As we entered the Maritime Container Services Park (MCS), Sydney on 6 July 2012, one could see lines of containers of various shapes lined up in neat columns and huge trucks with containers negotiating their way to find a space for containers. The manager said, ‘We export air’. As he showed us around, navigating our bus through the empty pavements amidst thousands of containers stacked up in neat rows, there were several trucks with containers which came to unload the containers. What struck me and one of my other Indian colleagues was the absence of a work-force.

Ishita Dey

Though West Bengal was late in catching up with the creation of satellite centres compared to its counterparts in India, it has made its mark in the country’s ‘New Town’ geographies through the creation of Sector V, Salt Lake and Jyoti-Basu Nagar, Rajarhat (formerly known as New Town). These sites are interesting spatially as they connect the city to the airport and vice versa. These cities operate and function today through the lens of productive forces – the labouring lives involved in circulation of capital. An ethnography of labouring accounts across sectors like construction, IT/ITES and street food vendors shows how the urbanisation of goods and services not only thrives on production of space conducive to capitalism but also how these spaces facilitate a certain circulation of capital. What do the stories of labourers reveal about these new spaces?