Planning land as infrastructure : land disputes, state planners and the practice of planning in urbanizing India

Keywords: Anthropology of planning, land disputes, infrastructures, urban futures, anthropology of aspirations, bureaucracy.
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26

Abstract

This paper is an ethnographic study of land disputes and land related urban transitions in three peri urban villages located in the National Capital Region of India. Amidst emerging master plans, real estate activity, logics of economy and party politics these villages have undergone massive land acquisition for urban development. As the use and value of land rapidly transforms on this urban periphery, the paper tries to comprehend how land itself comes to qualify as infrastructure shaping and redefining the idea of the Urban.
To do so the paper follows the biography of disputed land plots and compares the oral histories of these plots with those recorded within the various layers of the Urban Planning bureaucracy. It explores how these land disputes circulates along with files, state planners, master plans, laws or money within these planning offices and the multiple relations that mediate such circulation. By mapping the genealogy of these land conflicts the paper hopes to demonstrate how the practice of urban planning operates to shape land and making its biography possible. The varying histories and practices of planning lend to land specific qualities, transform it into something that can be listed, classified, recorded or exchanged and ultimately constitutes it as infrastructure. In this process, Planning itself emerges as a constantly negotiated practice and a discursive category that works both as a mode of governance to administer and map land as well as a way of life for ordinary residents, shaping visions and aspirations for an imagined urban future.