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Whose city is it anyway? Middle class imagination and urban restructuring in twenty-first century Kolkata

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2015

Henrike Donner
Henrike Donner*
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University, Department of Social Sciences, Gipsy Lane, Headington, Oxford OX3 oBP, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article provides an overview of the way in which post-liberalization urban restructuring is determined by middle class imaginations and lifestyles in Kolkata, India. It charts how the conjunction between planning, politics and private investment made middle class hegemony in the new urban politics possible, and how the processes that have been set in motion create new spatializations according to class through exclusions and reformulate citizenship as social relationships are redefined in the language of markets.

Keywords

Middle classurban spaceIndiaKolkataneoliberalism
Type
Dossier on Urban Classes and Politics in the Neoliberal Era: Turkey in Comparison
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 46 , Spring 2012 , pp. 129 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2012

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