Re-Forming the Megacity: Calcutta and the Rural–Urban Interface

Abstract

The city of Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) is a stark manifestation of the stereotype of the Third World megacity. Imagined as a “black hole” of poverty, deprivation, disease, and suffering, Calcutta is seen as the quintessential urban problem, in need of reform and intervention. Such a stereotype rests on two key assumptions. First, it is assumed that the “crisis” of the megacity is synonymous with the crisis of poverty and its concentration in slums, squatter settlements, and other types of urban informality − for example Mike Davis’s (2006) apocalyptic narrative of a “planet of slums.” Second, such megacities are assumed to be disconnected from systems of global capitalism and thus understood to be “off the map” − this occurs, for example, in the global cities/world cities framework of Sassen (1991) and others (for an important critique of the global cities framework, see Robinson 2002).

*While the name Calcutta was changed to Kolkata in 2001, I continue to use the Anglicized term in my work. I do so since the city, despite the nativist renaming, is itself a colonial construction, an urban artifact whose founding act is inextricably linked to the founding of the British empire in South Asia.