Class Politics in the (Re) Making of Space: Displacing the Urban Poor in Kolkata,India

Abstract

In the wake of the neoliberal turn in India, the focus on urban areas has gained importance in the planning process at various geographical scales. Urban space making and restructuring processes are evident in the form of various physical infrastructural undertakings and developmental projects such as bridges, flyovers and other lines of transportation, also upscale shopping malls, plush residential buildings devoted to residential and recreational uses. The (re)making of urban spaces is subject to intense conflicts both from above and below, since it is a contradictory socio-economic process based on conflicting class interests. However, in the current literature inspired primarily by post-structuralism that examines urban space, the emphasis is unduly on the politics of urban subalterns. This literature prioritizes a plethora of everyday practices on the part of the disenfranchised population in response to the top-down developmental politics. Such an approach is undialectical: it ignores the fact that the (re)creation of urban space is a combined result of the struggles from above reflecting the interests of the ruling classes and its state in accumulation, and the struggles from below represented by the subordinate classes, reflecting their interests in their own reproduction. Urban space (re)making must be studied in its totality. Through an analysis of empirical materials based on a study of the poorer (low-income) segments of the urban working class in India, I assert that a Marxist approach provides a better analytical framework to understand the politics of the urban subordinate class, in which the emphasis is on class struggle that complexly intertwines with other socio-spatial schisms in the society.