Cities in South Asia are homes to one of the highest concentrations of people anywhere in the world and the allocation of land and urban resources and the benefits that can be derived from them in this region have become increasingly contested. This book explores the politics of urban land in South Asia and the challenges related to their respective urban futures.
For most people, land comes at a premium, and as a result conflicts and contestations over land and urban resources are rife in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, as witnessed in the many struggles of low-income groups and vulnerable or marginalised communities to fight off dispossession or displacement. This book maps current challenges shared across national borders and charts out new directions for future research and land policy. With contributions from emerging and established authors, the book offers a critical accounting of the situation that exists in urban South Asia, while also critically engaging with the current challenges and future directions for land use and land politics.
The book will be useful to students and researchers of public policy, development studies, economics, urban and regional development studies, and sociology as well as to policy makers, real estate professionals, and commercial firms engaged in property market/real estate study in Asia.
Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Edited by:
Urmi Sengupta,
Kenneth Nielsen
Imprint: Routledge India
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 490g
ISBN: 9781032870465
ISBN 10: 103287046X
Series: Cities and the Urban Imperative
Pages: 250
Publication Date: 18 March 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Figures. List of Tables. List of Contributors. Foreword. 1. The Politics of Urban Land in South Asia 2. Dispossession and the militarised developer state: Financialization and Class power on the agrarian-urban frontier of Islamabad 3. Land Use Planning and Dispossession in Goa, India 4. Production, transformation, and contestation of land in informal settlements 5. The question of land in conflict-ridden east and south Sri Lanka 6. Unregulated Neoliberalism, Urban Land Grabbing, and Environmental Destruction in Kathmandu Valley 7. The Question of ‘Land Justice’ in Urban Bangladesh 8. A house is not a home: the struggle for spatial justice in post-war Colombo 9. Rent and Right to the City 10. Revisiting the Urban Land Question at the Extensions of Lahore: People’s Infrastructural Labour towards (Im-)Permanent Inhabitation 11. Land pooling technique as an urban development tool for Nepal 12. The new frontier: A critical reflection on land pooling policy in Delhi. Index
Urmi Sengupta is Reader in School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, and Research Associate at the Department of Sociology, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
