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The expanding reach of urban greening across the United States and beyond often materially and immaterially impacts communities of color, leading to displacement and decreased access to new urban a...

This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. We look analytically and linguistically from this region to engage the terms ‘mahaul’, ‘mausam’ and ‘aab-o-hawa’ as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory and embodied registers. Gathered together, the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam) and sociomaterial entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab-o-hawa). An expansive yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. This essay on South Asian urban climates provides an analytical frame based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms provide evidence of a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates—in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails.

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...

Dans quelle mesure peut-on parler d’obstacles et de problematisation a propos de processus d’enseignement-apprentissage artistiques interculturels ? Cette intervention se propose d’explorer, par un regard croise entre une didacticienne qui a travaille dans le domaine de l’enseignement de la danse Kathak (une danse indienne) en France et une didacticienne des sciences, le sens que ces deux termes, relativement stabilises en didactique des sciences, peut prendre lorsqu’on les transfere a ce domaine interculturel.

Mirroring broader trends in international development over the past two decades, the current urban reforms line-up in India has seized upon the closely related discourses of citizen participation, accountability and transparency in urban governance. In recent years, however, critical scholarship has contended that participation as currently institutionalised through mainstream development can be seen as a ‘new tyranny’. A useful starting point in the theoretical analysis of the pathways of neoliberalism is the Marxian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the ‘terrain of the conjunctural’. Parastatals are a peculiar feature of India’s colonial and post-colonial legacy. Stakeholdership, of course, comes with a price. Once the payment policy had been finalised in 2005 and the Government of Karnataka had announced the details in local newspapers, residents began to come forth with cash contributions, which they were required to pay in one of the two designated bank branches spread across the city.

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...

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I "materialize" the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages .I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of "flow" and "fixity" are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contem- porary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force- giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky "becoming-being". This argument raises the need for supplementing political-economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post-colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.

This article reconsiders the epistemic and geographic boundaries that have long separated scholarship on urban water poverty and politics in the Global North and South. We stage an encounter between the seemingly dissimilar cases of Tooleville outside of the city of Exeter in California’s Central Valley and Bommanahalli outside of Bangalore, India, to illuminate the geography of water marginalization at the fringes of urban areas, and to deepen cross-fertilization between two geographic literatures: environmental justice (EJ) and urban political ecology (UPE). We argue that there is scope for transnational learning in three arenas in particular: (1) water access, (2) state practice, and (3) political agency. In so doing, we aim to advance a genuinely post-colonial approach to theory and practice in the pressing arena of urban water politics.

Most urban residents around the world access water through a variety of so-called informal means. While “informal” water access is often equated with private water vendors operating outside of the state, this essay argues that informal practices and logics pervade the entire water system, cutting across perceived boundaries separating the formal and informal, state and private, and utility and nonutility. This essay reconceptualizes urban water informality through a postcolonial theoretical lens, arguing that “informal” water does not lie outside of state control and oversight, nor is it strictly separate from “formal” water. Rather, informal water is a product of historically specific forms of state practice that have shaped differentiated and fractured forms of space and infrastructure over time. Central to an understanding of informal water provision is the relationship between state practice, space, and infrastructure. The essay draws from the case of Bangalore, India, to critically rethink urban water informality.

The Indian government has set the challenging goal of increasing its electricity capacity six- to eight-fold in the next 30 years in the context of significant capacity shortfalls and a financially ailing electricity sector. The central and state governments are subsidizing renewable energy because of energy security concerns, to promote domestic resources and a diversity of fuel supply. International funds made available through the international climate change regime could potentially provide much needed support to pay the higher costs that most renewable energy requires. This article performs a case study analysis of the history of the development of one renewable energy technology in India—cogeneration of sugarcane waste—focusing on the barriers this technology has faced in the past and now faces, and how well international and domestic efforts have worked to overcome these barriers. The goal of this work is to lend insight into the effective structure of future international support mechanisms being ...

his article approaches the idea of interdisciplinarity as an aspect of the globalization of pedagogical practices through the teaching of kathak dance in France. Our study positions itself in a didactic research program that tackles the question of interdisciplinar- ity under the theoretical angle of joint action between teacher and students (Ranganathan 2004; Ranganathan and Petrefalvi 2007; Sensevy and Mercier 2007; Loquet, Roncin, and Roessle 2007; Loquet 2007). In this program, "didactics" is defined as the science whose object of study covers educational, teaching, and training practices. Our contribution to this program concerns the field of knowledge related to the body, in particular in sports and artistic activities (Loquet 2006). The ambition of research in didactics currently taking place in France is to show that the teacher's action cannot be treated in a unilateral way, independent of the student's action, just as the interactions between teacher and student cannot be set apart from the objects of knowledge that unite them. In this model, we grant a central place to the concept of "milieu," seen in a general way as the space where the teacher and the students interact. The Indian teacher and the French students operate in what we shall call a "milieu," defined as an interdisciplinary space where two disciplinary regimes collide and interact. The kathak teacher incarnates one discipline composed of academic codes from the Indian

The purpose of this paper is to weigh the issues and options for increasing electricity access in remote and geographically challenged villages in interior Rajasthan, the desertstate in Western India where power sector reforms are currently underway. By first providing an overview of reforms and various electrification policy initiatives in India, the paper then analyzes the specific problems as studied at the grass-roots level with respect to rural electricity access and the use of off-grid renewables. Finally, it discusses interventions that could facilitate access to electricity by suggesting a sequential distributed generation (DG)-based approach, wherein consecutive DG schemes—incorporating the requisite technological, financial, and institutional arrangements—are designed depending on the developmental requirements of the community. In essence, this approach fits under the broader need to understand how the three “Rs”— rural electrification (the process), power sector reforms (the catalyst), and the use of renewable energy technologies (the means)—could potentially converge to meet the needs of India's rural poor.

As cities in India are continuously stretched and redrawn to encompass agricultural land, the responsibility for providing infrastructure in new peripheral settlements is increasingly being transferred from the state to the market, neighbourhood and household. In order to lobby for services and regularisation,1 there has been a surge in neighbourhood-level initiatives in the form of residents welfare associations (RWAs), party-and trade union-affiliated groups, and inter-neighbourhood federations. Despite the salience of periurbanisation for the trajectory of Indian cities, little social science research has investigated these new geographies, the nature of such neighbourhood associations and their class identities, and the types of claims they make on the state — particularly under a scenario of neoliberal reform and restructuring.