Planning the Millennium City: The Politics of Place-making in Gurgaon, India

Since India’s economic liberalization in the 1990s, real estate speculation and rising costs in urban centers have pushed growth centrifugally to the peripheries of mega-cities. The territory on which these new towns emerge is not a tabula rasa, but often bears a long history of village life and land tenure, even as the political-economy of real estate begins to assert alternative identities on such places. This paper explores the politics of place-making, using the case of Gurgaon, one of Delhi’s burgeoning satellites. With its first mayoral election in 2011, Gurgaon’s growth has taken place largely in a vacuum of municipal city planning. Its boosters have drawn on popular imaginaries of both the West and East Asia, branding it the “millennium city.” Rather than the outcome of a state-sponsored mega-project, Gurgaon appears to be the sum of hundreds of private land deals, with a pixelated built environment of affluent gated enclaves, villages, and pockets of underdevelopment. Many former farmers have become landlords, enriched and active in the speculation game (government actors have labeled them “colonists”), while others have been less fortunate, yet little scholarship has focused on the interactions between residents of different communities, and the process of social and cultural capital formation that under girds placemaking or multi-scalar attempts to resolve planning issues. What possibilities exist in the postliberalization Indian city for residents to forge a coherent sense of place or plan within the piecemeal? This chapter begins with an historical overview of the region, and the political context that allowed for Gurgaon's transformation. Although economic liberalization is used as a heuristic for thinking about the emergence of new urban geographies in India, interpretive analysis of key terms and planning concepts link Gurgaon with colonial and post-colonial planning. In particular, I draw on Hull's (2011) example of post partition Delhi, where US inspired master-plans were designed, though ultimately failed, to foster community solidarity via proximity within housing colonies. Only an hour's drive from Delhi, Gurgaon epitomizes the state's stepping away from the nationalist mega-projects of the 20th century, and illustrates a new faith in the market to supply the actors who might execute them. Drawing on interviews with residents, urban villagers, domestic staff, planners and developers, I argue the politics of place-making in Gurgaon constitutes a form of planning in its own right, as actors at various levels of agency and relative influence, attempt to solidify claims associated with residency and take up many of the responsibilities of formal planning institutions. Their activities go beyond standard definitions of “participatory planning”and begin to offer opportunities for remaking some of the conceptual tools and vocabularies we use to explain the nature of community and place-making in and around new towns and mega-projects on already inhabited landscapes.