%0 Journal Article
%T Planning a ¡®slum free' Trivandrum: Housing upgrade and the rescaling of urban governance in India
%A Glyn Williams
%A J Devika
%A N Jagajeevan
%A Umesh Omanakuttan
%J Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
%@ 2399-6552
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/2399654418784305
%X This paper examines how India¡¯s national urban development agenda is reshaping relationships between national, State and city-level governments. Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, 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 Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission¡¯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 Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission¡¯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 Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission funding success, have reshaped urban governance in ways not envisaged within policy. As a result, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission 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
%K Urban governance
%K state rescaling
%K slum development
%K Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission
%K Kerala
%K India
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2399654418784305