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Caste is as an under-recognized marker of environmental inequalities in urban India, what this article names as “environmental unfreedoms” for their fundamentally humanity- and dignity-robbing trai...

Deborah Cowen has written an illuminating paper on the nineteenth-century making of rail infrastructure and the Canadian metropolis. She connects the dots between the building of the Canadian Pacif...

From Victorian England and its colonies, to cities in South Asia today, “improvement” has long infused the language of urban planning. Through the case of Bangalore, India, this article argues that urban improvement should be understood as a project of liberal government forged in the crucible of empire and harnessed in the service of the state’s capital and spatial accumulation strategies. Once practiced by colonial planners, urban improvement fundamentally entails enhancing the value of urban space and its circulatory infrastructures through the mobilization of corrective behaviors related to property and propriety. In the process, improvement grafts race, class, caste, and other forms of social difference onto urban space, which in turn provides the justification for further improvement. Ultimately, improvement begets cycles of inequality and exclusion, even while it promises betterment and inclusion. Three improvement regimes are identified here: racialized improvement in the colonial city (1890s–1920s), classed improvement in the industrial city (1930s–1970s), and marketized improvement in the world-class city (1980s–2010s). The article further shows that with each wave of urban improvement came vernacular and nationalist responses that sought to extend housing and services to unserved constituents. These indigenous calibrations are as important to the genealogy of improvement as its original European form.

This article studies Cape Town’s new slum “reblocking” paradigm, in which settlements are reorganized, housing upgraded, and services delivered in situ. Though not without structural and long-term challenges, research shows that for those waiting for post-apartheid housing, reblocking provides an alternative to eviction and resettlement. Through primary and secondary research over 2014–2016 on four reblocking pilot projects covering six hundred households, we argue that reblocking hinges not on consensus but rather the “productive tension” generated in the negotiation of visions and outcomes. We draw on critical theories of agonism and participation to suggest that such tension plays a role in producing legitimacy.

Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption narratives become politicized and yoked to symbolic, material, and territorial regimes of power. We suggest that recent theories of urban informality provide a revealing lens into the ethico-politics and territorial struggles of contemporary capitalism across the North and South.

In this age of global inequality, how people talk of corruption matters. This article examines the role of corruption narratives in struggles against land enclosures (“land grabs”) in two Indian cities. Drawing on ethnographic research on land grabs in Mumbai and Bangalore and critical corruption and geography literatures, we argue that corruption talk by slum-based and lower middle-class residents and activists advances an ethical critique of contemporary capitalism. In our cases, corruption discourse upends mainstream development agendas that narrowly equate corruption with individual acts of bribery and the long-standing notion in India that corruption manifests mainly among the poor and lower rungs of the state. Instead, we find that “corruption” serves as a cultural, semantic, and moral rubric that expresses and shapes a sense of structural injustice in this moment of sharpening urban inequality. Specifically, corruption talk is leveraged to identify and challenge the mechanisms underlying elite land...

The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water is popularly framed as a case of “environmental racism” given that Flint’s population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint’s water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age. I expand on the idea of “racial liberalism” here. While upholding the promise of individual freedoms and equality for all, racial liberalism—particularly as it was translated into urban renewal and property making in mid-20th-century urban America—drove dispossession. In Flint racialized property dispossession has been one major factor underlying the city’s financial duress, abandonment, and poisoned infrastructure. Yet, through austerity discourse, Flint is disciplined as if it were a financially reckless individual while the structural and historical ca...