Geopolitical Urbanization as a Generative Process: Urbanizing the Himalayas

Keywords: political geography, urban geography, china, india, himalayas, tibet
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 52

Abstract

Scholars of urban geopolitics have shown how political conflict can take the form of urbicide, which visibly and viscerally reshapes urban landscapes through destruction. They have also demonstrated how urban planning has contributed to durable patterns of exclusion and conflict in both the global North and the global South. This paper argues that urban geopolitics can occur not only in contexts of urbicide, but also of spectacular construction. In cities across the global South, urban growth is not only remaking livelihoods and locales, but also providing new kinds of resources – material, informational, and social – around which marginalized or segregated groups can pursue their aspirations. A focus on generative urban geopolitics is important for uncovering how marginalized and indigenous groups at the peripheries of states such as China and India, whose governments have led urbanizing campaigns that draw from national modelings, find political expression not only through contestation, but also through modification of the urban places that are increasingly part of daily life. This paper draws upon fieldwork in western China as well as a comparative discussion of the Smart Cities Mission in India and the Civilized Cities campaign in China to how these states have used geopolitical urbanization to transform their Inner Asian frontiers with the goals of reducing cultural difference, weakening territory autonomy protections, and securitizing their borders. Nevertheless, the peoples of these frontier lands have found ways to maneuver and resource urbanization in the context of homogenizing state-led private-public urbanization efforts.