Rule by difference
"Empire, liberalism, and the legacies of urban "improvement
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4139567 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Ranganathan (0000-0003-4787-1519, American University, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 1386-1406 |
| Publication date | 2018-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0308518x18781851 |
| OpenAlex | W2809242270 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 41 |
| References cited | 43 |
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
Capital (architecture · Social and Economic Development in India · Urban and Rural Development Challenges · Urban Planning and Governance
A clustering approach to clean cooking transition pathways for low-income households in Bangalore
The Analog City
Coloniality–urban informality–climate justice nexus in Sub-Saharan African cities
Making repair reparative
Infrastructural Concealment
The making of a model town
Caste, racialization, and the making of environmental unfreedoms in urban India
Re-Constructing Restoration
Make live and let the land question die
Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City
Jugaad Infrastructure
Critiquing Indian Middle‐Class Principles of Mobility
Sidewalk fix, elite maneuvering and improvement sensibilities
Flows and fixes
Fragmented urban water governance
Toxic Formations
City of Non‐equivalents
Localizing India’s global smart cities
Water governance and the colonial urban project
Fanon's Mobilities
Empire, redux
Land use planning and the making of a ‘properly propertied’ Vancouver
Pollution Governance in the time of disasters
Historicising sanitation work
Property, waste, and the “unnecessary hardship” of land use planning in Winnipeg, Canada
Primary Materials
Civilizing swamps in California
Urban agriculture and urban planning
Rethinking international intervention through coeval engagement
Understanding regulatory cultures
Geographies of land use
Food Desert Imperialism
Dispossession without displacement
Racial regimes of property
What is planning without property? Relational practices of being and belonging
From contested commons to ornamental ecologies
Urban Life at the Extensions
Sister Communities
An Improvised Dispositif
Fugitive Dust
Toward a critical caste ecology
A rule of property for Bengal
Another Reason
The Will to Improve
The New Cambridge History of India
Dispossession without Development
The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India
Whiteness as Property
Society must be defended
Foucault and Political Reason
Racial Liberalism
Spaces of Colonialism
Colonizing the Body
Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore
Liberalism in Empire
Powers of Freedom
Liberal Strategies of Exclusion
Geontologies
Colonial modernism and the flawed paradigms of urban renewal
Governance, economic settings and poverty in Bangalore
The Borrowed View
Housing the Poor in a Colonial City
Colonial and Post-colonial Geographies of India
Princely India and the British
Hydraulic City
The Liberal Government of Unfreedom
Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities
Commoners, Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820
Ambivalent Improvements
Mathas, gurus and citizenship
Governing the Contaminated City
Ordinary Urban Spaces
Princely Mysore before the Storm
Customs in Common
The Dialectic of the Familiar and the Unfamiliar
Sovereignty Revisited
| Unique citing works | 41 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5,86 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 41 |