Raw ground to single family homes in the peri-urban: Path dependence and creation in market-rate affordable housing production

Abstract

Shaped by interaction among actors with different values, policies and priorities, urbanization has pushed urban boundaries into peri-urban frontiers. Although extant literature sheds light on land-related tussles in urban peripheries, what remains less understood are the comparatively silent nature of small land-related transactions taking place outside of the scholarly focus on large-scale flagship developments. If peri-urbanization, as Webster (2002, p. 1) writes, is to be understood as “a process in which rural areas located on the outskirts of established cities become more urban in character, in physical, economic, and social terms, often in piecemeal fashion”, then understanding the incremental processes of land commodification through the supply of privately-built but affordable market-rate homes merit equal, if not more attention.

We rely on a strategically situated ethnography on the work of three small-scale developer/builder firms in a village recently brought into the folds of Chennai’s expanded metropolitan area; an expansion that renders Chennai India’s fourth largest metropolis. A focus on the actions of firms developing land and building homes in one village, allows theorizing peri-urbanization as a sporadic albeit path-dependent and path creating process of change. In contrast to observations that the unplanned peri-urban is disorderly and dysfunctional (Marshall, 2009, p. 139), we argue that a focus on the actions of firms allows seeing land conversions to fall within discernable, personally influenced patterns. Each such pattern creates diverging clusters of affordable homes that shed light on the policies that could help spatiality of peri-urban villages to evolve in socially desirable directions.