Sustainability or (Sustain)ability? Environmentalism and Shades of Power in a Metropolis

Abstract

The distribution of power in the built environment of an urban space undoubtedly points to a complex labyrinth, wherein state power, civil society and actors in their everyday settings attempt to work through the macro-structures of ‘governmentality’. The present work, in this context, attempts to trace such flows of power negotiations in the metropolitan city of Delhi. It does so by examining such potentials, through the lenses of, what one might willy–nilly term, as the ‘social economy’ of everyday life. The work substantiates this central thesis by an ethnographic study of the implications of the recent demolition/displacement drive in Delhi on a low-income neighbourhood of the bank of Yamuna, i.e. Kudasiya Ghat. It teases through the numerous ways in which a multitude of actors navigate their way through urban life, especially in settings like that of the informal spaces in the Global South. More specifically, it explores the ways in which the discourse of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ effectuated through the Delhi Master Plan 2021, is circumvented by an ensemble of actors—traditional elites, bureaucratic class and political agents—within their respective micro-settings. In fact, the present work attempts to see as to how the current judicial discourse on the cleansing of slums and the neo-liberal agenda of World Class city marketing strategies colluded through a repertoire of new modes of silent resistance. Thus, in so doing, it points to the growing resilience of the Foucauldian idea of ‘heterotopia’, as a key theoretical analytic which unpacks the urban form and its constituents. In conclusion, it raises further questions about the ways in which one tends to conceptualize emergent forms of citizenship in the Global South, through the prism of, what scholars like Arjun Appadurai term as ‘deep democracy’.