Cities

How should we distribute land areas between amenities— schools, hospitals, parks—and private plots for homes and jobs? What is the ideal proportion for each? We need to do this for two different situations, greenfield sites and brownfield sites. In greenfield sites, where we start with vacant land, we have considerable freedom to choose our proportions, and the ideal we have selected will be a very useful guide for new area planning. Even for brownfield sites, a notion of what would be ideal proportions for land distribution between amenities and buildable plots would be a useful guide. The article attempts to extract guiding principles and concludes with a detailed study of the redevelopment of BDD Chawls at Worli, Mumbai.

Urban and Regional Planning and Development: 20th Century Formations and 21st Century Transformations edited by Rajiv R Thakur, Ashok K Dutt, Sudhir K Thakur and George M Pomeroy, Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019; pp xiv + 546, ₹9,726 (hardcover).

Caste-based spatial segregation, largely assumed to be a characteristic of rural societies, is reproduced in urban spaces as well, and a large population of Dalits continue to inhabit segregated settlements in the metropolitan cities of the country. Fieldwork conducted in one such segregated neighbourhood of Balmikis in central Delhi is drawn upon to explore how they perceive the urban space and how they think they are perceived by others.

Drawing on data from a large household survey in Bengaluru, this paper explores the quality of urban citizenship. Addressing theories that have tied the depth of democracy to the quality and effectiveness of citizenship, we develop an index of citizenship and then explore the extent to which citizenship determines the quality of services and infrastructure that households enjoy. Findings show that citizenship and access to services in Bengaluru are highly differentiated, that much of what drives these differences has to do with class, but there is clear evidence that the urban poor are somewhat better in terms of the services they receive than they would be without citizenship. Citizenship, in other words, abates the effects of class.

Accumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order edited by Swapna Banerjee-Guha (New Delhi: Sage), 2010; pp 256, Rs 695.