For the first time in thirty years, large-scale, forced evictions of the informal poor are taking place in Delhi, India. These evictions are driven by the privatization of public urban land. The displacement of Delhi's poor is explained and often justified by the media, politicians and the courts as a process of environmental improvement: greening the city by evicting the poor. The objective of this study is to examine how environmental discourse is shaping the human geography of Indian urbanism. In particular, it looks at the role of environmental discourse in legitimating the privatization of public land, how this privatization has affected the livelihoods and tenure security of Delhi's poor residents, and how the poor understand and respond to these changing conditions and representations of the environment. This doctoral dissertation research project consists of three phases, which explore the production, circulation, and reception of environmental discourse at key geographic nodes. The first phase will examine elite perceptions of the environment to interrogate how anti-poor and often neoliberal representations of the environment are produced and organized. The second phase will explore how these representations are spread into informal settlements, in part through government survey and mapping exercises, and how the informal poor receive and respond to these representations. The study's third phase will investigate how one settlement in Delhi has effectively thwarted eviction by self-mapping and creating its own alternative representation of a "green city." This doctoral dissertation research will employ multiple qualitative methods, including participant observation, structured and unstructured interviews, examination of print materials, archival research, and small-scale structured surveys. This study will contribute to academic and policy debates on neoliberal reform and urban restructuring in the global South by probing into the question of how environmental regulations and discourses come to align with a neoliberal economic agenda.
This project has wide-ranging implications for the issues of property rights, land tenure, public space, and poverty policy under conditions of neoliberal economic reform for localities and states around the world. It will provide concrete policy recommendations for promoting sustainable and equitable urban development projects, evaluate the social impacts of economic reform in Indian cities, and provide insight into how the urban poor respond to regulatory and political constraints. It will also contribute to debates within urban geography over patterns of spatial restructuring and urban governance in the global South and to discussions of current changes in the political economy and urbanism of Indian cities. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will also provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
