Cities in South Asia are home to one of the highest concentrations of people anywhere in the world. For most people, land comes at a premium, and as a result conflicts and contestations over land are rife. In the edited volume The Politics of Urban Land in South Asia, the contributors discuss the politics and challenges associated with rapid urban transformation across the subcontinent.
The land contestations analysed in the book have risen within the context of wider changes in governance, demography, and aspirations, alongside economic shifts, and serious reconfigurations of political and financial structures. Globalization and neoliberal restructuring have heightened the significance of the real estate and construction sectors, driving land grabbing and commoditization in cities across South Asia. Coupled with a growing private sector involvement more generally, the allocation of land and urban resources and the benefits that can be derived from them have become increasingly contested, as witnessed in the many struggles by low-income groups and vulnerable or marginalized communities to fight off dispossession or displacement.
In The Politics of Urban Land in South Asia, the authors examine how India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal to a large extent face a shared set of challenges related to their respective urban futures. By juxtaposing a series of case studies that map current challenges that are shared across national borders, the authors identify and explore three defining characteristics of the current conjuncture, namely dispossession, opposition and critique, and alternatives. Dispossession is, as the book demonstrates, implicated in most forms of urban restructuring across South Asia, generating consistent patterns of exclusion and marginalization in both old and emerging urban spaces; opposition and critique are, in turn, common responses from communities subject to coercive dispossession, but also from scholars and activists engaged in knowledge production on urban transformation; while alternatives point to emerging and sometimes-experimental practices that seek to balance competing demands on urban land as they work towards more just, equitable, and inclusive urban forms and outcomes. Read more about the book here!