Displacement, Aspiration and the Contradiction of Capitalism

Dhiraj Kumar & Keyoor Pathak

We recently read one piece in The Indian Express, titled “Smart cities, broken communities: From New Delhi to Varanasi, what we lose when urban planning is not inclusive.” This descriptive writing issued a subtle invitation in a form of provocation to deliberate the phenomenon sociologically. We try to discuss what lies behind the shiny portico of smartness? What does the loss of community, shops or any space refer. Any form of displacement, or the loss of community desire or aspiration in the name of the modernity make us aware about the way we organise space, society and subjectivity. This piece of writing engages with a discussion of displacement which refers that it is not just a policy outcome but a psychic and moral burden mainly structured by the aspiration and weird by the contradiction. This contradiction is embedded with the concept and planning of smart cities. David Sandel aptly argued that ‘Smart Cities are ninety percent Sociology and ten percent Infrastructure’. It demands how to look this contradiction sociologically.

Smart cities, as proposed and imagined by policymakers and development planners, and promoted by politicians, have emerged from the logic of late capitalism, where the transformation of space serves capital accumulation. This transformation occurs only after the commodification of space and the restructuring of identities into fragmented selves. This process of capital accumulation not only changed the infrastructure but also facilitated unpredictability. This kind of unpredictability renders capitalism always flourish in form of instability through the production of space and spatiality.

If we examine the concept of spatial fix, we can find that slums are razed, skylines apartment built, and infrastructure modernised and all these happened in the name of progress. Here we want to make a point, smart city is not only associated with the discourse of developmental projects but smart city is a desire driven machine. The ideology of developmentalism as a process and activity served as a signifier but also it operates not by deception but by the organising our desire. We want to make an argument that by organising the desires, the poor and the masses whose settlement are not just displaced but also renounced. This renouncement is a necessary by-product of developmental projects carries the burden of late modernity. The smartness of the city depends on the ideological fantasy which talked about the technological advancement and beautification equated to the idea of justice and inclusion. It also accelerates the accumulation and facilitates the tragedy of late capitalism. We all are the carrier of this late modernity and this tragedy is doubled by the fact that displacement and making of smart cities often rides on the back of aspiration. No one denies that even a marginalised desires better infrastructure, more livable house, and having the aspiration to achieve the fantasy which capitalism generates. Our selves are gripped in the chain of aspiration generated by capitalism. Here is the psychoanalytic twist, the poor or the excluded or the displaced are made to aspire the system that structurally excluded him. The displacement of individual, collective masses, spaces as a fragmented subject of capitalism wanting inclusion but their inclusion can be only happened on the cost of erosion of their history and spatial memory. Such erosion is not just a material loss; it can be termed as a symbolic violence where the individual or the community itself is a reason of their violence due to their aspiration. If we exclude their uninvited role in the making of the broken selves no one can deny that this loss can be a narrative discontinuity of the identity associated with the place. It is the demand to forget who you were in order to become who the developers or the planners want or allow to be. The theorisation suggests that the subject is caught between the imaginary (fantasies of development), the symbolic (state planning and the legal frameworks) and the real who have the unassimilable trauma of eviction.

This piece of writing deals with two parallax perspective, we are forced to confront two seemingly irreconcilable truths: that smart cities may be necessary to address infrastructural decay, and that they simultaneously operate through structural exclusion. The Indian Express article mourns the loss of community, and rightly so, but we want to tell that we don’t need to fall into a nostalgic idealisation of the past. The displacement was never utopia. But the dream of its erasure reveals the moral blindness at the heart of developmental ideology.

We must stay with the contradiction. Now the city is being turned into the spectacles of smartness. Planning in the cities is not technocratic but theatrical. The making of master plans, its visualisation, creates an aesthetic of rationality. Legibility, the idea of James Scott is instructive here, which refers that development planners want space readable, and governable through efficient manners while erasing the informality, local and unpredictable. To demand inclusive development while recognising that inclusion, under capitalism, often means being included into dispossession. The ethical act, then, is not to resolve the contradiction but to hold it open, to resist the fantasy that displacement can be “managed” without confronting the deeper symbolic and psychic wounds it creates.

Our writing is not just a moment for reflection but it is a call to rethink the very language of the grammar of development induced displacement. What if inclusion isn’t simply about extending the benefits of the city to those on the margins, but about radically reimagining what the city could be? Not a sophisticated engine of growth built for accumulation of capital, but a shared ethical space rooted in care, memory, and justice. As Zizek reminds us, truly political acts don’t always come with clear solutions. It consists aesthetic lie. Often, their power lies in the contradiction and the unsettlement we’ve come to accept as normal. So perhaps the most radical response to the “smart city” fantasy isn’t to reject development altogether, but to ask: what would a smart city look like. This is the moral and political parallax we live within–the uncomfortable space between past and future, between what we hope for and what we inherit, between technical planning and human need. But maybe sitting with that discomfort–without rushing to fix it–is where a more truthful, more grounded sociology begins.

[Dr Dhiraj Kumar, Assistant Professor, Section of Sociology, MMV, BHU. Cell: 8917680236 & Dr Keyoor Pathak, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Allahabad. Cell: 9471601415]

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Vol 58, No. 14 - 17, Sep 28 - Oct 25, 2025