Dissertation | SPA Delhi
Differential Citizenship in Space-making
strong inflow of foreign investment, the management and manipulation of the debt crises for the benefit of rich countries at the expense of the poor countries (Harvey, 2005). According to Neil Smith, the production of scale is a "social process," in which "scale is produced in and through a societal activity which in turn produces and is produced by geographical structures of social interaction" (Smith and Harvey, 2008). According to Smith, "the social as much as a geographical contest to establish boundaries between different places, locations, and sites of experience" is reflected in the continuous manufacture and reproduction of scale. This production is one of the government procedures employed by the Courts in eviction case law. The city is the scale at which the "pressing concerns" of public interest must be diagnosed and characterized, according to the judiciary. This is the scale at which interventions, judgments, and solutions must be conceptualized and implemented at the same time. Evictions can be carried out through the courts in PILs due to the peculiarities of the scale's production (Bhan, 2012). Further, in neoliberalism, rights cluster around two dominant logics of power- that of the territorial state and that of the capital. The point is clear from this cluster of power itself. Both the state and the capital are in a way regulated by the dominant and elite class. In a more logical sense, let us consider we wish our rights to be universal. But are they universal? In an actual sense- not, for they are to be protected by the state governed laws enforced by the state/ political power itself, and without this regulation of rights, the notion of rights becomes empty. The problem is induced by jurisdiction. The people who are not the “citizens” of a state, or are migrants or do not have a domicile, do not have a jurisdiction to look over them, and often these are the people who are exploited by the neoliberal capitalist accumulation. Therefore, David Harvey asserts that other than various rights which citizens can exercise, the most crucial right that they have and often forget is that of- “The Right to the City”. This is not limited just to an individual’s liberty to access urban resources, rather “it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey, 2009). Moreover, these changes can be brought in by a collective power and a community together rather than an individual, which makes it more of a
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