Assetizing the Future: The Politics of Land and Development in an Indian New City Project

Land has returned to the center of debates on capitalism, urbanization, and global development across several disciplines, including anthropology, geography, critical agrarian studies, urban studies and political economy, and from multiple theoretical perspectives. In this presentation, I discuss the contemporary ‘land question’ in the context of an urban mega-project in southern India, where I have been conducting ethnographic research for the past ten years. In 2014, a new capital city for Andhra Pradesh, Amaravati, was planned as an ultra-modern ‘greenfield city’ that would also serve as the state’s key ‘engine’ of economic growth. The project consumed 35,000 acres of agricultural land, disrupting the lives and livelihoods of 100,000 people living in the 29 rural villages encompassed by the master plan. In the presentation, I trace how the values, meanings and affordances of land were altered through the imagination, planning and execution of the Amaravati project and following its collapse in 2019. As the farmers who gave up their land to build a new capital participated in this spectacular urban imaginary, they began to strategize, politically and financially, to construct new futures as propertied urban citizens—especially by ensuring the future value of their compensation plots. More broadly, I argue that in this case, the transformation of agricultural holdings into urban property through land pooling represents not just the assetization of land, but also the creation of a new kind of fictitious asset. These dematerialized plots of land began to circulate within a regionally embedded transnational property market, creating new avenues for accumulation as well as ‘dispossession’ as the risks of this speculative mode of development were transferred to the farmers. Finally, I reflect on what the Amaravati story may contribute to current debates on neoliberal development policies, urbanization, and the politics and values of land in India and the global South.

This will be a hybrid event.

For more information and the webinar link, please see http://www.swedishcollegium.se/subfolders/Events.html.