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Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation, and citizenship in the Southern Metropolis

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Abstract

Drawing on Charles Tilly’s work on inequality, democracy and cities, we explore the local level dynamics of democratization across urban settings in India, South Africa, and Brazil. In all three cases, democratic institutions are consolidated, but there is tremendous variation in the quality of the democratic relationship between cities and their citizens. We follow Tilly’s focus on citizenship as the key element in democratization and argue that explaining variance across our three cases calls for analyzing patterns of inequality through the kind of relational lens used by Tilly and recognizing that patterns of contestation are shaped by shifting political relationships between the nation and the city. We conclude that Tilly’s theoretical frame is nicely sustained by the comparative analysis of cases very different from those that stimulated his original formulations.

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Notes

  1. As Kaplinsky (2005, p. 49) has argued, the traditional World Bank view that poverty is a result of limited participation in the global economy is a classic residualist view. Tilly explicitly contrasted his relational view to the existing literature’s narrow focus on the attributes or attitudes of individuals or groups that assumes there are “self-sustaining essences” at work rather than relational dynamics (1998:16–19). It is noteworthy that in its World Development Report on Equity and Development, the World Bank (2006, p. 21) embraced a relational view of inequality and even cites.

  2. Constitutional amendments in 1992 did give village and municipal governments new formal powers, but political and bureaucratic resistance at the provincial state level has blocked effective devolution of power.

  3. The share of manufacturing in Greater Mumbai’s economy was reduced from 42% in 1980 to 23.5% in 1994 (Whitehead and More 2007, p. 2428).

  4. No single statistic captures the contradiction between the use and exchange value of the city’s land than the finding that the average residential rent is 140 percent of per capita income (Whitehead and More 2007, p. 2428).

  5. It is this inter-level distribution of political power that had has derailed the effective implementation of the decentralization reforms introduced through constitutional amendment in 1992.

  6. Appadurai argues that global networks of NGOs and social movements, and global discourses of human rights and democratization, “has provided a huge boost to local democratic formations” (Appadurai 2002, p. 25).

  7. Most spectacular was a march at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development that outdrew the ANC-sponsored march of “official” civil society organizations four times.

  8. See in particular the series of papers produced by the “Globalisation, Marginalisation and New Social Movements in Post Apartheid South Africa” project sponsored by the Centre for Civil Society and the School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal. http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?5,56

  9. A la Michael Mann (1986).

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Heller, P., Evans, P. Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation, and citizenship in the Southern Metropolis. Theor Soc 39, 433–450 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9115-3

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