Howard Spodek's Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India is an important and timely history of a city that has re-emerged at the forefront of debates around India's model of economic growth. Once known as the ‘Manchester of India’, Ahmedabad has long been overshadowed by Bombay (now Mumbai) in the imagination of urbanists. Its relatively unknown character outside of India belies its significance as a bellwether of India's contradictory and chaotic process of modernization. Spodek argues that Ahmedabad is a ‘shock city’, paradigmatic of an era, ‘forcing to the surface what seemed to be intractable problems of society and government’ (p. 5).

The book is divided into three sections, the Gandhian Era (1915–50), the Westernizing City (1950–80) and Creativity and Chaos (1969 onwards). Its strongest and most engrossing chapters span the first two sections, detailing the building, and subsequent decay, of four Gandhian-influenced institutions that organized economic and political life in the late colonial and early post-independence period, the Congress party, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), the Ahmedadbad Mill-owners Association (AMA) and the Textile Labour Association (TLA). Gandhi made Ahmedabad his base on his return to India, and played an important role in shaping labour relations in the industrializing city. Unlike Bombay and Calcutta, Ahmedabad's emerging industrial elite was entirely indigenous, with roots in the city's prominent business families, and had close ties with the Congress party during the independence struggle. The TLA was founded by Anasuya Sarabhai, a progressive activist, social worker and Gandhian, and sister of one of Ahmedabad's leading mill-owners. Indeed, Gandhi's ideal for the relationship between mill-owners and workers was one of family (p. 94). The TLA's principles were negotiation, compromise and arbitration, although strikes were employed on occasion, and Gandhi himself mediated conflicts between owners and workers. At the time of independence, Ahmedabad's mill-workers had the highest wages in India. The TLA combined labour organizing with the provision of social services, running literacy centres and a special unit for women workers, which gave rise to the internationally renowned Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA). In later years, the more radical Ambedkarites and communist unions challenged the paternalistic Gandhian approach, but the TLA, the only union recognized by the Mill-owners Association, remained predominant. Until the 1960s, mill-workers formed a sizeable proportion of Ahmedabad's population, and the TLA and other unions provided a platform for organizing across caste and religious lines.

The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), in the Gandhian era, was closely aligned with India's independence movement. City governments were the first elected governing institutions in India, and thus constituted ‘training grounds’ in democratic practice. Compared to the colonial commercial centres of Bombay or Calcutta, British administrators had little interest in controlling the AMC. Vallabhai Patel, India's first home minister, began his political life as a municipal councillor. As president of the Corporation, he improved public services and infrastructure, promoted the nationalist struggle and built the Congress party machine. Patel developed close ties with the Ahmedabad's business leaders, and marginalized socialists within the Congress. A key figure in Spodek's account is socialist leader Indulal Yagnik, a Gandhian as well as a critic of Gandhi, and of the Congress party under Patel. An activist and mobilizer, Yagnik's concern was for workers and peasants, and he played an important role in the movement to create the linguistic state of Gujarat after independence. Yagnik's influence, and that of the political left, declined after the creation of Gujarat in 1960. The locus of political power and action shifted from the AMC to the Gujarat state government, housed in the new state capital of Gandhinagar, next to Ahmedebad. Gujarat continued to industrialize, and Ahmedabad became home to many of the landmark institutions of modernizing India, such as the first Indian Institute of Management.

The period from 1969 onwards was one of economic growth and prosperity combined with institutional decay, within and outside government. New industries were started by outsiders with few roots in Ahmedabad, and, spurred by policies favouring small enterprises, the textile industry informalized. Informalization involved the breaking up of large factories into small workshops allowing industries to escape labour regulations. Large urban mills were replaced by smaller, decentralized power looms.

The TLA declined as an institutional force, with profoundly destabilizing consequences, tearing apart the social consensus of the Gandhian era. Caste and religious cleavages hardened and riots increased in intensity, even as Ahmedabad continued to grow, economically, demographically and physically. A new organizing force emerged in Ahmedebad during this period, the ‘Sangh Parivar’, a family of right-wing Hindu organizations. With a presence at the grassroots and within state institutions, the Sangh Parivar mobilized and fostered religious animosity for political ends, culminating in the pogrom of 2002, where an estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed, nearly half in Ahmedabad. The deep socio-spatial rifts that characterize Ahmedabad today should be cause for concern, as scholarship in the US and South Africa has shown the pernicious effects of state-induced segregation. Spodek's account of this period is less cogent than earlier chapters, and the links between economic, political and spatial transformations are not as effectively drawn out.

Ahmedabad: Shock City is an important contribution to the still sparse scholarship on the political economy of Indian cities. Ahmedabad's claims as a ‘shock city’ for India are particularly compelling today, as Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi gains national prominence for his pro-business development model. While Spodek's book has clear relevance for South Asianists, it will be of interest to a wider audience of urban scholars. Unlike Manchester or Chicago during the industrial age, it is unlikely that any single city can lay claim to the status of ‘shock city’ for the global era. But the shock cities of today, whether Lagos, Shenzhen or Ahmedabad, will exist outside the west. Ahmedabad's patterns of rapid growth, informalization, institutional decline and socio-economic inequity are prevalent in many developing cities, but as Spodek shows, their histories reveal political and social complexities that give us a better understanding of contemporary urban society.