Paper short abstract:

This paper uses interviews with actors, scholarly literature, press and visual documentation to examine and analyze how recent development projects at water bodies in Ahmedabad have utilized narratives of ‘modernization’ to produce policed sites of consumption and exclusion as ‘public spaces’.

Paper long abstract:

Public water bodies in Ahmedabad have been host to conflicts in which coalitions of a variety of actors have reconfigured patterns of social relations, land use and regional hydrological regimes. This paper uses Hajer's (1993) discourse-coalition approach to investigate how city administrators, state-championed technocrats and planners, city elites, displaced residents and civic associations have mobilized for or resisted urban development projects through rhetoric of ecology, environment, society and publics. Field-based research suggests that storylines of 'beautification' and 'sanitization' of water bodies has constructed a local form of 'ecological modernization' discourse in Ahmedabad (Mathur 2012). Such narratives have mobilized an active anti-poor stance and transformed water bodies into commodified leisure spaces with increased surrounding land values favoring elites. The privileging of entrepreneurial governance has normalized the role of technical actors such as private design and construction consultancies. In turn, other actors have aligned around notions of 'ecological crisis' or 'forced displacement' (of biophysical ecologies, people, habitat and livelihoods) to contest processes and outcomes in globalized city-making in Ahmedabad. Recent projects such as the Sabarmati Riverfront rely upon policing and narratives of the 'sanitary city' to socially discipline the urban poor into accepting hydrological landscapes as territories for leisure and Ahmedabad's ruling and middle classes (Diwadkar 2013). In this paper, we rely upon interviews with actors, scholarly literature, press and visual documentation to examine and analyze how recent development projects at water bodies in Ahmedabad have utilized narratives of 'modernization' to produce policed sites of consumption and exclusion as 'public spaces'.