Research on Urban Asia
by Anirban Acharya
This book analyses the question
of the right to the city, informal economies and the non-western shape
of neoliberal governance in India through a new analytic: the right to
sell.
The book examines why and
how states attempt to curb, control, and eliminate markets of urban
informal street vendors. Focusing on Kolkata, the author provides a
theoretical explanation of this puzzle by distilling and analysing the
inherent tensions among the constitutive elements of neoliberal
governance, namely, growth imperative, market activism, and
corporatization, and demonstrates its implications for the
formal/informal boundaries of the economy.
A
useful addition to the existing literatures on the right to the city,
informal economies, and the shapes that neoliberalism takes in the
non-west, the book provides a non-western counter to accounts of
neoliberalism and will be of interest to academics working in the
fields of South Asian Studies, Urban Studies, and Political Economy.
