This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and
ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township,
variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in
Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state
government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban
planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded
Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the
city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land
acquisition, state largesse and corruption - and at the cost of
erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a
fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of
construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost
city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as
the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as
'transit labour', engaged in odd and informal jobs. Written on the
basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records,
and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the
politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial
capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal
and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global
emergence of 'new towns' is based. Departing from the dominant
styles of urban studies that focus on cultural or spatial analysis
of cities, the authors show the links between changes in space,
technology, political economy, class composition, and forms of
urban politics which give concrete shape to a city. It will
immensely interest those in sociology, political science,
economics, development studies, urban studies, policy and
governance studies, and history.
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