Who owns the city? The case of Gurgaon, India
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Bhagia, Meher
- Graduate Program:
- Architecture
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 03, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Madhuri Desai, Major Field Member
Melissa Wright, Outside Field Member
Mallika Bose, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Brian King, Outside Unit Member
Ute Poerschke, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- corporate land ownership
corruption
India
neoliberalism
urban land grab
moral economy
urban villages
urbanization
housing
urban planning
neoliberal urbanism - Abstract:
- 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 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 the NCR. Gurgaon is a city that has embraced neoliberal policies and partly managed to manufacture the image of a ‘successful’ city built by private developers. In this research, with Gurgaon as my focus, I underscore the contradictions between neoliberal ideology and its everyday operations. First, I examine corporate purchases of urban land in Gurgaon by developing a land database for upcoming sectors in the city. I make visible the radical changes in property ownership patterns from agricultural land to luxury gated communities, 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 and village residents using qualitative field-based research. How did the farmers cope with the sweeping land grabs? What set of social practices, values and morals are now dominant among the landowning villagers and why? What do they consider to be acceptable ways of earning a living? I respond to these questions and present ‘improperty’ as a significant feature of this new moral landscape of Gurgaon. Third, I uncover the extent of corrupt practices in this city and the interests of key urban experts in the city-making process. Undeniably, corruption is entrenched in real estate, urban planning, and development. It has serious adverse long-term consequences for the built environment and society in general. Despite being a significant impediment in producing just cities, scholarship on corruption in urban development remains rare. Today, planners and architects are compelled to implement profit-maximizing decisions while unable to tackle their potential damaging environmental and social impacts. In this interdisciplinary research, I argue that pervasive corruption and fraud in the urbanization process is a massive problem in urban planning and confronting this issue should be a primary step in resolving the housing crisis, deepening land inequality, and poverty in cities.