2020 Volume 2020 Issue 38 Pages 47-64
Gentrification as an analytical tool to explain the transformation of inner-city zones in terms of class, consumption and the built environment has gone global. Behind the growing attention to the gentrification processes beyond the West is the series of urban renewal in global South cities that transforms the landscape full of informal housing and economic activities into modern one that is conducive to capital accumulation. What characterises the gentrification of global South cities is, thus, the simultaneous process of eviction and displacement of the poor that is legitimised by the postcolonial and neoliberal aspirations of urban development in the making. This renewed interpretation of gentrification theory rooted in the post-industrial West has given rise to debates on planetary gentrification imbued amply with the Indian experience.
Drawing on preliminary fieldwork in Ahmedabad, one of India's growth poles, this article examines the politico-economic and aesthetic logic behind the city's top-down gentrification since the early 2000s as well as its social consequences upon the displaced. The findings are as follows: firstly, whilst displacing slums and street vendors en masse, the lakefront and riverfront development schemes kept tiny segments of the informal sector in their renovated sites as cultural memories so as to attract tourists' gaze. Secondly, these schemes not just evicted the slum dwellers in coercive manners but also deprived the evictees of livelihoods that are mostly available in their original settlements. Thirdly, the resettlement of the displaced from different slums with various cultural backgrounds into the same public housing complexes resulted in anomie. Where there was no social cohesion amongst the residents, violence by thugs became so rampant that little or no collective grievance for the lack of public service was made. These findings suggest that gentrification theory needs to focus on displacement and its impact on the rebuilding of local communities should it explore the urban processes that are at work in the global South.
