Planning a 'slum free' Trivandrum: housing upgrade and the rescaling of urban governance in India

This paper examines how India’s national urban development agenda is reshaping relationships between national, State and city-level governments. JNNURM, the flagship programme that heralded a new era of urban investment in India, contained a range of key governance aspirations: linking the analysis of urban poverty to city-level planning, developing holistic housing solutions for the urban poor, and above all empowering Urban Local Bodies to re-balance relationships between State and city-level governments in favour of the latter. Here, we trace JNNURM’s implementation in Kerala’s capital city, Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram), where the city’s decentralised urban governance structure and use of ‘pro-poor’ institutions to implement housing upgrade programmes could have made it an exemplar of success. In practice, Trivandrum’s ‘city visioning’ exercises and the housing projects it has undertaken have fallen short of JNNURM’s lofty goals. The contradictions between empowering cities and retaining centralised control embedded within this national programme, and the unintended city-level consequences of striving for JNNURM funding success, have reshaped urban governance in ways not envisaged within policy. As a result, JNNURM has been important in rescaling governance relationships through three interlinked dynamics of problem framing, technologies of governance and the scalar strategy of driving reform ‘from above’ that together have ensured the national state’s continued influence over the practices of urban governance in India.