Abstract
AbstractGurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.
Highlights
In late 2015, I sat with Mukesh Yadav in Badshahpur urban village in Gurgaon in the north Indian state of Haryana
Badshahpur had been incorporated into the city in the Gurgaon-Manesar Urban Development plan 2021, bringing expanses of the village’s agricultural land into the urban real estate market
Opposition to land acquisition, while not completely absent (Kennedy 2014), has been much more muted than in other parts of the country. This is in part facilitated by the creation of a differentiated landscape of agrarian change, articulated through the urban villages, wherein certain factions of the dominant landowning communities have been able to instrumentalise inequalities in the agrarian social structure, temporalities of the urbanisation processes and the “flexible” local state (Gururani 2013) to disproportionately benefit from land acquisitions
Summary
In late 2015, I sat with Mukesh Yadav in Badshahpur urban village in Gurgaon in the north Indian state of Haryana. Through the exemption of the urban villages and the introduction of a license system it was the private sector and not the state that acquired and developed 85% (35,000 acres) of urbanisable land in Gurgaon between 1981 and 2014.
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