Within this article, we discuss/unpack a speculative international property development born out of a license agreement between the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and real estate investment company, Anglo Indian. The proposed building of twelve cloned, MCC branded, cricket communities in India-targeted to the consumption-based lifestyles of India's new middle class-is addressed within the context relational to the political, economic, and cultural rationalities of postcolonial India, shifting power dynamics within the international cricket formation, and the associated re-colonisation of cricket-related spaces/bodies. Anglo Indian's proposed communities are understood as part of a complex assemblage of national and global forces and relations (including, but certainly not restricted to): transnational gentrification; urban (re)development; and, revised understandings of historical and geographic connections between places, governance, and the politics of be(long)ing in branded spaces. This analysis explicates how Anglo Indian's idealized community development offers a literal and figurative space for embodied performance of "glocal competence" for consumption-based identity projects of the new Indian middle-class (Brosius 2010, p. 13) through the somewhat ironic mobilization of colonial spatial logics and cultural aesthetics. 2 Keywords: speculative (re)development, master planned communities, cricket, new Indian middle class, (post)colonialism, urban branding Within this article, we focus on what we might term the re-colonisation of spaces and bodies as enacted within and through, the political, economic, and cultural rationalities of post-colonial India. Our focus is on analysis of a speculative, and indeed spectacular, international property development: a proposed series of twelve branded cricket communities targeted at metropolitan locations throughout India (specifically, Delhi,
This article reports findings from a study designed to examine cricket's role as an international development tool-with a particular focus on how decisions are made at the highest institutional levels to support cricket-related development initiatives. Data for the study are drawn from interviews with executives in the International Cricket Council and the Marylebone Cricket Club who were asked about how and why decision-makers in their organizations chose to engage in development-related work. The study is informed by literature on postcolonialism, sport for development and peace, global politics and the sociology of cricket. The results illustrate that: (a) a select group of executives in the International Cricket Council and the Marylebone Cricket Club make decisions hierarchically, and that decisions reflect organizational mandates; (b) decision-makers tend to be dismissive of critiques of sport for development and peace, with notable exceptions; and (c) the goals and implications of development-related programmes are portrayed differently to different audiences. This article concludes with commentary on the ways that cricket continues to be implicated in postcolonial relationships and on the processes of decision-making in organizations governed by neoliberal policies.
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This article investigates the politics of the design of a golf‐focused gated community in Gurgaon, India. It considers the aesthetic uses of golf and architecture that go into the production of a purified urban environment to explore the relationship between urban development, environmental aesthetics and spatial purification in contemporary India. I demonstrate how an architectural focus on golf reproduces the ‘distribution of the sensible’ by attempting to delimit the field of view: who and what is seen, and what an individual can or cannot see. I show how golf is political—deeply connected to and inseparable from legacies of colonial environmental and spatial purification and exclusion, as well as contemporary aesthetic‐political regimes that justify spatial segregation, cleansing, and the protection of beautiful environments away from the urban poor. The aesthetic emphasis on a beautified, green and empty environment that characterizes the production of golf highlights the aesthetic terms on which environmental selves are imagined and how environmental images are constructed. This is an aesthetic premised on the creation of shared viewership combined with the power to be(long) in a place where one can be with others but not mixed up with them.
This essay analyzes embodied experiences of enclaving. It argues that by tracking revolutions in built form that gating enacts, urban geography has simultaneously tracked revolutions in urban subjectivity. It highlights three enclaved “body types” within existing literature: securitized bodies in fortressed cities, performative bodies in consumptive enclaves, and hygienic bodies in purified zones. It then offers three ethnographic scenes of gating related to new crises of personhood: metabolic illness, atmospheric breakdown, and resurgent ethno-nationalism. Attention to the psychic forces behind gating, it finally argues, can further show the gender, class, and ethnic underpinnings of what appear as generic architectural zones.
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