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OverviewRule by Aesthetics offers a powerful examination of the process and experience of mass demolition in the world's second largest city of Delhi, India. Using Delhi's millennial effort to become a 'world-class city,' the book shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. This practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms - what Ghertner calls 'rule by aesthetics' - allowed the state in Delhi to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, overcoming its historical reliance on inaccurate maps and statistics. Slums hence were declared illegal because they looked illegal, an arrangement that led to the displacement of a million slum residents in the first decade of the 21st century. Drawing on close ethnographic engagement with the slum residents targeted for removal, as well as the planners, judges, and politicians who targeted them, the book demonstrates how easily plans, laws, and democratic procedures can be subverted once the subjects of democracy are seen as visually out of place. Slum dwellers' creative appropriation of dominant aesthetic norms shows, however, that aesthetic rule does not mark the end of democratic claims making. Rather, it signals a new relationship between the mechanism of government and the practice of politics, one in which struggles for a more inclusive city rely more than ever on urban aesthetics, in Delhi as in aspiring world-class cities the world over. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Asher Ghertner (Assistant Professor of Geography, Assistant Professor of Geography, Rutgers University)Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc Dimensions: Width: 23.10cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 15.00cm Weight: 0.363kg ISBN: 9780199385577ISBN 10: 0199385572 Pages: 272 Publication Date: 08 October 2015 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on translation and transliteration Introduction 1. World-class city making 2. Gentrifying the state: Governing through property 3. Nuisance talk: From sensory disgust to urban abjection 4. Aesthetic criminalization: The nuisance of slums 5. World-class detritus: The sense of unbelonging 6. The propriety of property: Resettlement and the pursuit of belonging 7. Conclusion Notes ReferencesReviewsAsher Ghertner gives us a rich, multidimensional view of city making in the Global South as we rarely see and feel it. His work is grounded in sharp observations and revealing interviews that expose Delhi's slum clearance efforts like a gaping wound. Theoretically adventurous and politically aware, Ghertner shows a decisive shift in world city building from statistics to aesthetics, yet with little improvement in the lives of the poor. -Sharon Zukin, Professor of Sociology, City University of New York, and author of Naked City In the early 21st century, as slum populations are expanding rapidly in the world's megacities, new governmental programs of eviction are being mobilized to 'make room' for land uses considered more appropriate to elite visions of the global city. In this original, meticulous investigation, Asher Ghertner explores how such transformations have been implemented and contested in millennial Delhi. In so doing, he offers an illuminating, if disturbing, portrait of emergent patterns of legal struggle, displacement, and resistance in that city, while also provoking urbanists to devote more attention to the role of 'aesthetic governmentality' in the contemporary remaking of urban space. -Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory, Harvard University, and author of New State Spaces Author InformationD. Asher Ghertner is an interdisciplinary scholar who uses the contemporary politics of slum demolition and urban renewal in India to challenge conventional theories of economic transition, city planning and political rule. He is Assistant Professor in Geography and Director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers University. He previously taught at the London School of Economics. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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