IT-Oriented Infrastructural Development, Urban Co-Dependencies, and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Politics in Pune, India

Ray, Aditya (2020). IT-Oriented Infrastructural Development, Urban Co-Dependencies, and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Politics in Pune, India. Urban Planning, 5(4) pp. 371–383.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v5i4.3506

Abstract

Existing scholarship on postcolonial urbanisms has judiciously analysed the role played by the state and private capital in the expansion of large, transnational industrial clusters and zones in different metropolitan fringes in the global South. However, much of this scholarship has focused primarily on the antagonisms wrought by the ‘expulsion’ (Sassen, 2014) of local populations from their land and livelihoods in these areas, at the hands of the neoliberal state and global capitalist elites. In contrast, there is not enough research on how diverse local communities and subaltern actors adapt to, engage with, and sustain these new high-tech global knowledge enclave over time. Citing this gap in our knowledge, this article argues for the need to move beyond some of the adversarial accounts associated with the overarching logics of postcolonial suburban developments in the global South, to focus on their complex and vibrant ‘afterlives.’ Drawing on ethnographic data from Pune city in western India, and an emerging IT and IT-enabled services outsourcing hub, the article reveals that contrary to popular perceptions of high-tech suburban clusters as sovereign spaces for transnational capital in the city, these sites are, in fact, constitutive of their multiple ‘outsides’—which include diverse informal economies and actors that facilitate the provisioning of essential human infrastructural services in these spaces. To evidence these claim, the article highlights different example of ‘urban co-dependencies,’ which have emerged in place, corresponding to the routine demands of these ‘new’ spaces, their inhabitants and users. The article, then, also reveals how everyday micro-political cultures, which include the different territorial conflicts and collaborations between so-called elites and subaltern actors in the local context, continue to ‘co-shape’ the typologies and the temporalities of local land use, urban planning and development that takes place in and around these high-tech clusters.

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