Land Fictions

D. Asher Ghertner; Robert W. Lake

Description

Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs.This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular.Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

Sujets

• Human geography

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501753749
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

LAND FICTIONS

A volume in the series Cornell Series on Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment Edited by Wendy Wolford, Nancy Lee Peluso, and Michael Goldman

A list of titles in this series is available at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

LAND FICTIONS The Commodification of Land in City and Country

Edited by D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2021 by Cornell University Press

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Ghertner, D. Asher, editor. | Lake, Robert W., 1946– editor. Title: Land fictions : the commodification of land in city and country /  edited by D. Asher Ghertner, Robert W. Lake. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Series:  Cornell series on land : new perspectives on territory, development, and  environment | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020021490 (print) | LCCN 2020021491 (ebook) |  ISBN 9781501753732 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501753961 (paperback) |  ISBN 9781501753749 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501753756 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Land use—Economic aspects. | Land use, Urban—Economic  aspects. | Land use, Rural—Economic aspects. Classification: LCC HD156 .L277 2021 (print) | LCC HD156 (ebook) | DDC  333.73—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021490 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021491

Contents

Acknowledgments

 Introduction: Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake 1.  Fictitious but Not Utopian: Land Commodification and Dispossession in Rural India Michael Levien 2.  Fictions of Surplus: Commodifying Public Land in Canada and the United Kingdom Brett Christophers and Heather Whiteside 3.  Fictions of Safety: Defensive Storylines in Global Property Investment Sarah Knuth 4.  Ground Fictions: Soil, Property, and Markets in the Colombian Conflict Meghan L. Morris 5.  Narratives of Waste: The Fictions and Frictions of Land Commodification in Liberalizing India Sai Balakrishnan 6.  Rental Fictions: Speculating in RentRegulated Housing in New York City Benjamin F. Teresa 7.  The Fiction of Formalization: Titles, Concessions, and the Politics of Landownership in Cambodia Michael B. Dwyer 8.  Regularization and the Fictions of Planning “Unauthorized Delhi” D. Asher Ghertner 9.  The Sanctuary of the Collective: Contesting the Fictions of StateLed Land Commodification in PeriUrban Guangzhou Mi Shih

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viCONTENTS

10. thgiRWenoGsnongrotyCiethTheFic’sEdge:itnos and Fetishes of Land Documents in Ho Chi Minh City Erik Harms 11. MeyitalriteMaeytivitcejbuSsteohLWr:eitactgneh Political in the Contested Fiction of Urban Land in Camden, New Jersey Robert W. Lake 12. ateeStandofLhTisnniFyoitculegoratabGrRs: Ghana’s “SmallScale” Gold Mining Sector Heidi Hausermann and David Ferring  Afterword: Land Fictions in theLongue Durée Michael John Watts

Notes References Contributors Index

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271 283 315 319

Acknowledgments

This book began as the Eighth Biennial MaGrann Conference held in the Depart ment of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in May 2015. The con tributors to the book first presented working papers there with the collective aim of exploring the geography and politics of land commodification from a compar ative perspective. The original concept motivating the conference stemmed from the observation that urban and rural processes of dispossession were becoming increasingly intertwined, and that understanding land commodification—what Karl Polanyi famously called “the weirdest of all undertakings”—required bring ing the agrarian question to town (see Chari 2004) and the urban question to the countryside. Recognizing the extent to which financial models, land marketi zation schemes, and development policy themselves were moving between city and country—such as the intersecting developmentalist calls to close agricultural yield gaps and capture urban rent gaps—our claim was that critical development studies and the respective urban and agrarian fields needed to take bolder steps to learn from each other’s rich but stubbornly nonconversant traditions. Assem bling a mix of urbanists and agrarianists with deep familiarity with land and environmental politics in diverse national contexts spanning the global North and South proved highly generative in identifying shared storylines driving the intensifying patterns of land commodification so many of us had been observ ing over years of fieldwork. By focusing on the powers of persuasion that go into narrating land as firstandforemost an object of commodifiable potential, we played with Polanyi’s concept of commodity fiction, operationalizing it not as an empirical condition—a “crude fiction,” as Polanyi put it,givenby or inherent within market society—but rather an active process of storytelling. JiaChing Chen, Jo Guldi, Don Mitchell, Tania Murray Li, Malini Rangana than, Melanie Somerville, and Wendy Wolford presented research at the initial Land Fictions conference. Although they were unable to contribute chapters to the book in the end, we would like to think that they remain part of the con versation. Michael Watts generously joined that conversation at a later date. We are grateful to Priti Narayan and Sangeeta Banerji, doctoral students in Rutgers Geography at the time, for helping select and invite participants, organize the conference sessions, and discuss the individual papers. We thank the Depart ment of Geography at Rutgers for supporting the conference and especially the late Mark MaGrann for most generously creating the endowment that made that

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viiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS

support possible. Mark attended the first day of the conference, and we have full faith that he would have found all kinds of ways to read the storylines explored in the present book into the New Jersey environments he knew so well. We also thank Rutgers Global, especially Rick Lee, for cosponsoring the event. We are grateful to Wendy Wolford, Nancy Peluso, and Michael Goldman for endorsing the book and inviting it into the Land Series they coedit at Cornell University Press. We also thank Jim Lance and his editorial team at Cornell for masterfully shepherding the book forward. Preetha Mani provided cutting insights into the power of narrative, and Rick Schroeder helped encourage our thinking about rural and urban connections.

INTRODUCTION Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country

D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake

What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was per haps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors. —Karl Polanyi,The Great Transformation

Just days after the 2016 US presidential election, presidentelect Donald J. Trump met with three Indian real estate executives in Trump Tower, New York. In one of the first in what would be a long string of incidents raising ethical concerns about Trump’s unwillingness to separate his real estate business from his politi cal duties, commentators questioned why the engagement with the three prop erty moguls preceded Trump meeting Indian prime minister Narendra Modi or indeed any other world leader, with the exception of Japanese prime minister 1 Shinzo Abe. Two of the executives who met Trump—Sagar and Atul Chordia— were building the first Trump Tower in India, located in Pune, Maharashtra, a booming city 150 kilometers from Mumbai. The New York meeting was read in India as a sign that Trump’s business in the country—already the Trump Organization’s largest international market— would only grow in the wake of his electoral triumph (see Babar 2016). Unlike in other countries where the Trump brand has been less successful—reflected in canceled projects in Argentina, Azerbaijan, Brazil, and Georgia—Trump’s Indian partners reported units selling approximately 30 percent per square foot above market rates (Venkataraman 2016). Kalpesh Mehta, the third executive at the November 2016 Trump Tower meeting and Trump’s chief marketer in India, explained this trend by calling the Trump brand “a lead generator,” providing wealthy Indians with the opportunity to become “members of the Trump family” (AbiHabib and Lipton 2018). Trump’s international projects typically require that he neither make a capital contribution nor play a role in project design, planning, or delivery. The Trump

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