Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Doren Massey, emphasizing the politics of the space, underlined the importance of understanding phenomenon like globalization “as changing forms of the spatial organization of social relations. Social relations always have a spatial form and spatial content” (Massey, 1994). Arguing along this framework, I analyse how the process of urbanisation. regarding the expansion of the built-up areas propagated by the state and facilitated by private developers within the locale dominant social structures, give rise to sporadic and exclusion-inducing urbanisation. Here in this paper, I analyse, through the framework of political economy, urbanisation as a production, consumption, and reproduction processes by different social groups in a given space. However, I limit myself to the study of the process of urbanisation regarding capital accumulation and social reproduction. To understand how urbanisation produces uneven development and maintains the durable inequality, a broader analysis of the interlinkages between urbanisation, capital, and land use has to be made to study the socio-spatial transformations. It is very crucial to understand the different modes of changes in the built environment and the various uses of the land regarding political-economic processes, particularly in the context of the juxtaposition of global capital and provincial capital in developing countries like India. The use of land as a tool to regulate social relations through the production, consumption, and distribution of labour, leads to the analysis of the relationship between the space and the capital formation. The transformation of the economic and social relations is spatial in terms of the transformation of the built environment related to profits and dominance in a capitalist society. The dynamics of the capital flow leads to uneven development with the flow of capital from the primary to the secondary circuit of capital. The flow to secondary circuit of capital leads to the acquisition and spatial restructuring of land use for investment in the built environment in the making of “global” cities by the State and other parastatal agencies. In the case of Gurugram, if it was to be seen, it could be analysed how “Gurugram” was the geographical fringe of then “globalizing” Delhi, and therefore the allocation of land for real-estate and location for manufacturing firms was taking place. The capitalist accumulation, by restructuring the built environment and by the acquisition of land leading to the socio-spatial inequality to fulfill the needs of global finance through local resources and labour, needs to be analysed from the political economy perspective on urbanisation and development. To understand present-day Gurugram and its spatial transformations, it is important to analyse the historical nature of the State, the existing socio-economic structures, and how the everyday negotiation and regulations of land give rise to frontiers of underdevelopment and social exclusion.