In the early years of the last decade, I was working on a book which took me frequently to the western Indian state of Gujarat. It was an unsettling time to be there. Hindu fundamentalist-led mobs had killed over a thousand Muslims in an outbreak of communal violence in 2002, most of them in the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad. The judicial repercussions of the riots continued to dominate the national news. Inside Gujarat I found Muslims fearful and Hindus unrepentant, many even justifying the violence as a necessary ‘lesson’ for the victims. Journalists covering the violence pointed to long-term indoctrination by Hindu fundamentalist groups. I felt there was more to it than that. What was it about Gujarat that had made it so hospitable to violence?
I began to look deeper, and it quickly became apparent that something unusual was going on in Ahmedabad. Every time I visited a new mall or hotel had gone up, or a new road had been built. To an extent this was not remarkable. When India adopted capitalist reforms in 1991, it committed itself to a programme of accelerated urbanisation, enacting laws to give more powers to local authorities and launching schemes like the (2005) Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, influenced by globalisation and the neoliberal ideology sweeping the post Thatcher-Reagan world, were behind the urban push. With economies of speed and scale, the urban form was considered a necessary complement to neoliberalism and sold as a global aspiration. The city also became the unit of competition between nations, assuming an entrepreneurial role to attract global finance from corporate investors and tourists. In the late twentieth century, New York gentrified neighbourhoods, cleaned up Times Square, and launched the ‘I Love NY’ campaign to attract tourists; the desert outpost of Dubai emerged as a banking, tourist and transport hub; and Tokyo and Seoul leveraged their experience in heavy industry. In 2008, Beijing hosted the costliest Summer Olympics of all time. Terms like ‘place marketing’, ‘imagineering’ and ‘worlding’ entered the lexicon as cities vied with each other for attention and cash.
