global cities and survival circuits summary sassen

To this end, cities are transformed into “entertainment machines”, where high value-producing workers “make ‘quality of life’ demands, and in their consumption practices can experience their own urban location as if tourists, emphasising aesthetic concerns” (Lloyd and Clark 2001: 357). More often than not, the idea is to reclaim a position in the global economy as a reinvigorated centre for business, professional assemblage and tourism. In the urban regeneration approach, comprehensive action is taken to overhaul the physical, social, economic and environmental character of an urban space that has degenerated over time. This is the new face of urbanisation in India it relies on the “bypass” approach to urbanisation instead of the urban regeneration approach one ﬁnds in western cities. However, the development of new towns functions less as a means to decongest the older metropolitan centres than as a means to bypass them. The government has responded to this coming crisis by promoting new townships close to Indian metropolises in an attempt to decongest them (Wang, Kundu and Chen 2010).

Moreover, the big cities in India are growing faster than small and medium towns. This will create immense pressure on India’s urban economies with their already massive deﬁcits in infrastructure and civic amenities. Rajesh Bhattacharya is at the South Asian University, New Delhi and Kalyan Sanyal is at the Calcutta University.Ĭcording to the India: Urban Poverty Report, the urban population in India is growing at a rate faster than the total population, and by 2030, 41% of the country’s people will live in cities and towns (GOI 2009). The authors are indebted to an anonymous referee of this journal for useful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. However, the condition of post-coloniality, characterised by capital and its wasteland, manifests itself in the new towns as the slow but inevitable encroachment of the excluded population on these new zones of exclusivity. The globalised economy, hegemonised by immaterial labour, creates conditions for these new towns to culturally secede from their national or regional location and align themselves with the global cities. Rajesh Bhattacharya, Kalyan Sanyal India’s “bypass” approach to urbanisation seeks to decongest its post-colonial metropolises by building new towns for a new economy of knowledge-based activities and businesses driven by global capital on their fringes. REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRS Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-colonial Urbanisation

Global cities and survival circuits summary sassen