IN-PERSON Lisbon Livable Cities. Section B

Abstract

In the context of fast-growing urbanisation, this paper tends to focus on a coastal town in South India carrying a colonial history, whose local institutions are attempting to retain, conserve and promote infrastructural colonial residues as the city’s heritage. Relying on tourism as its major economy, a strategy reinforced by the implementation of a Smart City mission aiming at transforming Pondicherry into a “global tourist destination”, our aim is to critically address the scope of urban development policies and governance, which are primarily centred upon ‘heritage and tourism’ factors that shape the city’s livability. The long coastline of Pondicherry, historically specialised into artisanal fishing activities, tends to be the main asset of the production of a heritage-tourist city. An extensive colonial history, constituted by the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and predominantly the French regime until 1954, still continues to shape the discourse that surrounds urban interventions, while complex games of power appear, blurring both the ways through which such operations are conducted as well as their political ambitions. Analysing Pondicherry’s development policies since the late colonial period reveals a compulsive rhetoric based on heritage conservation and on tourism promotion, that tends to shape the transformation of the coastal neighbourhoods into tourist-based activities. Drawing upon these interrelated complexities, both referring to references to colonial heritage and anchored in complex local games of powers, this paper engages with the politics of heritage and tourism that alter the living spaces along the coastline, sidelining existing fishing hamlets and their economic and social assets.