Examining the role of formal-informal nexuses in the contested production of peri-urban Kolkata

Once considered the degenerate and illegal margins of urban living, the peripheries of urban centers in the Global South have emerged in the past two decades as central to the realization of global imaginaries of 'world class living'. In what ways have the liberalization of the economy, political decentralization and globalization influenced the uneven development of the peripheries? Who are the different actors and institutions that have emerged as central to these transformations and how do they engage with and challenge existing social and political relations in making claims to the periphery? What are the social and spatial implications of these political struggles over access to land, infrastructure and representation in governance structures for the urban and rural poor living precariously on the margins?;This dissertation examines these questions through a dense-data case study of the rapid transformation of the north-eastern fringe area of Rajarhat, Kolkata It fmds that land is increasingly commoditized and spatially fragmented through the everyday spatial practices of different nexuses of actors who mobilize both formal and informal modes of urban development. The reconfiguration of social-spatial arrangements in turn leads to new forms of urban politics at the periphery ranging from the politics of propertied citizenship to the politics of resistance rooted in informal claims to the use of land in multiple ways. The role of formal-informal nexuses is therefore crucial to the spatial and political production of the periphery. They not only negotiate the terms for global, regional as well as local agents of urban transformation, but also build careful, strategic and flexible territorial practices that bend, stretch and at times paradoxically give way to new laws related to land and urban governance structures, creating an uneven geography.;I therefore conclude that peri-urbanization as a process is materially rooted, deeply contested, inevitably political and is recasting the urban scale in Kolkata. The findings of the dissertation address recent theoretical debates around urban informality, processes of peri-urbanization and politically negotiated rights-claims to urban space. It also suggests certain policy directions to address the spatial inequalities and social injustices engendered through the dynamic transformations of peripheries.