Digital empire in India’s urban peripheries: Property technics in agrarian Delhi's urban extensions

Abstract

Under late capitalism in an information age, infrastructural visions of speculative urban extensions into the peripheries of the global south unfold through an emerging digital empire of (im)material technologies of property-making i.e., a property technics. In India, this empire expands where the colonial-agrarian past and the postcolonial urban present meet in the itinerant veneer of digitally-mediated urban futures under an imperial mode of technoscientific capitalism. This is a southern setting where the coloniality of capitalist expansion into India’s urban peripheries is being differentially articulated through imperialist conduits of digitalization and urbanization that simultaneouly (trans)forms agrarian lands at the fringe into urban property. While recent geographical scholarship on similar processes have focused mostly on smart cities and their speculative regional visions, this expanding digital empire of techno-capitalist urbanization extends well beyond these prominent centers of hyper-networked urban geographies, penetrating into India’s vast informational peripheries. This digitalisation-as-urbanization is evident in India’s National Capital Territory of Delhi where agrarian logics of the past at the urban periphery and city planning’s techno-futurism in the present come together or come apart under different figurations of evolving policy regimes. Through an ethnographic account of tone such digitally mediated (un)making of urban property in the capital’s surrounds, I show how spectacular acts of state violence and attendant marginalizations were coded into possibility by the constitutive technical and infrastructural imaginaries that propelled this (im)material extension of India’s postcolonial digital empire into Delhi's extensions. Thereafter, I analyze this digitalizing/urbanizing empire under my novel rubric of a postcolonial property technics.