Representations of Calcutta are analysed, and the author shows how the rumours of westerners contribute to the elaboration of an imaginary city. In doing so, they circulate in ways fundamental to the maintenance of international order.

This book offers an on-the-ground view of colonial Calcutta's neighbourhoods, where kinship-like ties shaped urban space and resisted city-making efforts of the state.

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Indian diaspora has had a complex and multifaceted role in catalyzing, justifying and promoting a transformed urban landscape in India. Focussing on Kolkata/ Calcutta, this book analyses the changing landscapes over the past two decades of one of the world’s most fascinating and iconic cities. Previously better known due to its post-Independence decline into overcrowded poverty, pollution and despair, in recent years it has experience a revitalization that echoes India’s renaissance as a whole in the new millennium. This book weaves together narratives of migration and diasporas, postmodern developmentalism and neoliberal urbanism, and identity and belonging in the Global South. It examines the rise of middle-class environmental initiatives and Kolkata’s attempts to reclaim its earlier global status. It suggests that a form of global gentrification is taking place, through which people and place are being fundamentally restructured. Based on a decade’s worth of field research and investigation in multiple sites - metropolitan centers connected by long histories of empire, migration, economy, and culture - it employs a multi-methods approach and uses ethnographic, semi-structured interviews as well as archival research for much of the empirical data collected. Addressing urban change and policies, as well as spatial and discoursive transformations that are occurring in India, it will be of interest to researchers in the field of urban geography, urban and regional planning, environmental studies, diaspora studies and South Asian studies.

A riveting family portrait of four generations of Jewish women from Calcutta.

Despite the fact that virtually all urban growth is occurring, and will continue to occur, in the cities of the Global South, the conceptual tools used to study cities are distilled disproportionately from research on the highly developed cities of the Global North. With urban inequality widely recognized as central to many of the most pressing challenges facing the world, there is a need for a deeper understanding of cities of the South on their own terms. Locating Right to the City in the Global South marks an innovative and far reaching effort to document and make sense of urban transformations across a range of cities, as well as the conflicts and struggles for social justice these are generating. The volume contains empirically rich, theoretically informed case studies focused on the social, spatial, and political dimensions of urban inequality in the Global South. Drawing from scholars with extensive fieldwork experience, this volume covers sixteen cities in fourteen countries across a belt stretching from Latin America, to Africa and the Middle East, and into Asia. Central to what binds these cities are deeply rooted, complex, and dynamic processes of social and spatial division that are being actively reproduced. These cities are not so much fracturing as they are being divided by governance practices informed by local histories and political contestation, and refracted through or infused by market based approaches to urban development. Through a close examination of these practices and resistance to them, this volume provides perspectives on neoliberalism and right to the city that advance our understanding of urbanism in the Global South. In mapping the relationships between space, politics and populations, the volume draws attention to variations shaped by local circumstances, while simultaneously elaborating a distinctive transnational Southern urbanism. It provides indepth research on a range of practical and policy oriented issues, from housing and slum redevelopment to building democratic cities that include participation by lower income and other marginal groups. It will be of interest to students and practitioners alike studying Urban Studies, Globalization, and Development.

Traveling India in the Age of Gandhi is a study of "armchair" travel writers who journeyed to India during what has often been termed the "Age of Gandhi," placed between 1914–1948. Most of the travel writers surveyed understood this era to be a unique time in world history—in India and elsewhere on the globe. The lingering trauma of World War I, the rise of radical state ideologies in Russia, Italy, Japan, and Germany, world-wide depression in the 1930s along with a host of other unsettling political, cultural, and technological realities revealed a world of bewildering complexity and uncertainty. For many of the travel writers surveyed in this work, India was the main drama in a shifting global landscape. Moreover, many viewed it as the ultimate travel experience, a journey that tested one's capacity to fully engage the earth's most compelling forms of human diversity and suffering. Although a few notable figures are included, most of the authors in the study constitute a breed of largely forgotten travel writers. This work is an attempt to extract the core of their observations, impressions, and conclusions concerning what they saw and experienced, particularly concerning Indian aspirations for independence and India as the world's most exotic human landscape.