Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Auroville: city of the dawn, city of the future, now

2018; Complutense University of Madrid; Volume: 15; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5209/tekn.59078

1549-2230

Ian Parker,

Social and Economic Development in India

This paper briefly describes the formation, present-day functioning and problems facing the futuristic city ‘Auroville’ in the state of Tamil Nadu in south India. Founded in 1968 as a ‘universal’ city, and planned to have 50,000 inhabitants that would take the next step in human evolution to exist as a self-sustaining community independent of nation states, Auroville manifests another utopian attempt to create a ‘common’ space which resonates with communist hopes to reclaim the commons from capitalist enclosure. This paper explores the problems that face Auroville when it creates its ‘commons’ on existing peasant land and becomes implicated in colonial politics.