IT-Oriented Infrastructural Development, Urban Co-Dependencies, and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Politics in Pune, India

Abstract

Existing scholarship on postcolonial urbanisms has judiciously analysed the role played by the state and private capital in the expansion of global information-technology clusters and exclusive high-tech knowledge enclaves that have emerged across different metropolitan fringes in India and in the wider global South. However, much of this scholarship has focused primarily on the antagonisms wrought by the 'expulsion' of local rural populations from their lands and livelihoods, at the hands of the neoliberal state and global capitalist elites. In contrast, there is not enough research on how diverse local communities and subaltern actors emerge in place, and help organise, support and sustain these modern infrastructural spaces well after the initial moment of their establishment. Citing this important gap in our knowledge, this article argues for the need to move beyond some of the adversarial accounts associated with the overarching logics of postcolonial capitalist accumulation and new suburban development in the global South, to focus instead on the complex ‘afterlives’ of these modern high-tech suburban spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data from Pune city in Western India, and an emerging IT and IT-enabled services (IT and ITeS) outsourcing hub, the article reveals that contrary to popular perceptions of high-tech clusters as sovereign spaces for transnational capital, these sites are, in fact, constitutive of their multiple 'outsides' - which include diverse forms of informal and illegal economies and labour. To evidence these claims, the article highlights different examples of 'urban co-dependencies' which have in situ emerged in Pune's new urban fringes, to meet the growing gaps in demand of essential public services in these areas. The article then proceeds to show how Pune's local micro-political cultures, including the numerous instances of territorial conflict and collaboration between so-called elites and subaltern actors at the local level, continue to ‘co-shape’ the typologies and the temporalities of local land use, planning and development that takes place in India’s new urban fringes. This paper attempts to expand this discussion in digital geographies by exploring their interaction with uneven urban development and planning in cities of the global South. At the centre of its enquiry are 'high-tech' urban clusters located at the fringes of Pune (a Tier-2 metro city in western India), that include several large and small, highly securitised software technology parks, associated industrial zones, glitzy shopping malls and luxury residential condominiums, bordered by an ever-shrinking reservoir of vacant and un-built 'village' land. Instead of cataloguing the genealogy and evolution of 'technology-parks' or 'knowledge corridors' as 'spaces of sovereign exception' (Gonzalez-Vicente, 2019), this paper theorises large urban IT-clusters in Indian cities as constitutive of ‘a multiplicity of normative orders' (Mezzadra and Neilsen, 2019, p.152), which intersect with the multiplicity of economic actors, labour forms and practices - whether they be formal or informal, legal or illegal, sustained or provisional. Through this, the paper emphasises the need to emplace these global infrastructural spaces and zones within a grassroots conception of co-dependent urbanisation and highlight rootedness of these modern infrastructural spaces or zones within urban social networks, territorial collaborations and contestations among heterogeneous urban actors and their everyday micropolitics.