Seeing Mumbai through its hinterland: Resource and Real estate conflicts in India's city-regions

Abstract

This talk focuses on the acute environmental crisis over the governance of resources in liberalizing India, and links these water and air crises to the making of new real estate markets. Using the case of regional Mumbai’s real estate market, this talk situates Indian cities within their wider hinterlands and maps the spatial politics of resources and land development across the urban-rural divide. By focusing on two contemporary high-profile corruption ‘scams’ – Lavasa Lake City and the Adarsh housing society – this talk hopes to offer more productive ways of engaging with that murkiest and most corrupt of sectors, real estate. Lavasa Lake City, located around 200 kilometers from Mumbai along the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, is an example of urban firms from Mumbai moving into the urbanizing hinterland. The water supply to the new SEZs and hill cities such as Lavasa are made possible by re-routing water from irrigation canals to these new private towns. The Adarsh housing society ‘scam’ involved the manipulation of development rights, and more broadly, the monetization of air, to build a higher FSI (floor space index) tower whose real estate profits can be re-directed from war veterans to politically connected beneficiaries. These real estate ‘scams’ are symptoms of a changing economic-electoral geography where the political class experiments with new regulatory regimes for water and air that can produce new real estate profits across the urban-rural divide. This talk uses Mumbai as a window into analyzing how flows of capital and resources – including water, air, garbage – produce specific forms of urban-rural, or city-countryside, linkages. More broadly, the talk calls for new frameworks of urban environmental politics that can incorporate within them the agrarian political economy. 

About the speaker

Sai Balakrishnan is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She has also worked as an urban planner in the United States, India, and the United Arab Emirates, as a consultant to the UN-HABITAT in Nairobi, Kenya, and has served as a Research Fellow at the Land Governance Laboratory (LGLab), a Cambridge-based not-for-profit organisation which studies and disseminates tools for inclusive land resource allocation in rapidly urbanising countries. Her work has been published in Pacific Affairs, EPW, and in edited book chapters. Her book, titled "Shareholder Cities: Agrarian to Urban Land Transformations along Economic Corridors in Liberalizing India" is forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press.