Of Liminality and Identity of the Built-In City: Theory and Evidence from New Town, Rajarhat
摘要
Post-liberalised economic realities in India have seen a rapid growth of built-in cities, influenced by private developers, most conspicuously in and around the Information Technology hubs in India. Cities such as Gurugram in Haryana, Noida in Uttar Pradesh, Hitec City in Andhra Pradesh, and New Town in West Bengal represent similar stories of large-scale displacement, lack of appropriate compensation, growing marginalisation through cartographic techniques of city planning, and a constant dialectic of the displaced, migrant workers, and settlers. Scholars, so far, have addressed the issues of displacement, migration, exclusion, and impoverishment in opposition to the urban growth trajectory. There has also been a rich literature on space claims by the marginals and displaced. However, little is written about the ways in which these cities develop an identity of their own through active engagement of their residents and space-claiming “intruders.” Based on a decade-long ethnographic research on the growing New Town Kolkata, this chapter shows how the city, through its “spatial production,” has created and solidified its unique symbols, retained its uncertain liminalities, and formed an identity of its own. In doing so, the chapter uses observational data on the “production” and “reproduction” of spatial transformations of several urban symbols as identity markers, coupled with qualitative interviews and small-scale surveys of the “consumers” and the urban space claiming “intruders.” The chapter concludes by showing that while the identity markers and their reproductions indicate the transcendence of liminality of the New Town, spatial consumers create newer meanings, memories, and attachments with the built-in cityscape. The active meaning-making process reflects an oscillation and overlap of certainty and liminality of urban space.