4 - Frontier Urbanization

Summary

The mobilization of space … begins …with the land…. The mobilization is next extended to space, including space beneath the ground and volumes above it. The entirety of space must be endowed with exchange value. And exchange implies interchangeability: the exchangeability of a good makes that good into a commodity, just like a quantity of sugar or coal; to be exchangeable, it must be comparable with other goods, and indeed with all goods of the same type. The ‘commodity world’ and its characteristics, which formerly encompassed only goods and things produced in space, their circulation and flow, now govern space as a whole, which thus attains the autonomous (or seemingly autonomous) reality of things, of money.

—Henri Lefebvre

In the historical struggle over property rights, the antagonists on either side of the barricades have used the weapons that most suited them. Elites, controlling the lawmaking machinery of the state, have deployed bills of enclosure, paper titles, and freehold tenure, not to mention the police, gamekeepers, forest guards, the courts, and the gibbet to establish and defend their property rights. Peasants and subaltern groups, having no access to such heavy weaponry, have instead relied on techniques such as poaching, pilfering, and squatting to contest those claims and assert their own.

—James. C. Scott

If ghettos were the sites of surveillance and control—as we have seen in Chapter 3— frontiers represented lawlessness and chaos that needed to be counteracted to transform them into suburbs. Suburbanization in the context of early-twentieth-century Calcutta was a conscious planning response to the problems of inner-city ‘congestion’, public health breakdown, and industrialization. Some of the suburbs—such as Alipore and Cossipore—were already developed in the nineteenth century as highly gentrified spaces dotted with upper-class garden houses. But most of the frontiers of the city to the south and east that were developed through the twentieth century were still forested, low lying, and marshy, and punctuated by natural bodies or water at the turn of the century. These spaces could not be brought to planned urbanization without remaking them as worthy of building activities. Forests needed to be cleared, ponds were to be drained out, dried, and filled, and lowlands needed to be raised with additional soil. Taming the frontiers thus required a considerable logistical mobilization.