Producing Urban Space and the Transformation of the Retail Sector in Delhi, India

There has recently been a proliferation of scholarly interest and research on urban India, which coincides with an increase in scholarly attention toward cities in the global South more generally. These 21st century metropolises have different origins than cities in Western Europe and North America, and our ability to imagine their futures is limited because existing urban theory is informed by the EuroAmerican urban experience. This dissertation seeks to contribute to our understanding of 21 st century metropolises, through an analysis of the production and governance of urban space in Delhi, India.;The focus of this dissertation is Delhi's informal retail sector. I show street hawkers maintain access to space in three very different parts of Delhi, even though they are criminalized by municipal authorities committed to transforming Delhi into a so-called 'world-class' city. Furthermore, 1 seek to understand how the visions of urbanity and claims of multiple interest groups are reconciled by the state in terms of policy, as well through negotiations and struggles among multiple interest groups on an everyday basis. Existing research on urban India has focused on how the poor have secured entitlements by making claims against the state, and how the new middle class has wielded political power through public interest litigation, but there has been little research on how the everyday interactions of non-state actors affect the governance and production of urban space.;The findings are based on 10 months of fieldwork in 2011 and two follow-up visits in 2012, and are presented in three chapters. In the first chapter entitled "Multiplicities of Governance Regimes in Delhi, India: Toward a Theory of Alliance-Based Governance", I show how street hawkers maintain access to urban space by forming alliances with non-state actors who protect them from the state. This alliance-based governance determines how and by whom urban space is used on an everyday basis. Although the emancipatory potential of these alliances should not be exaggerated, they offer hawkers limited contingency to improve their livelihood security and land-use tenure through everyday negotiations and minor transgressions—what I refer to as a parallel politics. The second chapter, "India's New Urban Poor: Street Hawkers and the Worlding of Delhi", takes the relationship between the new middle class and street hawkers as its point of departure. India's new middle class has been the subject of extensive scholarly analysis, but much of this work either predefines people as members of this class and focuses on their lifestyles, or attempts to simply identify members of this class according to arbitrary economic categories. I take a relational approach, and through an examination of the interaction between street hawkers and the new middle class (i.e. resident welfare and market traders' associations), I demonstrate that a new urban poor has emerged in India since economic reforms were launched in the early 1990s. Finally, in the third article, "Subverting urban development: street hawking, urban informality and NGOs in Delhi", I seek to explain why urban development schemes in India bear little resemblance to the welt thought-out plans of their genesis. I present two case studies in which municipal authorities have made a prolonged effort to evict hawkers from places where they have historically operated. In both cases municipal authorities as well as hawkers would prefer a formal licensing system, but the authorities would only agree to a scheme that gives them flexibility to determine land-use in the future, while hawkers will only participate in a system that improves their security over land-use tenure. The findings suggest that non-governmental organizations can play a progressive role in urban development by mediating between street hawkers and municipal authorities.;Taken together these chapters demonstrate the uniqueness of urban processes in 21st century metropolises. Current research on these cities tends to reify the image of a dual-city: municipal authorities and planners in 2 1st century metropolises seek to faithfully reproduce Northern policy and planning, and their efforts run aground due to a sizeable subaltern population whose worldviews we are only beginning to take into account. Instead of assuming that the desires and methods of municipal authorities, planners and members of the middle classes in the global South are more or less analogous to those of their Northern counterparts, and that 21 st century metropolises are terrains of struggle upon which 'global North thinking' confronts 'global South thinking', I have sought to demonstrate that a more nuanced understanding of the negotiations and struggles among these groups is necessary. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).