This article develops the concept of recombinant urbanization to show how agrarian landed property and land-based caste/class relations shape the production of post-liberalization urban real estate markets in India. I focus on two interrelated but differentiated agrarian property regimes in western Maharashtra to argue that real estate development is building on prior uneven agrarian land markets, which were themselves sociotechnically produced by colonial and postcolonial development politics. Through an examination of the organizational form of sugar cooperatives, which mediated agrarian capitalism in an earlier era, I track how these primary agricultural cooperatives are now being reorganized into real estate companies, sometimes with former sugarcane growers as company shareholders. The same caste-based political and social capital that made sugar cooperatives possible in a capitalist agrarian society is now being leveraged by agrarian elites to ease their own and their constituents' entry into an urbanizing economy. The concept of recombinant urbanization opens new methodological entryways to analyze the entangled agrarian and urban question in predominantly agrarian and late liberalizing societies.

Much of the urban growth in developing countries is taking place along infrastructure corridors that connect cities. the villages along these corridors are frenzied and contested sites for the consolidation and conversion of agricultural lands for urban uses. the scale of changes along these corridors is larger than the political jurisdiction of local governments, and new regional institutions are emerging to manage land consolidations at this corridor scale. this article compares two inter-urban highways in India and the hybrid regional institutions that manage them: the Bangalore-Mysore corridor, regulated by parastatals, and the Pune-nashik corridor, by cooperatives. It traces the emergence of parastatals and cooperatives to the turn of the twentieth century, the ways in which these old institutions are being reworked to respond to the contemporary challenges of highway urbanization, and the winners and losers under these new institutional arrangements. I use the term "negotiated decentralization" to more accurately capture the back-and-forth negotiations between local, regional and state-level actors that leads to context-specific regional institutions like the parastatals and cooperatives.

This article uses as its entry point the empirical phenomenon of what we call ‘real estate politicians’ in India; that is, politicians whose main source of wealth is real estate. We argue that the rise of real estate politicians is situated within deeper processes of ‘labour voter contradictions’ in low-wage democratic societies of the global south. On the one hand, countries like India largely compete in the global economy based on their cheaper labour costs, but on the other hand, the condition of electoral democracy makes it imperative for politicians to meet the consumption, including housing, needs of their low-wage but electorally mobilised labour voters. As real estate politicians mediate the negotiated access of unorganised and surplus workers to informal land and unauthorised housing, the delinking of housing struggles from labour struggles leaves processes of capitalist agglomeration unchecked. This, we argue, blunts the potential of land struggles to emerge as sites of radical labour politics.

No abstract

No abstract