Shareholder Cities: Land Transformation Along Urban Corridors in India

The following text is an excerpt from Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India, by Sai Balaikrishnan, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This publication is the latest title in the Penn Press/Penn IUR City in the 21st Century series. Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press. Excerpted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

In 2001, the newly liberalized Indian state launched one of the most ambitious development programs the country has ever seen, comparable in scale only to the massive railway-building enterprises of colonial India: economic corridors. To fill in the “infrastructure gap,” the Central Government started the construction of the Golden Quadrilateral highway-building program to connect the four major cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. World Bank studies estimate that these upgraded highways will translate into significant annual savings, because faster travel times will translate into lower freight costs and economic gain. Some of these highways were also designated as economic corridors: a bundled spine of high-speed roads and internet, water, and power networks, along which will develop new globally competitive industrial nodes and “smart cities.”

… The economic corridors offer new empirical and analytical entryways into a political economy of land that cuts across the urban-rural divide…. [S]ome of India’s most decisive conflicts over its urban future will unfold along the new economic corridors, where the electorally strong, agrarian propertied classes are coming into direct contact with financially powerful urban firms. By moving the narrative of urbanization out of cities into the economic-corridor regions, new protagonists come into view. One that has hitherto been eclipsed in the analyses of urban real-estate markets is this agrarian propertied class. Much of the scholarship on urban real-estate markets, derived as it is from the experiences of western cities, focuses on the urban fractions of capital, such as developers and mortgage companies. How does the entry of agrarian elites into real estate force us to rethink conventional theories on urban property relations? More broadly, what new narratives of urbanization arise when older histories of agrarian capitalism and caste/class formation collide, collude, and recombine with the new economic corridors and corridor cities? ...

When the promoters of the new corridor cities transform landowners into shareholders, they are creating a new form of local government, which I call the “shareholder city.” I use the term “city” to emphasize the governance aspects of these jurisdictions. The corridor region resembles what Henri Lefebvre in the mid-twentieth century called an “urban society” and what Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid more recently called “planetary urbanization” that renders inadequate city-village distinctions. In the context of this book, the term “city” remains relevant, as the “city” in “shareholder cities” signifies the legal status of the jurisdiction that links territory-authority-polity in a social contract: the boundary of the city defines a territory; laws, such as the decentralization law, grant a public authority the power to make and enforce rules for governing this territory; and the boundary also delineates the polity that has the power to hold the authority accountable for its actions.

… [N]ew shareholder cities … attempt to restructure the local state in such a way as to redraw the public/private boundaries of these new jurisdictions. In his brilliant defense of the public sphere, Paul Starr reminds us that privatization is not merely aimed at shifting assets and services to the private sphere; instead, it constitutes a “reordering of claims in a society”: “The terms public and private sum up a whole structure of rules and expectations about the proper conduct and limits of the state. To say some activity is public is to invoke claims of public purpose, public accountability, and public disclosure. To say something is private is to claim protection from state officials and other citizens. The theory of property rights sees privatization as a reassignment of claims to the control and use of assets, but it misses the special claims of the public sphere in a democratic society—claims for greater disclosure of information...[and] for rights of participation and discussion.”

In the shareholder cities, the “rights of participation and discussion” are premised on landownership. These propertied norms threaten to undermine the democratic ideal of one-person/one-vote. The shareholder cities are changing not only the public/private boundaries of the city but also who has claims on the city. At stake here is the notion of the democratic city, where, irrespective of their position in society, all individuals have equal claim-making power on the public authority that governs the city. The shareholder model of compensating landowners with shares in the new real-estate development is, instead, a variant of land readjustment or land pooling, which is gaining popularity as a mode of resolving land conflicts in other parts of India. In land readjustment, instead of shares, smaller but serviced and higher-priced plots of land are returned to the landowners. Though focusing on the price of land may be the most expedient way of gaining consent from the middle peasantry, what gets eclipsed in these negotiations are the bigger distributional questions about the reallocation of land and land-based social power among new users.