4. Contemporary Urban Policy in India: A Critique of Neoliberal Urbanism

In the era of contemporary globalization, the ‘urban’ is being redefined just as dramatically as ‘global’ with new orientations in urban activities and their role in the national and global economic changes. Earlier, in the Keynesian cities of advanced capitalism, the state agreed to share a considerable part of social reproduction, from housing to welfare, transportation, and infrastructure, expressing a peak in the relationship between social reproduction and urban scale. The contemporary cities need to be analyzed in their contextualities in terms of the wider economic restructuration, weakening of the State at the national scale, and its response to the priorities of market. The process is closely connected with the neoliberal doctrine sweeping across the world characterized by an uneven and problematic inclusion of the urban process of the South in the global urban system and generalization of gentrification as a universal global urban strategy. Cities of the South have started showing signs of intense spatial crisis, reflecting contradictory processes of inclusion and exclusion. The foregoing crisis is characterized by constraints in social planning, withdrawal of the State from and increasing involvement of international financial institutions in urban development and projects, privatization of basic urban services, heightening gentrification, and conversion of a larger city space for elitist consumption and a growing exposure to a global competitive framework leading to extensive place-marketing. In the light of the foregoing, this chapter offers a critical analysis of the contemporary urban policy in India and examines its socioeconomic implications at a wider scale.