Charter Cities and Development: examining a paradox

Abstract

Cities have long been established symbols of modernization and progress, places where people can participate in the imagined futures of urban life and enjoy the privileges of ‘development’. In other words, cities evoke the emancipatory promise of ‘development’ and are seen as sites where people can transform themselves and their circumstances through economic growth. Thus, broadly speaking, cities are firmly associated with the idea of progress and modernization. As symbolic of modernization they are reflective of processes that enable people to move closer to ‘development’ and away from underdevelopment. In short, cities are thought of as places where ‘development’ happens. The idea of development ‘happening’ in and through cities has over the past decades resulted in some cities proactively aiming to assume the features of ‘a global’ city within a given timeframe (Dupont 2011). This conventional association of urbanization in general and the city in particular with ‘progress’ and ‘development’ is, to be sure, tendentious, and at best a highly fragmented interpretation of more complicated relations and processes. However, despite cogent reservations about cities as intrinsic sites of human development, recent initiatives have forged ahead with unreconstructed urbanization agendas. Perhaps the most prominent and revealing example in this regard concerns proposals to operationalize the so-called ‘Charter Cities’ approach as a development strategy. The lure of the Charter City relies to some extent on the idealized imaginary of the city more generally. However, as we will see, a Charter City is conceived as a different type of city, and has more in common with special export zones (SEZs) and export processing zones (EPZs). The concept of the Charter City thus raises important critical questions about the politics of development and inequality in the early part of the 21st century. The question of ‘what kind of a city it is’, to its implications for the theory and practice of development, are the focus of this chapter.