IN December 2017, an advertisement in a leading English daily announced the launch of yet another ‘season’ of Happy Streets Ahmedabad. The highlight of this season was the new venue and chief attraction – the Sabarmati Riverfront – Ahmedabad’s premier 21st century landmark. As a place-making initiative, Happy Streets is concerned with revitalizing public space through collaborative initiatives between urban communities, private players, and the state administration. This selected space is designated as vehicle-free for three hours every Sunday morning, so that participants of Happy Streets can mingle with each other and engage in activities such as cycling, jogging, dancing and yoga.

The stated goal of Happy Streets is to forge community interactions and highlight the challenges of congested roads, air pollution and scarce pedestrian space for Ahmedabad’s citizens.¹ Its slogan: ‘Our Roads, Our Way’, conjures up images of Ahmedabad’s beleaguered and ‘victimized’ urban community coming together to ‘reclaim’ its rights over encroached urban space. Simultaneously, ‘happiness’ and an exuberant celebration of life or joi de vivre is a prominent theme that marks this initiative. At the heart of the Happy Streets narrative then are seemingly contradictory subtexts of ‘victimhood’ and ‘happiness’ that open up interesting questions about the politics of urban space in Ahmedabad.

It is undeniable that the urban middle class exercises considerable control over the physical and cultural contours of the city. Elsewhere, I have detailed how Ahmedabad’s recent remaking as a Megacity bears a strong imprint of middle class interventions through a complex set of processes that entail local and transnational forces.² I identified one of these processes as capture in which the middle class colludes with the project of neoliberal urbanism to physically capture or usurp public space for the ends of middle class leisure and economic interests. Simply put, neoliberal urbanism is concerned with the ‘mobiliz[ation] of city space as an arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices.’³

 

Taking this argument further, I suggest that Happy Streets must be understood as a political project of Ahmedabad’s middle class that reveals the contradictions and anxieties underlying its relationship with urban space. Couched in the language of urban rejuvenation and inclusive community building, such strategies work to maintain the deeply exclusionary nature of urban space in Ahmedabad by offering tokenistic solutions to urban problems. Moreover, the desire to embrace globally circulating notions of the ‘good urban life’ exemplified by such events feed into recurring nativist anxieties about Gujarati pride or asmita and the middle class’s fear of ‘marginalization’ within the framework of India’s representative democracy.

The middle class is commonly understood as a relatively privileged group that has the ability to influence political and cultural decisions in a manner that is disproportionately greater than its actual size. However, it is a heterogeneous category that cannot simply be captured by consumption indices and income levels. I draw on Leela Fernandes’s definition of the new middle class as a ‘political construction of a social group that operates as a proponent of economic liberalization.’⁴ Both historically and today, the middle class has played a catalytic role in the expansion and development of Ahmedabad. They have done so through elected positions in the city’s administration and extra-electoral means as city planning experts and architectural consultants for important urban development projects.

 

By the time of Indian independence in 1947, there were three Ahmedabads.⁵ To the east of the Sabarmati river was the old walled city or sheher built by Sultan Ahmed Shah in 1411 that housed lower-middle class neighbourhoods called pols, consisting of Hindu and Muslim residential clusters. To the East and beyond the walled city was majdoor gaam or working class Ahmedabad, consisting of industrial labour (first arising to feed the labour demands of textile mills). It was under the stewardship of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who as the mayor of the city, along with other nationalist elites, initiated Ahmedabad’s expansion beyond the western banks of the Sabarmati river in the 1920s.⁶ This westward expansion was largely in response to the growing population and crumbling civic amenities within the walled city. Interestingly, it was on the western banks of the Sabarmati river that M.K. Gandhi established his ashram from where he launched his non-violent satyagraha movement against British colonial rule in India.

At the turn of the 21st century, the newer western part of Ahmedabad has further expanded into three segregated ‘ethnic’ areas – the first and largest chunk consists of mostly posh Hindu middle class neighbourhoods and upscale commercial establishments; the second area houses Asia’s largest Muslim ghetto of Juhapura in the southwestern outskirts of the city; and third, is the Dalit middle class ghetto in Chandkheda to the city’s northwestern periphery. These are not simply ethnic neighbourhoods but segregated spaces in which the non-dominant communities are not allowed to buy or rent property within Hindu majority areas. Indeed, these spatial divisions of western Ahmedabad have strengthened with the inflow of urban renewal funds from the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) programme under which the city gained the status of a Megacity in 2005.⁷

 

Straddling the line that demarcates eastern and western Ahmedabad is the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project – the grandest and most contentious icon of 21st century Ahmedabad. As part of this project, the mostly dry banks of the Sabarmati river that formerly housed 30,000 families in informal settlements with regular markets and livelihood activities (such as urban farming and local laundries or dhobi ghats), have been transformed into a cleaned-up Paris-inspired Riverfront.⁸ The beautification drive required filling the dry riverbed with large amounts of water diverted from the Narmada dam canal. This gentrification was largely driven by the city’s techno-managerial middle class that helped plan and implement the project through participation in a non-representative, quasi-governmental body – the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Corporation Limited (SRFDCL), appointed by the city’s municipal corporation under the Indian Companies Act of 1956.

 

The Riverfront project has generated contentious debates among the affected populations, activists, middle class project consultants and state authorities. Its critics have raised questions about the practical and ethical justification of the project given its environmental, social and monetary costs. Many scholars have pointed out the disregard for the urban poor, and indeed, violence involved in the planning and execution of this beautification project.⁹ The project officially displaced 14,000 households, many of who were evicted forcibly and relocated to faraway places on the city’s periphery, where they were totally cut off from sources of work and basic civic amenities. One study has labelled the Riverfront as ‘environmentally racist’ for excluding the displaced poor from the planning and implementation process.¹⁰ Most recently, there has been a controversy about diverting scarce Narmada Canal water to feed the Sabarmati Riverfront for recreational purposes and water sports, while farmers have been prevented from using that water for agriculture.¹¹

Despite contestations surrounding the project’s implementation, the Riverfront has emerged as the top destination in tourist itineraries for Ahmedabad since its launch in 2012. It has quickly superseded the famed jaali (latticework in stone) of the city’s famous Sidi Syed Mosque (symbolizing the city’s Indo-Islamic architectural heritage) as the most iconic landmark of the city. International dignitaries from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Chinese President Xi Jinping to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have been brought to this location as part of heavily mediatized events on their official visits to showcase Ahmedabad’s global aspirations. In a spectacular media event during the Gujarat state election campaign in 2017, the prime minister landed a single-engine seaplane on the Sabarmati Riverfront before the full glare of the media.¹²

 

The Riverfront holds a special place in the ‘collective unconscious’ of Ahmedabad’s middle class, to borrow a phrase from psychoanalyst Carl Jung.¹³ Having assumed the eminence of a modern myth, the gentrification project speaks to future aspirations and the recurring sentiments of subservience and marginalization Gujaratis have often expressed in the recent past. Of particular significance are two instances that are etched in Gujarati memory and associated with the hurting of Gujarati pride or asmita: the first is the alleged passing over of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel for Jawaharlal Nehru for the post of the first prime minister of India;¹⁴ and the second is the opposition to building the Narmada dam – described as the lifeline of Gujarat.¹⁵

The Riverfront is a source of unbridled Gujarati pride for the quintessential Ahmedabadi middle class person. A public symbol that resembles the developed world and bolsters the city’s image, which took a huge hit in recent times due to the communal violence of 2002. This profile of Ahmedabad’s political geography provides the crucial context within which to understand the political nature of placemaking initiatives, and the middle class’s relationship with and control over urban space in the city.

 

Happy Streets is organized primarily as a public relations exercise by a leading English language newspaper whose target audience is the urban middle class. Although similar place-making initiatives have been started in several cities across India, the analysis that follows dissects specific sites in Ahmedabad to uncover the contradictions and anxieties that mark middle class control over urban space. What is the political significance of the three carefully chosen physical sites within Ahmedabad city – C.G. Road, the Riverfront, and Shantigram township, Adani’s luxury real estate project – where the Happy Streets initiative unfolds? In 2014, C.G. Road – a key artery of western Ahmedabad’s road network – was selected as the site for hosting the first Happy Streets event. This densely trafficked road with many intersecting streets is an upscale commercial hub for shopping and business. Laced with high-end shops and malls showcasing leading national and international consumer brands, C.G. Road is predominantly frequented by the city’s middle class.

Recall the themes of ‘victimhood’ and ‘happiness’ underlying Happy Streets. In this scheme, the participants of Happy Streets are ‘citizen-victims’ of rampant urbanization who are deprived of pedestrian space and clean air due to excessive vehicular congestion on a daily basis. The organizers of the event want to suggest that cordoning off C.G. Road for three hours every Sunday morning and stopping all vehicular traffic is an act of ‘reclaiming public space’ by ordinary ‘citizen-participants’ of Happy Streets. It is worth asking: who is ‘occupying’ C.G. Road every day of the week and who is ‘reclaiming’ the road on Sunday morning?

 

Ironically, the participants who are supposedly ‘reclaiming’ C.G. Road on Sunday morning by participating in elitist activities such as yoga, Zumba and cycling in their branded sportswear, also happen to be the ones whose vehicles cause congestion on C.G. Road during the week. In other words, the middle class is successfully able to maintain control over public space at all times, and thereby fulfil its goals of commerce, entertainment and leisure. It achieves this by mobilizing agencies of the state such as the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and Ahmedabad Traffic Police as the official co-sponsors of the event.

In 2016, the venue of Happy Streets shifted from C.G. Road to the Sabarmati Riverfront, a shift that is significant in more ways than one. With this shift, the pretence of ‘reclaiming’ a congested public space in the city is entirely dropped in favour of openly expressing happiness about the gentrification of the Riverfront. Unlike C.G. Road, the Riverfront is not an overcrowded space that must be freed up on a Sunday morning, but a highly select symbol of neoliberal urban planning that was supposedly crafted as an antidote to the problem of congestion.

 

The project’s chief designer is said to have conceived the Riverfront as a public space ‘without walls’ where ‘we agree on adjusting with each other’.16 Despite the absence of walls and the promise to make adjustments, theoretically speaking, the case of the Riverfront is ultimately one of occupation, twice over. First, involving the initial ouster of the urban poor living along the riverbanks to make way for constructing the Riverfront. And second, the enlistment of the Riverfront as a site for Happy Streets that allows the middle class to ‘re’-occupy this gentrified space, but this time as the supposed ‘victims of urbanization’. Happy Streets expresses no remorse for those ousted, nor does it propose an imaginative alternative to forge a genuinely inclusive community to overcome Ahmedabad’s many divides.

 

An unusual co-sponsor of Happy Streets on the Riverfront was the Election Commission of Gujarat. Volunteers standing on a makeshift stage and speaking into a microphone administered a public pledge to vote in the then upcoming December 2017 assembly elections. Participants carried placards and pledged to vote, even if it meant exercising the option of NOTA (none of the above).17 One of the enduring anxieties of the Indian middle class is that its votes are outnumbered in the face of the overwhelming poor masses of the country. By taking a public oath to make its votes count, the middle class reiterates its position as an alleged victim of representative democracy that tends to privilege numbers. This public spectacle of the pledge performed on the non-representative platform of Happy Streets further exposed the extra-electoral power the middle class wields. It laid bare the irony of the techno-managerial middle class seeking greater representation, even as it dominates the ‘expert panels’ (as city consultants and urban planners) that produce urban icons such as the Sabarmati Riverfront.¹⁸

Thanks to its new sponsors, Happy Streets travelled from the River-front to an upscale, gated community in Ahmedabad built by the Adani industrial group called ‘Shantigram – the good life’. The sponsors hosted one Sunday session of Happy Streets within the precincts of the township, potentially throwing it open to the general public. This marked the final and symbolic rejection of the stated goal to reclaim ‘public space’ for the public. When Happy Streets enters the luxurious, privately owned real estate of Shantigram, it loses all pre-tense of addressing the problems of urbanization, and instead celebrates the shrinking of ‘public space’ and the increasingly unequal and privatized spatial landscape of Ahmedabad. Happy Streets comes face to face with the philosophy of the gated community, which states:

‘Welcome to the Good Life. It is a life which is grand and never limited by the mundane, a life full of possibilities for proud Indians to stop living small and start living large, to start living like the citizens of a new emerging global giant, India.’¹⁹

 

By embracing this philosophy of the ‘good life’, Happy Streets celebrates the aspirations of Ahmedabad to become a global city as defined within the parameters of neoliberal economic restructuring. What is clearly revealed is that such place-making initiatives are not about highlighting the crisis of urban life at all, but end up concealing the disturbing socio-economic and religious divides that have become part of the city’s mundane, everyday landscape. The entry into Shantigram symbolizes the ultimate political act of middle class secession from solving the urban crisis.

Edward Soja’s framework of spatial justice is useful in understanding how Happy Streets as a political project reproduces unjust geographies in Ahmedabad while paying lip service to the idea of an inclusive urban community.²⁰ Whereas two of the three chosen sites work to maintain middle class complicity in capturing, appropriating and occupying public space, the final site celebrates a ‘public peek’ into an exclusive private space. That Happy Streets offers a tokenistic solution to urban problems of traffic, air pollution and congestion is not its primary criticism. These tokenistic gestures reveal the escapist tendency of the middle class and its abdication of taking on the responsibility of bringing about any radical change to urban landscape.

The capture of urban space by Ahmedabad’s middle class raises further questions. To what extent can we read Happy Streets as a metaphor of the vulnerability of the middle class and its inability to exercise control over public space? Could it be that the middle class capture of urban space is itself a mirage or illusion, given the unequal nature of the middle class nexus with neoliberal politics? Historically, the city’s middle class elite charted its distinctive path in industrialization and the nationalist political movement. However, Ahmedabad’s contemporary middle class has shown an acute willingness to fall in line with rather than challenge the dominant neoliberal vision. Ironically, the increasingly unsustainable urban infrastructure of Ahmedabad as part of its remaking as a neoliberal megacity, is as much inimical to the interests of the middle class as to that of the poor. In the absence of an imaginative alternative, the story of Ahmedabad may well become one of lost opportunities.

 

Footnotes:

1. Happy Street, Times of India, 7 November 2017.

2. Mona G. Mehta, ‘Ahmedabad: The Middleclass Megacity’, South Asian History and Culture 7(2), 2016, pp.191-207.

3. N. Brenner and N. Theodore, ‘Cities and the Geographies of "Actually Existing Neoliberalism"’, Antipode 34, 2002, p. 368.

4. L. Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2006, p. xviii.

5. A. Yagnik and S. Sheth, Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity. Penguin, New Delhi, 2010.

6. Amrita Shah, Ahmedabad: A City in the World. Bloomsbury, USA, 2015.

7. Dyotana Banerjee and Mona G. Mehta, ‘Caste and Capital in the Remaking of Ahmedabad’, Contemporary South Asia 25(2), 2017, pp. 182-195.

8. N. Mathur, ‘On the Sabarmati Riverfront: Urban Planning as Totalitarian Governance in Ahmedabad’, Economic and Political Weekly 46(47-48), 2012, pp. 64-75.

9. R. Desai, ‘Entrepreneurial Urbanism in the Time of Hindutva: City Imagineering, Place Marketing and Citizenship in Ahmedabad’, in R. Desai and R. Sanyal (eds.), Urbanizing Citizenship, Contested Spaces in Indian Cities. Sage, New Delhi, 2012; N. Mathur, op. cit., 2012, pp. 64-75.

10. Harita Dave, ‘Environmentally Racist?’, Ahmedabad Mirror, 10 April 2018, http://ahmedabadmirror.indiatimes.com/ahmedabad/cover-story/environmentally racist/article show/63688073.cms.

11. In Gujarat’s Water Crisis, Key Question: Why is Narmada’s Level Low This Year? The Indian Express, 28 March 2018, http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/ in-gujarats-water-crisis-key-question-why-is-narmadas-level-low-this-year-5113688/

12. ‘Gujarat Polls: PM Modi Lands at Sabarmati River’s Dharoi Dam Via Seaplane’, Business Standard, 12 December 2017, http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/gujarat-polls-pm-modi-lands-at-sabarmati-river-s-dharoi-dam-via-seaplane- 117121200142_1.html

13. Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1980.

14. Prayaag Akbar, ‘Sardar Patel: An Unexamined Life’, Livemint, 11 April 2015, ttps://www.livemint.com/Leisure/vkB9XJTYAe0EtDZuby3eBK/Sardar-Patel-An-unexamined-life.html

15. Mona G. Mehta, ‘A River of No Dissent: Narmada Movement and Coercive Gujarati Nativism’, South Asian History and Culture 1(4), (Gujarat Special issue), 2010, pp. 509-528.

16. Amrita Shah, 2015, op. cit., p. 54.

17. For a video of Happy Streets participants taking a public oath to vote, see: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=MBDKOR9uB8Y

18. John Harris, ‘Cities and the New Middle Class in the Reinvention of India.’ Working paper for conference, A Great Transformation? Understanding India’s Political Economy, 2007.

19. Adani Realty, Shantigram: The Good Life, https://www.adanirealty.com/good-life

20. E.W. Soja, ‘On the Production of Unjust Geographies’ from E.W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2010, pp. 31-66.