New policy and legislative initiatives in India over the last decade, from the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 to subnational state-level counterparts, have encouraged processes of corporate urbanisation, by facilitating the development of ‘industrial townships’ largely by private actors. This emerging policy architecture places a range of municipal functions, infrastructures and services in the domain of the (private) township, paralleling processes of urban gating and enclave growth worldwide. This paper analyses the relevant policies and laws to examine the role of the state in facilitating the growth of such urban clubs in India and fostering privatised provision of public goods. With few evaluations of the scope and impacts of such urban development in India, the case of Jamshedpur, an early prototype of corporate urbanisation, highlights how such sites may encourage patterns of unplanned and under-provisioned growth around the core.

A large theoretical and empirical literature suggests that the salience of network-based ties in contract enforcement under relation-based governance systems limits market expansion. This paper illustrates the incorporation of new agents into market exchange under conditions of informal contract governance using a case study of the cycle-rickshaw rental market in a city in central India. Our analytical model formalizes features of this market through a higher penalty of default for migrants that introduces a gap between the ex ante risk for out-of-network agents and the ex post risk. The model predicts a sorting equilibrium such that migrants are more likely to participate in the rental contract. We test this prediction using primary survey data with multidimensional measures of migrant status and find that it is a significant predictor of rental contract participation, even controlling for credit access and other variables that moderate the rickshaw driver's ability to own a cycle-rickshaw.

In the years since liberalization, state power has been rescaled in India's polity and this is both a cause and consequence of greater interstate competition for footloose capital. In this context, some state governments are designing special regulatory tools to attract and concentrate investments by easing 'doing business' for private investors and leveraging land resources-primarily in their largest cities. Equally important, they ensure public investments are channelled to these select spaces and that resources are available for maintaining high standards of infrastructure. In Hyderabad, the 'Industrial Area Local Authority' (IALA) is a powerful tool that allows privatised management by state and nonstate actors of recently constructed productive spaces, mainly concentrating globalised service sector activities, including by collecting local tax revenues and various development charges to be spent exclusively within the industrial area. In this way, governance and fiscal functions are outsourced to non-elected bodies, outside the purview of democratic institutions. By essentially replacing municipal authorities, the IALA framework produces new forms of governance at the same time that it generates fragmentation of the institutional fabric of urban spaces. In effect, it creates a tool for bypassing urban politics, or in the case of periurban spaces does not allow an urban politics to emerge. Building on recent research, this paper examines the implications of IALAs in Hyderabad on urban governance and local state sovereignty.

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The concept of “speculative urbanism” has over the space of only a few years informed a large and growing literature on the intersections of real estate capital flows and processes of urban planning and governance in cities of the Global South. Speculative urbanism can be said to embody urban governance as “investment strategy”; it represents the turbulent trajectory of world‐class city‐making projects in an era where the returns to capital are their primary driving force and metric. Based on a case study of Bangalore, India, speculative urbanism brings to light a number of undercurrents hitherto missed by global city theorists, such as the rise of transnational policy networks, processes of interreferencing, and the rise of entrepreneurial parastatals as key actors in land acquisition and development.