Ahmedabad: the middle class megacity

Abstract

This article explores the nexus between the middle class and neoliberal politics in the remaking of Ahmedabad as a ‘Megacity’. The middle class is deeply invested in the discursive and material processes of producing Ahmedabad as a ‘Megacity’ in ways that advance largely exclusionary economic and political agendas. The Megacity project offers the middle class more direct and vociferous opportunities to realize its political interests without depending on electoral democracy. It argues that through the processes of crisis, participation, celebration, and capture the middle class has successfully mediated its aspirations and interests vis-à-vis the broader agenda of neoliberal urbanism. Ethnographic and other evidence is used to examine these processes and the enlistment of seemingly neutral discourses of development, nostalgia and community. By championing the ‘Megacity’ the middle class has proved to be a key ally in the official promotion of the ‘Gujarat model’ both in Gujarat and beyond the state.