal of Malad’s development as a “perfectly blended ecosystem,” even as it destroys environment-dependent livelihoods and long-term health. Marginalized service providers such as security guards, gardeners, and food vendors form another facet of this fabric, and their intimate feelings of belonging and exclusion elucidates how capitalism works along with and re-inscribes existing social divisions. The third facet of this research is constituted by women who work in call centers, and whose experiences of navigating stigma while working night shifts illustrates the persisting role of traditional patriarchal norms in the functioning of neoliberal development. Through a global intimate analytic, I illuminate important but often overlooked power dynamics entailed in the roll-out of neoliberal urbanism. Moreover, in its focus on intimacy, this analytic helps analyze how these groups grapple with inequalities, cope with exclusions, and negotiate their place in an urban realm fraught with social hierarchies. This nuanced perspective helps articulate contradictions in Mumbai’s development, its resulting inequalities, and their multifaceted manifestations. The daily navigations of these groups in the paradoxical spaces of contemporary Mumbai sheds light, I argue, on processes of neoliberal urbanization in other parts of the world, and their ubiquitous entanglement with existing social divisions and political contestations.