Séminaire organisé dans le cadre de l’équipe de recherche « Politiques socio-économiques et restructurations territoriales » CENTRE D’ETUDES DE L’INDE ET DE L’ASIE DU SUD UMR 8564 CNRS-EHESS Mercredi 9 juin 2010
Speculative Urbanism and the making of the next World City. Michael Goldman (University of Minnesota, Sociology)
This talk explores the process of making Bangalore, India into a ‘world city,’ by focusing on specific world-city projects, the parastatal government agencies managing them, the explosive IT industry as the putative engine behind this world-city making, and the inter-urban dynamics across world cities such as Dubai and Singapore. Most of these activities are linked to the highly remunerative challenge of transforming rural economies into urban real estate. Land speculation and active dispossession of those working and living in the rural periphery on land which the new world-city projects are being built, is the main business of government today in Bangalore. The talk suggests that this temporary “state of exception,” with both its attendant suspensions of civil and human rights as well as their institutionalization into government practices, reflects a shift into new forms of “speculative” government, economy, urbanism, and citizenship.
Discussant: Ludovic Halbert (CNRS, LATTS) Gating processes in the Indian urban fabric.
Spaces, stakeholders and scales in Bangalore and beyond. Aurélie Varrel (CEIAS, Geography)
This talk aims at unraveling gating processes as the product of interactions between a complex web of political, social and economic stakeholders, analyzed in the specific context of Bangalore in the 2000s. It focuses especially on the role of the local real estate sector. It suggests several research avenues, based on the proposal to consider the impact of gated residential areas at different scales, beyond walls and gates. Both the micro local and metropolitan scales are significantly reshaped by the creation of enclaves, although such consequences are often overlooked. Another scale to consider is the transnational one, that of remittances and investments of Indian migrants, since residential enclaves appear to be the medium for the creation of an Indian transnational real estate market. Finally, a core issue underlying this presentation is that of comparison between different Indian metropolises and between various forms of enclaves, beyond the narratives on the globalization of the label “gated community”.
Discussant: Renaud Le Goix (Université Paris 1, Géographie-cités) Séance ouverte à tous. Les échanges se dérouleront en anglais. Contact : Loraine Kennedy. kennedy@ehess.fr Loraine Kennedy Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CNRS-EHESS)