




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 4 (2): 165-168, July 2021 

 
BOOK REVIEW  

 
Rethinking Delhi, When ecological Consciousness 
crosses paths with Bourgeoise Imaginaries 
 
Avishek Ray1 

 

Amita Baviskar, Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi, New 
Delhi: SAGE-Yoda Press, 2020, pp. xvi–243, ₹ 1195, ISBN: 978-93-5328-
940-9 (Hardcover). 

In the wake of the “urban turn”, the 
city-space is increasingly being imagined 
as mappable, griddable, and segregable, 
and is being territorialized into urban 
“enclaves”. Territorial techniques of 
urbanization, which Schiller and Çaglar 
(2018) call “city-making”, give rise to 
proprietorship and create imaginary 
border(land)s within the city. Such 
enclaves realign the geographies of the 
city, and in so doing, create an 
“enclavist” identity not only for those 
who imagine the city thus, but also for 
the commons in the city. Amita 
Baviskar’s Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and 
the Commons in Delhi addresses the 
politics and nuances of the privatization 
and commoditization of the urban 
commons in Delhi. “Places are made 

                                                        
1 Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, National Institute of 
Technology, NIT Road, Fakiratilla, Silchar, Assam – 788010; avishekray@hum.nits.ac.in. 

Copyright © Ray 2021. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 

International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic  

Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i2.457  

mailto:avishekray@hum.nits.ac.in
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i2.457


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [166] 

meaningful,” Baviskar insists, “by the memories they accumulate, as much 
as by the everyday practices that animate them” (p. 1). This book combines 
personal memories with rich ethnographic detail to shed light on a range of 
practices that strip Delhi off its urban commons and transform it into what 
Baviskar calls an “uncivil city”. 

The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 lays down the central 
problématique—how “selective and superficial framings of environmental 
issues derive from economic and political inequality” (p. 18). It uses 
different sites in Delhi—homes, workplaces, streets, the river, and the 
ridge—to illustrate how ecological consciousness emerges from disparate 
understandings of the environment across class and space. Chapter 2 
discusses the conflicting nature of spatiality and issues of marginality in the 
context of Delhi’s transformation into a “planned city”. It demonstrates 
how the Master Plan, executed by the Delhi Development Authority 
(DDA) in 1962, has reoriented the coordinates of spatiality, sociality, and 
labour in the city. Chapter 3 deals with how bourgeois environmentalists 
played on the notion of “public interest” and, with the aid of appropriate 
judicial interventions, helped shut down factories and firms in Delhi; far 
from achieving environmental goals, this ended up further disenfranchising 
out-of-work industrial workers and other urban poor. This, Baviskar argues, 
“added epistemic violence to the structural violence of the Plan” (p. 19). 
Chapter 4 examines how, during the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, 
privatization of public wealth and resources was facilitated through the 
mobilization of an affective resonance—Baviskar calls this “the fragile 
facade of civil solidarity”—stemming from “anxieties about national 
honour and prestige” (p. 19). Chapters 5 and 6 look at how the discourse 
around certain non-human actors—cows, cycle-rickshaws, and the Yamuna 
River—play out in the context of Delhi’s intended ascendance towards 
being a “world-class” city. Chapter 7 considers the curious case of Delhi’s 
sacred grove, Mangar Bani, in the context of urban environmentalism, and 
how it has become a symbolic site for two sets of competing aspirations: 
that of urban developers and the public. Chapter 8 discusses alternative 
claims on Delhi’s ecology—the subaltern voices that are unheard, if not 
actively silenced—that run contrary to the bourgeois environmentalist 
discourse. Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion on how the bourgeois 
environmentalist discourse turns a blind eye to climate change and serenely 
evades the consequences of the crisis.  

The book offers a welcome break from a chronological style of writing. 
Baviskar approaches Delhi’s shift from a “planned” city to a “world-class” 
city using certain compelling themes. The book is an easy read, but the 
narrative—spanning ecology, politics, history, and sociology—warrants 



[167] Avishek Ray 

patience and provokes thought. Baviskar has a flair for discussing complex 
matters lucidly and supplementing them with anecdotes. Her writing is 
stimulating and engaging and forces the reader to think critically about the 
complex historical, political, and cultural dynamics of Delhi, the diverse 
meanings of which reflect and reproduce broader socio-spatial 
contestations in contemporary times. Indeed, these contestations yield 
different actors (and networks) with distinct dispositions and aspirations—
and, more importantly, competing environmental concerns—many of 
which find their spatial outlet in Delhi. This book does a wonderful job of 
exploring Delhi-based lifeworlds that articulate new expressions of 
territoriality and novel possibilities for social stratification, based on a 
contingent understanding of nature, as well as the historical dynamics that 
generate them. In short, the contestations over Delhi’s meaning—as a literal 
and figurative “place” amid feuds over environmental and ensuing 
territorial claims—come across clearly in this book. 

The most interesting aspect of the book is how it integrates two diverging 
paradigms, the ecology in and the ecology of the city—a contrast best 
illustrated in Pickett et al. (1997) and Grimm et al. (2000). It views Delhi’s 
urban ecological politics through the lens of an actor–network, as an 
integral part of a socioecological system beyond the biotic–abiotic binary. 
However, the book offers limited insight on the practicalities of urban 
commoning practices: collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-
capitalist principles of ecology and ethics. In other words, it has much to 
say on the ecology in and the ecology of the city, but very little on the 
ecology for the city, which may translate to “knowledge to action” (Childers 
et al. 2014). Baviskar “began writing these essays ... almost 20 years ago” 
(17). Indeed, all the chapters except for the Introduction and the 
Conclusion are reproductions of her previously published articles. 
Baviskar’s key finding that Delhi’s urban environmentalism is territorially 
governed and essentially elitist is by now a fairly well-established 
proposition. Many of her interlocutors cited in the book have already 
established this. 

In this book, Baviskar’s notion of the “uncivil city” is squarely juxtaposed 
with the imagination of a “civil city” of yesteryear. However, the 
imagination of Delhi-from-the-past as an idyllic “civil city”, that “with a 
careless generosity, welcomed all—different species of living as well as 
different classes of people” (8–9), has not been historically substantiated. At 
best, such traditionalist nostalgia seems only to arouse an acute sense of 
loss. But Baviskar does acknowledge that “it’s easy to be nostalgic ... from 
the vantage point of a place of privilege” (p. 7). It is germane in this context 
to consider that Baviskar too recently changed her affiliation from the 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [168] 

publicly funded Delhi University to the privately managed Ashoka 
University, which, for me, contravenes the persuasiveness of some of the 
arguments she presents in the book. However, in a recent piece, she writes, 
“The public versus private distinction needs a lot more nuance, and waving 
it like a flag only distracts attention” (Baviskar 2021), although this nuance 
does not come through in the book. Here, the antagonism between the 
public and the private is way too stark.  

Despite some concerns, this book does a reasonably good job of illustrating 
how urban ecological consciousness crosses paths with bourgeois 
imaginaries and renders Delhi an ambivalent site where territorialization 
and cultural differentiation are sanctioned, enacted, and contested. It should 
be of interest to scholars of urban ecology, sociology, history, and politics.  

 

REFERENCES 

Baviskar, Amita. 2021. "Ashoka and After: The Universities We Believe In." The 
Wire, March 25. https://thewire.in/education/why-singling-out-ashoka-does-
promoting-universities-in-india-no-good. 

Childers, Daniel, Stewart TA Pickett, J Morgan Grove, Laura Ogden, and Alison 
Whitmer. 2014. "Advancing Urban Sustainability Theory and Action: Challenges 
and Opportunities." Landscape and Urban Planning 125: 320-328. 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.01.022. 

Grimm, Nancy, J Grove, Stewart TA Pickett, and Charles L Redman. 2000. 

"Integrated Approaches to Long‐term Studies of Urban Ecological Systems." 
BioScience 50(7): 571-584. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73412-5_8. 

Pickett, Stewart TA, William R Burch Jr, Shawn E Dalton, and Timothy W 
Foresman. 1997. "Integrated Urban Ecosystem Research." Urban Ecosystems 1(4): 
183-184. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1018579628818. 

Schiller, Nina Glick, and Ayse Çaglar. 2018. Migrants and City-making: Dispossession, 
Displacement and Urban Regeneration. Durham: Duke University Press. 

https://thewire.in/education/why-singling-out-ashoka-does-promoting-universities-in-india-no-good
https://thewire.in/education/why-singling-out-ashoka-does-promoting-universities-in-india-no-good
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.01.022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73412-5_8
https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1018579628818

