Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

1. Flows and Bumpy Roads

1 1 Flows and Bumpy Roads Change This project began with the provocation of “change” in contemporary India. Since the opening up of India to the global market economy in the early 1990s, the country’s cultural landscape has undergone a remarkable transformation. The symptoms of this transformation are ubiquitous: Western-style shopping malls, new suburbia, gated residential communities, mega Cineplex theaters, prominence of the hotel industry, networks of flyovers, and heritage preservation to fatten tourism. The economic policies that have made it easier for foreign firms to enter the Indian market and have encouraged nonresident Indians to invest in the country have had a tremendous impact on the shape and perception of Indian cities and on “public visuality.”1 Real-estate advertisements beckon the new middle-class consumer with visions of world-class comforts: “Live the way the world does” (Figure 1.1). This appeal plays on the notion that until recently the Indian consumer was left out of circuits of consumption that had become habitual for most on the globe (that is, the ones who count within the circuit of conspicuous consumption), and simultaneously suggests a need to depart from or transcend one’s habitational moorings in the local, regional, and national. Given that local, regional consumption preferences remain a formidable obstacle to market penetration in India, the global punch shields a corporate anxiety. The image accompanying the slogan—with its swimming pool, manicured green expanse, and abundant leisure space—helps to specify the form of the desirable global affluence. Such exhortations and generic images of upper-class living are the rule in real-estate Figure 1.1. Advertisement, 2008.“Now Enjoy International Living in the Heart of Kolkata . . . Live the Way the World Does.” ` Flows and Bumpy Roads 3 advertisements in Indian cities: they attempt to introduce a new consumer subjectivity , even among those who may not be able to afford such luxuries. The frenzied building activity in the last two decades across metropolitan cities in India has been sustained by a desire to be competitive in the global real-estate market, global competence being signaled by a stock of images and motifs that valorize mobility and the conspicuous consumption of suburban space. Put another way, multinational corporations wishing to capture a piece of the Indian market have been able to make global competitiveness an important playing card, and in turn, the state-based and regionally based developers have sought to profit by actualizing this claim. These images and imaginations of a newly found global competence are useful in understanding the terms that govern change or the view of the transformative potential of contemporary Indian cities (Figure 1.2). The question I ask is this: how does the “world” enter Figure 1.2. Advertisement, Kolkata, 2008.“Creating a new India.” 4 Flows and Bumpy Roads (and exit) the material imagination of Indian cities—and what may we infer from this process about the ways in which dominant frameworks exert their claims? It is well to mention at the outset that here global stands for certain contemporary market-centered practices across the boundaries of nation-states, or one might say, market effects that spur the imagination of connectivity and exchange across the globe, rather than a comprehensive descriptor of change in the lives of the global populace. The diffuse imagination produced by the image of the global are actualized through different modes in real-estate advertisements , state policies, and planning documents. The infrastructure of the global shows up in various guises because different constituencies that shape the landscape, dominant or otherwise, operate under different models of the world and the nature of desirable exchange and connectivity even if they appear to be in mutually supportive roles. In the process they provide different ways to think about the materiality of cities. An example from a best-selling book on globalization might illustrate the point. Thomas Friedman began TheWorld Is Flat (2005) with his epiphany that Columbus was mistaken: the world is, in fact, not round, but flat.2 Rather, at the time Columbus sailed with his three ships,the world was round; he found the Americas in his search for the Indies. When Friedman set out to find “India ,” the global configuration had changed. He sought India and found America. Not only were American multinational corporations sprouting “back” offices— glass and steel skyscrapers—in cities such as Bangalore, but entire call centers were filled with young men...