Economic Liberalization

Liberalization the term, as defined in the global discourse is largely based on the act of relaxation of national economic policies of a country, that is to say that the country ‘liberates’ itself from a domesticated trade to a free trade market. This essay looks at the impact of an economic liberalization on the urban built environment of Indian cities at large borrowing from recent discourses on the post-liberal period globally. We start with the fundamental question of how are cities treated in Indian Literature? Many references to a ‘subaltern’ group of people as discussed predominantly by Indian scholars and anthropologists in the 1970’s and 1980’s can be found when one looks up Indian cities. The second perspective offered is through

Within this realm of a mass produced world view on the ideology of the ‘third-world’ economic development, one finds the discourse on the subaltern as an alternative discourse. This theory even though maybe rooted to ground reality, does not contribute to the actual discourse of the Indian cities post-liberalization, but gives a one point perspective of the actual narrative. This is because of the lack of ‘domestic’ literature on the actual discourse. Most of the available literature is borrowed from western dissertations with conflicting ideologies at the grass-root level and the lack of counter discourse based on contextual

The ideology of ‘global divides and local unites’ is applied in the making of these spaces and thus reflected in its architecture. This ‘exclusive’ architecture validates to an extent, a new meaning of citizenship that favors only a section of the society on grounds of consumption. In many global discourses including the ones discussed above refer to the rise of a new middle class that largely benefits from a liberalized economy in the third world context. One may counter this argument with an empirical understanding of the third world context of socio-political driven economics at grass root level. Despite what the western world view is of the middle class in India, the ground reality is not as generalized as it appears. It is the urban poor and the upper elite class who seem to have what appears to be a ‘default’ stake in the urban environment. There are newer discourses being made on the ideology of ‘slum-free’ cities to counter the ongoing discourse of vote-bank politics in India. Finally, liberalization of media and telecommunication has had a positive impact on developing countries to the extent that we are informed of the ongoing debates world over which may enable us to identify the missing links in