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In India, water infrastructure has long been central to state building. Rather than redistributing power, recent market liberalization measures have reproduced inequalities.

AbstractHow do we write about cities in a world of deepening inequality, real-estate geopolitics, and the planetary water crisis that is unfolding in parts of Asia and elsewhere? Indian urban studies, which began to gain ground as a legitimate subject of scholarly enquiry two decades ago, has now emerged as a site to study political society, state-making, and citizenship, and to offer rich accounts of how post-colonial urban governance and law-making work. In this review, I explore the powerful analytics developed in three recent books in urban studies: Anindita Ghosh's historical work on colonial Calcutta, Claiming the City: Protest, Crime and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1860–1920 (2016); Asher Ghertner's geographical analysis of neoliberal Delhi, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (2015); and Nikhil Anand's ethnographic account of restive publics and citizenship in Mumbai, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (2017). This recent scholarship on urbanization has moved away from earlier rubrics of segregation, biopolitical disciplining, and resistance to offer rich accounts of the frictions that make and unmake political societies, critical tools to study the life of law in post-colonial cities, infrastructures as sites for the production of citizenship, and new financial and legal assemblages of risk-management, building lobbies, and syndicates around which urban politics is swirling. These accounts also deepen our understanding of the long genealogy of the contemporary moment, including populism, electoral politics, and post-colonial state-making. Indeed, the future of urban studies in a rapidly urbanizing world should be one that helps us to understand the nature of politics, contestations around legalities, environmental crises, and new financial geographies of power and dispossession.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, new urban housing forms, including social housing, land pooling, and building syndicates, began to emerge as products of housing rights and labor movements. Yet this emergence cannot simply be accounted for by a history of workers' rights and housing movements but must also take into consideration the political economy of land and housing created by new forms of real estate speculation. This article situates the history of urban speculation and the new fiduciary innovations pertaining to urban land and housing markets within the scholarship on the development of architectural and town-planning theories during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on Calcutta and Bombay—two central cities of the British Empire—as case studies, I will trace the history of how the housing market became a tradeable object of speculation through colonial policies that disentangled housing from its singular history and abstracted it out of its nonmonetizable attachments. Indeed, it is by understanding how the land and housing market became a site for future investments and ultimately was structured through new social relations and values following World War I that we might get a fuller understanding of how we arrived at our contemporary "residential capitalism" and landscapes of accumulation and homelessness.

AbstractThe movement of the Hughli River in 1804-5 resulted in the deposition of alluvion along Calcutta's river banks which unfolded as an ownership crisis for the East India Company. The Company responded by developing new legal categories and administrative language to manage these newly formed lands and thereby fashioning itself as a public agent of Calcutta's land and landed property. Focusing on specific legal aspects of colonial hydrology that arose in the making of property in these amphibious spaces, the article argues that the soaking ecology of Bengal became a site for productive law-making by creating open-ended possibilities for taking land. It demonstrates how the Company used this new land formation to gradually institute a legal architecture regulating alluvion and dereliction and subsequently subjecting these soaking ecologies to an intricate documentary regime with the aim of disciplining the existing landed property relations in Calcutta. Documenting the haphazard extension and enactment of these new legal doctrines in a mobile landscape illuminates a particular history of the colonial regime of property and the Company-State's early articulations of a particular type of quasi-eminent domain as a manner of taking land. Pushing a new direction in legal geography, the piece shows how the legal arena became a productive site for geographical knowledge production and legal experimentation in the colony.

Following World War I Presidency towns in British India witnessed a sudden, abnormal rise in housing and rents, resulting in heated debates about the relation between municipal governance, the market, and private capital. By studying this particular moment, Bhattacharyya's article uncovers the emergence of a housing and rent market in Calcutta predicated on notions of housing rights as an outgrowth of worker protest and militancy, on the one hand, and market speculation in land and housing on the other. This tension opened up a space for colonial intervention, one that drew upon numerical reasoning driven by discourses of financial calculations of value and potential risks within the emerging urban real-estate market. The article contends that the regulations surrounding the housing speculation during the 1920s were an early bureaucratic exercise in rationalizing the urban land market in order to make it efficient by regulating the ways in which land and housing accrued value economically.

Die Beiträge des Sammelbandes setzen sich aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive mit verschiedenen theoretischen Konzepten von Erinnerung, Geschichte, Vergangenheit und deren Zusammenhang zu Zukunft, Dystopie und Utopie auseinander. Dabei erforschen sie politische, ethische, intellektuelle oder ästhetische Motivationen, die den verschiedenen Ansätzen zur Analyse der kulturellen Funktionen, die Vergangenheit und Zukunft erfüllen können, zugrunde liegen.