The Informal Local: A Multi-scalar Approach to Examining Participation in Urban Renewal

Abstract

Since India’s integration into international trade and finance, significant efforts to transform urban landscapes into world-class cities are underway. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Project (JNNURM), which commenced in 2006, is an important milestone in this trajectory, with its goals of investing in urban infrastructure and reforming governance to aid development. Multiple scholars have reflected on the empowerment of elite actors in urban governance and the instrumental, exigent forms of public participation in recent urban development programmes like the JNNURM. Spaces of participation are largely colonized by elite actors, allowing for anti-poor outcomes to emerge. This paper assesses this popular narrative of the JNNURM and its participation apparatus. By examining the particular history of urban development in India, and the implementation of the JNNURM in Chennai and Coimbatore, the paper points to the ways in which the urban poor did participate in the JNNURM—outside the ambit of institutionalized participation. While elite and state actors constructed the larger logic of exclusive city-making within the JNNURM, negotiations were strategically made by the poor at the scale of the local to ensure better outcomes for themselves where possible. These local negotiations complicate narratives that tend to totalize urban development projects like the JNNURM, demonstrating its vulnerability to historically contingent and informal relationships with elected officials and bureaucrats. A multi-scalar approach to examining citizen involvement may aid in a better understanding of struggles for citizenship and the possibilities for broader political transformation.