Papers by Sai Balakrishnan
Political Economy of Contemporary India
Routledge eBooks, Sep 28, 2022
Berkeley Planning Journal
hosted a colloquium series at which faculty and graduate students presented their work related to... more hosted a colloquium series at which faculty and graduate students presented their work related to COVID-19. The discussion spanned a wide range of topics around urban form, economic productivity, design, food justice, housing and displacement, political movement, and social control both in the context of countries in the Global South and the U.S. This White Paper contains six essays originated from the colloquium, each bringing a unique vision of how the COVID-19 pandemic is currently shaping and will continue to shape our cities in the future and what lessons we can learn from it. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unimaginable adversity, with nations across the globe devising ways to cope with the loss of life, economic productivity, and social fabric. Due to the agnostic nature of the virus, no facet of society, whether in the Global North or South, has been left untouched. As beacons of economic and social agglomeration, the pre-pandemic city, in particular, has seen a rapid transformation, in often unforeseen directions. Local businesses have shuttered, while large technology companies have thrived; offices have closed, while their adjacent streets have been opened for active mobility and social activities; apartment rents have decreased, while single-family home prices have increased; the underprivileged have been adversely affected by both the virus as well as the economic reality of the pandemic, while the affluent have been largely untouched in both health and economy. Responses to COVID-19 in various nations have only exacerbated existing socioeconomic inequities, and, expectedly, not all federal, state, or local responses have been beneficial to all strata of society. This white paper focuses on several core themes that have evolved over the course of the pandemic and have behaved differently across geographies: (1) urban economics and equity (2) social and economic power dynamics, and (3) strategies to preserve urban social and economic systems.
Regional Studies, 2021
Billboards are the new skyline for the region around the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. The newly constr... more Billboards are the new skyline for the region around the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. The newly constructed economic corridor is punctuated by signs that draw attention to its potential as one of the "best investment options. .. for bungalows, farm plots and estates." In anticipation of the proposed Pune International Airport, the precise location of which has been the subject of intense speculation, a billboard in front of an unfinished five-story apartment complex advertises its proximity to the airport-and to a new lifestyle of international travel-by proclaiming "Book your flat and fly to Singapore." The billboards echo an aspirational ideal of world-class living, with slogans inviting buyers to "an amazing lifestyle," "the home with a view attached," and "the right to be a world citizen." They are part of a branding strategy that also includes new brochures from the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), which has an acquired land bank of over 50,000 hectares of land in the western Maharashtra region for new industrial development. In February 2016, the MIDC announced its plan to host Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant, on one of its land banks in Talegaon, 30 kilo meters from Pune. Media and policy sources tout the Foxconn investment, at $5 billion, as the largest foreign direct investment (FDI) in India, and Foxconn chose this location because of its proximity to the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and the proposed Pune International Airport. 1 It also has plans to coordinate with the domestic firm Bharat Forge to build an airstrip adjacent to the proposed Pune International Airport that will carry exclusively Foxconn cargo. Similarly, the agricultural lands in Supa Village, located around 70 kilo meters from Pune, are the hub of a "dedicated industrial zone for Japa nese
Susan S. Fainstein is a Senior Research Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her book... more Susan S. Fainstein is a Senior Research Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her book The Just City was published in 2010 by Cornell University Press and won the Davidoff Award of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). Among her other authored books are The City Builders: Property, Politics, and Planning in London and New York; Restructuring the City; and Urban Political Movements. She has edited books on planning theory, urban theory, urban tourism, and gender and planning. Her research interests focus on theories of justice, urban redevelopment, and comparative urban policy. She has received the Distinguished Educator Award of the ACSP, which recognizes lifetime career achievement. Dr. Fainstein has been a professor of planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, and the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University and a visiting profe...
What is Land?, 2021
Market-oriented land-use instruments presume that is possible to delink
development or pollution ... more Market-oriented land-use instruments presume that is possible to delink
development or pollution rights from a particular plot of land, transfer these rights across space, and assemble them at some other location. When the social, ecological, and economic value of land is separated from its location, these processes can produce idiosyncratic planning outcomes, and a priori narrow understandings of land, which run counter to the planning ethic of getting to know a site’s identity and of keeping the meanings of land contestable, and can reorder the meaning of “land” in land-use planning.
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2021
totalized caricature. In both instances, Suh argues that translation reframed as an ethical activ... more totalized caricature. In both instances, Suh argues that translation reframed as an ethical activity can provide the basis for more productive engagement with the other. Levinas's notion of the self's infinite indebtedness to the other requires both Japan's ongoing acknowledgment of responsibility for colonization and war atrocities as well as Korea's introspection on its complicity with efforts to further colonize the Asian continent, without implying symmetry or equivalence between the two. As nationalist histories persist on both sides of the Strait, Treacherous Translation remains a crucial intervention.
Urban Studies
This article uses as its entry point the empirical phenomenon of what we call ‘real estate politi... more This article uses as its entry point the empirical phenomenon of what we call ‘real estate politicians’ in India; that is, politicians whose main source of wealth is real estate. We argue that the rise of real estate politicians is situated within deeper processes of ‘labour voter contradictions’ in low-wage democratic societies of the global south. On the one hand, countries like India largely compete in the global economy based on their cheaper labour costs, but on the other hand, the condition of electoral democracy makes it imperative for politicians to meet the consumption, including housing, needs of their low-wage but electorally mobilised labour voters. As real estate politicians mediate the negotiated access of unorganised and surplus workers to informal land and unauthorised housing, the delinking of housing struggles from labour struggles leaves processes of capitalist agglomeration unchecked. This, we argue, blunts the potential of land struggles to emerge as sites of ra...
Pacific Affairs, 2013
Much of the urban growth in developing countries is taking place along infrastructure corridors t... more Much of the urban growth in developing countries is taking place along infrastructure corridors that connect cities. the villages along these corridors are frenzied and contested sites for the consolidation and conversion of agricultural lands for urban uses. the scale of changes along these corridors is larger than the political jurisdiction of local governments, and new regional institutions are emerging to manage land consolidations at this corridor scale. this article compares two inter-urban highways in India and the hybrid regional institutions that manage them: the Bangalore-Mysore corridor, regulated by parastatals, and the Pune-nashik corridor, by cooperatives. It traces the emergence of parastatals and cooperatives to the turn of the twentieth century, the ways in which these old institutions are being reworked to respond to the contemporary challenges of highway urbanization, and the winners and losers under these new institutional arrangements. I use the term "negotiated decentralization" to more accurately capture the back-and-forth negotiations between local, regional and state-level actors that leads to context-specific regional institutions like the parastatals and cooperatives.
Pre-print Version_IJURR, 2019
This article develops the concept of recombinant urbanization to show how agrarian landed propert... more This article develops the concept of recombinant urbanization to show how agrarian landed property and land-based caste/class relations shape the production of post-liberalization urban real estate markets in India. I focus on two interrelated but differentiated agrarian property regimes in western Maharashtra to argue that real estate development is building on prior uneven agrarian land markets, which were themselves sociotechnically produced by colonial and postcolonial development politics. Through an examination of the organizational form of sugar cooperatives, which mediated agrarian capitalism in an earlier era, I track how these primary agricultural cooperatives are now being reorganized into real estate companies, sometimes with former sugarcane growers as company shareholders. The same caste-based political and social capital that made sugar cooperatives possible in a capitalist agrarian society is now being leveraged by agrarian elites to ease their own and their constituents' entry into an urbanizing economy. The concept of recombinant urbanization opens new methodological entryways to analyze the entangled agrarian and urban question in predominantly agrarian and late liberalizing societies.
Pre-Print Version_Economic and Political Weekly, 2018
The “money in the city, votes in the countryside”
dynamic meant that in the past, agrarian proper... more The “money in the city, votes in the countryside”
dynamic meant that in the past, agrarian propertied
classes wielded enough power to draw capital and
resources from cities into the rural hinterland. However,
as cities cease to be mere sites of extraction, agrarian
elites have sought new terms of inclusion in
contemporary India’s market-oriented urban growth,
most visible in the endeavour of the political class to
facilitate the entry of the “sugar constituency” into
Mumbai’s real estate markets.
Talks by Sai Balakrishnan
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Papers by Sai Balakrishnan
development or pollution rights from a particular plot of land, transfer these rights across space, and assemble them at some other location. When the social, ecological, and economic value of land is separated from its location, these processes can produce idiosyncratic planning outcomes, and a priori narrow understandings of land, which run counter to the planning ethic of getting to know a site’s identity and of keeping the meanings of land contestable, and can reorder the meaning of “land” in land-use planning.
dynamic meant that in the past, agrarian propertied
classes wielded enough power to draw capital and
resources from cities into the rural hinterland. However,
as cities cease to be mere sites of extraction, agrarian
elites have sought new terms of inclusion in
contemporary India’s market-oriented urban growth,
most visible in the endeavour of the political class to
facilitate the entry of the “sugar constituency” into
Mumbai’s real estate markets.
Talks by Sai Balakrishnan
development or pollution rights from a particular plot of land, transfer these rights across space, and assemble them at some other location. When the social, ecological, and economic value of land is separated from its location, these processes can produce idiosyncratic planning outcomes, and a priori narrow understandings of land, which run counter to the planning ethic of getting to know a site’s identity and of keeping the meanings of land contestable, and can reorder the meaning of “land” in land-use planning.
dynamic meant that in the past, agrarian propertied
classes wielded enough power to draw capital and
resources from cities into the rural hinterland. However,
as cities cease to be mere sites of extraction, agrarian
elites have sought new terms of inclusion in
contemporary India’s market-oriented urban growth,
most visible in the endeavour of the political class to
facilitate the entry of the “sugar constituency” into
Mumbai’s real estate markets.