Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi

Rule by Aesthetics offers a powerful examination of the process and experience of mass demolition in the world's second largest city of Delhi, India. Using Delhi's millennial effort to become a 'world-class city, ' the book shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. This practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms - what Ghertner calls 'rule by aesthetics' - allowed the state in Delhi to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, overcoming its historical reliance on inaccurate maps and statistics. Slums hence were declared illegal because they looked illegal, an arrangement that led to the displacement of a million slum residents in the first decade of the 21st century. Drawing on close ethnographic engagement with the slum residents targeted for removal, as well as the planners, judges, and politicians who targeted them, the book demonstrates how easily plans, laws, and democratic procedures can be subverted once the subjects of democracy are seen as visually out of place. Slum dwellers' creative appropriation of dominant aesthetic norms shows, however, that aesthetic rule does not mark the end of democratic claims making. Rather, it signals a new relationship between the mechanism of government and the practice of politics, one in which struggles for a more inclusive city rely more than ever on urban aesthetics, in Delhi as in aspiring world-class cities the world over.

About the Author :
D. Asher Ghertner is an interdisciplinary scholar who uses the contemporary politics of slum demolition and urban renewal in India to challenge conventional theories of economic transition, city planning and political rule. He is Assistant Professor in Geography and Director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers University. He previously taught at the London School of Economics.

Review :
"The strength of this book thus lies in Ghertner's ability to reveal how the 'world-class city' idea plays out in multiple registers, including financial institutions' reports, juridical discourses, civic activism and slum residents' aspirations. This eclectic approach is very impor- tant because it reveals the indeterminacy, and potential for hope, behind a concept researchers often write off as inherently destructive." --South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies "This book is a great read yet also manages to be impressively detailed in its data and textured in its ethnographic feel. Ghertner proves particularly agile in his movement among sites in Delhi as well as among concepts and modes of academic engagement, shifting from exposition and explication to conceptual development and back again. There is a masterful sense of a very locally specific framework and argument that simultaneously hold broad utility for a range of settings." --Society & Space "The book demonstrates what an academic work can achieve by connecting the ordinary lives of the urban poor with the larger political economy of a postcolonial city like Delhi." --International Sociology "Asher Ghertner gives us a rich, multidimensional view of city making in the Global South as we rarely see and feel it. His work is grounded in sharp observations and revealing interviews that expose Delhi's slum clearance efforts like a gaping wound. Theoretically adventurous and politically aware, Ghertner shows a decisive shift in world city building from statistics to aesthetics, yet with little improvement in the lives of the poor." --Sharon Zukin, Professor of Sociology, City University of New York, and author of Naked City "In the early 21st century, as slum populations are expanding rapidly in the world's megacities, new governmental programs of eviction are being mobilized to 'make room' for land uses considered more appropriate to elite visions of the global city. In this original, meticulous investigation, Asher Ghertner explores how such transformations have been implemented and contested in millennial Delhi. In so doing, he offers an illuminating, if disturbing, portrait of emergent patterns of legal struggle, displacement, and resistance in that city, while also provoking urbanists to devote more attention to the role of 'aesthetic governmentality' in the contemporary remaking of urban space." -- Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory, Harvard University, and author of New State Spaces "D. Asher Ghertner's lRule by Aesthetics invites us to interrogate the beauty and allure of modernization--the aesthetics of "world-class"--as part of the civic system: the intersection of governmental structures and the sentiments of elite and impoverished popular classes alike." -- Harvey Molotch, Public Books "Rule by Aesthetics is a tremendous accomplishment that raises the standard for theoretically engaged, empirically grounded, and politically astute urban studies." -- Austin Zeiderman, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research "Rule by Aesthetics draws on extensive fieldwork in Delhi's slums, courtrooms and state offices to shed fresh light on the violent underpinnings of contemporary city making." -- Hans Schenk, newbooks.asia "Dr. Asher Ghertner's Rules by Aesthetics invites us to interrogate the beauty and allure of modernization -- the aesthetics of "world-class" -- as part of the civic system: the intersection of governmental structures and the sentiments of elite and impoverished popular classes alike." -- Harvey Molotch, Public Books "Theoretically stimulating and rich in narrative drive, Rule by Aesthetics opens up new ways for thinking about urban governance in India and beyond." -- Ian Cook, New Books in South Asian Studies "Interesting to anyone concerned with the growth of and intricacies in Indian city life -- and with the more general problem of slum-clearance" -- Joseph Rykwert, Times Literary Supplement