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Communities across the Global South are experiencing extreme challenges of increased polarization amid rapid urbanization and globalization. Pressures of domestic and international migrations lead to social contestations over the use of limited urban amenities like public spaces in developing economies. In India, the advent of the neoliberal economy in the 1990s gave rise to an uneven economic growth creating two extremes of the society–the liberalizing'middle class' and'new rich,'and the marginalized migrants from rural areas and neighboring countries. Kolkata, a metropolitan city of India, faces similar challenges of polarization in its highly contested public spaces. Within the context of New Market Square, a social, cultural, commercial, and political epicenter of Kolkata, the study aims–to understand the social class relations through investigating the value of public spaces to different classes and to explore …