Making railway land productive: The commodification of public land in Kenyan and Indian cities

Abstract

This paper contributes to the current debates on public land commodification and privatization in a Global South perspective by comparing the disposal of railway land in Kenya and India. Turning public land into profits through inventory, sale, concession, real estate capitalisation is a growing phenomenon at the global level. The literature on large-scale urban development projects and political economy accounts on public land commodification often mobilize the prism of “the land grab” in their analysis to highlight the consequences of a predatory private property supported by State governments, leading to various forms of dispossession. In contrast to these works, we explore over a long period of time the professional cultures, the internal restructuring and the relations to central administrations of two public operators who are pushed to valorize their urban land and real estate properties. This vantage point from the inside of the organizations offers a specific account of the changing trajectories of land ownership, the generation of urban land value and the changing faces of public enterprises in an era of neoliberal reforms in cities of the Global South. It allows us to open a more complex and varied process of land commodification than it would appear from examples of the urban land grab debate.