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Wasteland governmentality has long shaped colonial and postcolonial landscape governance across the planet. While historically wasteland classification was deployed for agrarian land settlement and silviculture, with extended urbanisation it is increasingly used to consolidate landscapes of extended urban nature. These landscapes are in turn subjected to state-led land enclosures for urban and infrastructure development and for greenwashing. This paper investigates the political construction of one such landscape of extended urban nature, the Aravalli region, a geological feature which runs parallel to the extended corridor urbanisation in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR). Particularly, I examine how in the name of regulating mining, urban development, and pollution in the Delhi NCR, the revenue wastes including sacred groves, hills, and other village commons falling in the Aravallis have been consolidated as a state space. I examine how the patchwork of communities assembled in the extended urban fabric of the region deploys the sacred to counter land enclosure and the emptying out of meaning. I discuss three such modalities of the sacred in the region, namely, its use by agrarian villages to assert land rights over sacred forests, the misuse of the sacred by temple committees to produce faux nature, and its use by emergent urban environmental movements in the region to frame an anti-wasteland politics. Focusing my attention on the state, I discuss the need for a nuanced understanding of emergent urban environmentalism in the region as restorative commoning beyond the binary framings of bourgeois versus the poor., Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Archival power, silences, and absences profoundly shape and structure postcolonial landscapes, spaces, and urban environments by controlling bodies, histories, and interactions. This book explores pathways to dismantle these imperial entanglements by developing methodologies and plural epistemologies through an interdisciplinary dialog between history, memory politics, critical theory, and archival practice together with the fields of the built environment, landscape, urban studies, architecture, and the arts. Unearthing traces catalyzes critical discussions that not only challenge the objectivity and dismantle the neutrality surrounding current archival practices and archival institutions, but also question what constitutes the archive itself. The book unearths potential histories and minor narratives buried by the imperial production of pasts and silences. The diverse range of contributions in the book offers original research, discussions, positions, and tools and provides a critical resource for scholars, architects, artists, activists, and archivists who want to engage with landscapes and built environments in a critical and postcolonial perspective in relation to archival materials and practices., ISBN:978-2-88915-550-7, ISBN:978-2-83232-003-7

In his seminal book Arrival City, Doug Saunders (2010) paints a picture of arrival to the city as an once in lifetime linear endeavour that migrants from countryside undertake. Contrary to this, the experience of cities in the global south, especially those in Asia and Africa, has been starkly different. The cities here experience a phenomenon known as circular migration, meaning that migrants arriving from the countryside often return back seasonally maintaining a circular or cyclic relationship with the city. The migrants often do so in order to maximize their livelihood prospects, taking up work in the city whilst maintaining a farming homestead in the countryside. The phenomenon although prevalent is hardly taken into consideration in city planning and housing in the cities across the global south leading to a rise of precariously built and serviced tenement-housing settlements.

Concomitant with India’s spectacular economic growth following the 1990s liberalisation reforms, the Indian countryside, too, has witnessed exceedingly profound transformations. Departing at this spatio-historical conjuncture, this dissertation seeks to critically examine planetary entanglements within the ongoing urbanisation of agrarian land and commons in India through focusing on the transformations in the extended urban region of Delhi, specifically. Employing a transductive and critical ethnographic approach, this research pieces together large-scale urban processes through bringing local frictions and conflicts into a planetary perspective. Precisely, it attempts to locate the role of architecture and urban strategies in enabling global capital accumulation mediated through the production of cheap land, cheap labour, and cheap nature. It does so firstly through following the transformation of existing agrarian villages into tenement towns through the planned exclusion of unprofitable infrastructures, such as workers’ housing, under extended urbanisation. It investigates, in particular, the role that such grey zones play in helping maintain a mobile surplus labour force over an extensive urban fabric, necessary for low-cost global manufacturing. Secondly, this research follows the rapid rollout of economic and infrastructure corridors across India, which are emerging to bypass the still-unfinished land corridors. It locates precisely the role they play in differentially opening agrarian land and commons for enclosure and urbanisation through fabricating the preconditions for exercising India’s eminent domain laws. Thirdly, the study follows the production of extended urban nature through the consolidation and simplification of ecological commons into nature protected areas. This follows, crucially, the semantic construction of ecological commons as ‘wastelands’, which can then be operationalised for new cycles of value extraction through programmes such as carbon trading schemes. Finally, it discusses alternative ecologies and practices of commoning in the unintended landscapes produced under extended urbanisation, through following the adaptive strategies of transhumant pastoral itinerants. In these explorations, this dissertation journeys across multiple scales, spaces, and times, exploring how colonial and postcolonial traces are consecutively redeployed under extended urbanisation.

The global circulation of commodities such as fast fashion produces extensive spatial transformations, such as the explosion of agrarian settlements into tenement towns that accommodate hundreds and thousands of industrial migrants. This article attempts to make connections between the flux of commodities and extractive nature of everyday metabolism through exploring the specific case of Kapashera (Village of Cotton) close to Delhi. The text dives into the everyday life and metabolism of Kapashera's tenements and the systems that sustain them., Oase (104), ISSN:0169-6238, The Urban Household of Metabolism, ISBN:978-94-6208-517-6

ispartof: Unearthing Traces: Dismantling Imperialist Entanglements of Archives, Landscapes, and the Built Environment pages:181-193 ispartof: pages:181-193 status: published

Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities at increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logics of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, of movement and settlement, of centre and periphery, of time and space., Dialogues in Human Geography, ISSN:2043-8206, ISSN:2043-8214

This text, accompanied by a ‘gospel’ that I made by montaging the US-recorded captions, is an attempt for re-narrating Marshall Plan’s discourse on the working class, aka the so-called ‘free labor’ of the US against the ‘communist labor’ of the “Soviet threat.” I use gospel writing as a form of critical analysis to unearth the US doctrine on the ‘good life’ of the postwar labor. My purpose is to deconstruct how the postwar economy-political and cultural imperialism of the US was embodied in time, space, body, and mind of the postwar labor reporting from her ‘peacetime’ operational field by hiring ‘independent’ reporters of the war front. On the one hand, the article attempts a forensic analysis of the US-narrated postwar documentary photography and journalism; and on the other, it aims to reveal the extent of the Cold War US practice to disseminate its anti-communist ideology on postwar labor from text to image, from time to space, and from body to mind. Visual and textual records of photographs taken in Marseille in 1952 after the official ending of the Marshall Plan , are the primary source of data analyzed in this text. This data itself serve as critique and counter-argument to reveal the postwar ‘soft power’ discourse and practice of the US in Marshall Plan countries. Yet, this text is not about visuality or photography, it is rather about textuality and text, i.e., about textual records accompanying photographs for filing and publicizing the Marshall Plan in the ‘soft’ war front and home front. For this purpose, it uses captions, referred as “picture stories” by the NARA, as evidence instead of photographs of Haas, and analyzes captions as a means of historiographical practice for deconstruction of the publicized and archived discourse of the US postwar ideology. The ‘gospel’ of the Marseille Docker - Nicholas Derybolsky from 1952, as I made and entitled, is a collage composed of these “picture stories” dating May 7th, 1952. The captions, written either for record descriptions or as propaganda guides to accompany the photos of Haas guide the decoupling. I analyze repetitive words and word groups that appear in the captions, and via rhythmic deconstruction of these, I form figurative statements in order to re-narrate the Marshall Plan’s discourse on the ‘free labor’ over the original “picture stories.” In the end, it is not the image or photo-essay but the text - caption, picture story or gospel - which tells again and again in different statements, the good day of a ‘typical Marseille docker’ of the Marshall Plan.