Drafting the frontier: negotiation, uncertainty and digital governance in the Southern city

With Tom Cowan, University of Nottingham.

This is an online seminar and all are welcome. Please contact sue.davis@nottingham.ac.uk for the link.

Part of the Economic Worlds Seminar Series.

Abstract

Examining bureaucratic processes of boundary-mapping, record translation, and data simplification, the paper explores the role that bureaucrats, engineers and surveyors play in shaping patterns of real estate-led urbanisation. As cities across India have been transformed by real estate development over the past decade, state governments have looked for ways to unlock rural property markets and extend real estate markets into the countryside. While urban studies has tended to privilege municipal and private sector planning technologies in accounts of extended urbanisation, this paper argues that India’s new urban frontiers are being forged through the contested practices of the local bureaucracy (Jonnalagadda and Cowan, forthcoming). Examining how liberal property regimes claims are drafted, compromised and approximated on the outskirts of New Delhi, the paper explores the development of contingent and provisional real estate markets driving urbanisation in the South.