Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

My paper examines how current governances in cities of India are involved in engineering a new politics, i.e. the sculpting of civic subjects. This agenda, to sculpt civic subjects by entrepreneurializing spaces, is relatively new. Beneath this political maneuver to re-energize cities lies a strategic rationale to alter the socio-spatial character of the city, to reshape demographics. I chronicle that at the core of this neoliberal project lie two relational processes: first, a material drive to acquire land from villages situated in the peripheries of cities; second, a discursive drive to construct narratives of “entrepreneurial” and “global” cities that deploy new subject positions. The results suggest that sculpting new civic subjects represents a meaningful extension of neoliberalism’s tentacles to the most everyday corners of local social life. This neoliberal project moves beyond the economic realm to seize and re-work the most liminal of grounded settings: the local habitus.