Articles by Karen Coelho

This paper on Ambur town of Tamil Nadu, an important hub for leather goods production, catering primarily to an international market, explores how the town's proximity to a metropolis can be a source of underdevelopment rather than a spur to steady and rapid urbanisation. It puts the spotlight back on a class of small industrial towns, where the dirty work of production, particularly of recycling industrial cast-offs, assembling secondary products and catering to low-end domestic markets is not moved out of urban spaces. Instead it is kept hemmed into unplanned and unserviced town spaces, while large formal manufacturing firms colonise rural hinterlands. It also highlights how disconnects among sectors, space and place can keep a town at low levels of dynamism and social welfare.

How do mass slum resettlement programmes in expanding megacities contribute to the reproduction of urban poverty? Chennai's premier resettlement colony, Kannagi Nagar, housing slum-dwellers evicted from the city since 2000 has integrated itself into the industrial, commercial and software economies of the information technology corridor on unfavourable terms, swelling the supply of unskilled casual workers for local firms. This article highlights, from the vantage point of workers in the resettlement colony, how the restructuring processes of large formal sector companies within the "new economy" exploit conditions created by the state's slum clearance policies, to enhance the precariousness of work for residents of resettlement sites. It highlights issues of quality of work for casual workers in the formal sector and their role in the production, persistence and reproduction of working poverty. It thereby illustrates how the restructuring of urban space by new imperatives of urban capital, through the peripheralisation of both industrial establishments and working classes, creates new socio-spatial configurations of work and poverty.

Privatising Water: Governance Failure and the World's Urban Water Crisis by Karen Bakker (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan), 2011; (reprint from 2010 edition by Cornell University Press.)

The latest Cooum river restoration project in Chennai aims to focus on slum eviction as an achievable first step. A 19-kilometre elevated expressway on the river is also planned. Together estimated to displace over 18,000 families from the banks of the Cooum, these two projects testify to how waterfront development, beautification, and eco-restoration, along with high-end infrastructure serve multiple purposes - both as direct strategies for capital accumulation through real estate value, as well as idioms through which cities position themselves in the global arena.