Here is a paragraph from his essay.

See if you can realise the critique of the contemporary and how he manages to establish the city as a space of discrimination and unfairness.

‘Yet, planners and policy-makers still draw their lessons from those cities, criticize the new cities and try to remake them in those terms. In fact, what is demanded is a new view of cities and a reappraisal of what development should be, for whom and how. The failure of formal development suggests that the theories and assumptions of the essentially urban planners are inadequate; this essay suggests that it is the rural-minded poor who are creating the new cities and that it is with them that the real experience and lessons of development lie—certainly in terms of development that is relevant to their lives. It is the thesis of this essay that the poor are evolving within the existing city-village situation, a society, a hybrid rural-urban society with appropriate social structures and institutions which allows them to be part of both city and village. It argues that this formation of a hybrid society is a process which is currently taking place, shaped by the two forces of rejection and affinity: rejection as exclusion and exploitation by the urban centre, and the affinity of strong ancestral traditions and of familiar associations such as language and caste maintained through direct linkage.’

Ask of this paragraph, the following questions:

1. How does Sen identify the space he is talking about? Is it through practices, through policies, or through the people occupying these spaces?

2. Who, according to Sen are the victims of this dystopia? Who are the creators of this dystopian space? What actions led to the creation of this space?

3. What is the notion of the city and the village that Sen seems to carry with him, as a part of his argument?