India's Urban Revolution: Geographies of Displacement beyond Gentrification

Abstract

This paper uses an analysis of key dynamics of sociospatial change in Indian cities to offer a sympathetic critique of recent efforts to extend gentrification theory into the Global South. Despite the postcolonial overtures of this new, Southern gentrification literature, the paper argues that the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification of its analytical specificity that it loses both its explanatory power and its political potency. The paper shows that gentrification theory operates on four implicit presumptions, which fail to characterize the primary dynamics of urban change in India. These include: (1) the presumption that lower-class displacement is driven by a reinvestment of capital into disinvested spaces; (2) a property centrism; (3) an agnosticism on the question of extraeconomic force; and (4) the presumption that land from which lower classes are displaced finds a ‘higher and better use’. A priori commitment to the gentrification analytic thus overlooks key features of urban change in contexts, like India, with property, planning, and legal systems different from the postindustrial geographies from which gentrification theory developed. The paper suggests that ‘urban revolution’, ‘enclosures’, and ‘accumulation by dispossession’, while equally abstract terms, more clearly allow for the comparative analysis of displacement.