Who owns the city? The case of Gurgaon, India
The increasing purchases of valuable real estate for storing capital has contributed to the soaring prices of modest housing in many global cities and in certain South Asian cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. Saskia Sassen emphasizes the phenomenon of underutilization of bought properties existing alongside the extremely high demand for housing by low- and moderate-income households in the same cities. Despite the gravity of this fact, empirical analyses of urban land purchases remain rare, especially because they tend to be piecemeal and obscure, involving a myriad of smaller land deals and a variety of actors. Gurgaon, a neoliberal city adjacent to New Delhi and located in the National Capital Region (NCR), has the largest share of vacant formal housing in India. At the same time, urban housing demand is the highest in NCR. In this research, with Gurgaon as a focus, I underscore the contradictions between neoliberal theory and its everyday operations. First, I examine corporate purchases of urban land by developing a land database for peri-urban Gurgaon. I make visible the radical changes in property ownership patterns, extreme concentration of land ownership, deeply unequal distribution of urban land, and the use of illicit practices by leading companies in land banking. Second, I explore the impact of this neoliberal landscape on the urban villages of Gurgaon. Third, I uncover the extent and forms of illicit state-corporate activity in urban planning and development and the interests of key urban experts in city-making.
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