TY  - BOOK
AU  - Ishita Dey
AU  - Raṇabīra Samāddāra; Suhit Sen
TI  - Beyond Kolkata:  : Rajarhat and the dystopia of urban imagination
T2  - Cities and the urban imperative
SN  - 9780415844352
U1  - 307.760954 DEY 
PY  - 2013///
CY  - New Delhi, India 
PB  - : Routledge
KW  - Social Sciences
KW  - Kolkata (India) -- Social conditions -- 21st century
N1  - 	1. Where is Rajarhat? --
2. Destruction of a world --
3. Losers and gainers --
4. Urban legends of consent --
5. Logistics and nightmares --
6. New town, new labour --
7. The global and national histories of Rajarhat --
8. Politics of the multitude --
9. Concluding reflections
N2  - This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township, variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land acquisition, state largesse and corruption -- and at the cost of erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as 'transit labour', engaged in odd and informal jobs. Written on the basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records, and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global emergence of 'new towns' is based
ER  -