Metropolitics

Agrarian Fantasy, Settler Colonial Property, and the Making of Industrial Johannesburg

Renugan Raidoo — 2026-01-20T06:00:00Z

Some of the gated estates in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria sell residents a settler colonial fantasy of a bucolic idyll away from the urban condition. But Renugan Raidoo examines the important role agricultural surplus played in mining industrialization, which tells a much more complex story of urban–rural relations.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” “A piece of the past has found its' [sic] way to the future” in all-white majuscule is the first thing one sees on the

- Essays / Africa, South Africa, Global South, Johannesburg, Pretoria, gated communities, rural, colonial urban planning, agriculture, industry, history, apartheid, real-estate turn, real estate

On the Land Question in India: The Case of Sriperumbudur Industrial Region in Peri-Urban Chennai

V. Gajendran — 2025-12-23T06:00:00Z

Amidst intense demand for land, farmers near Chennai, India face dispossession by neglect.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” My essay begins with a puzzle. The past two decades have been called the decades of intense land conflicts in India. There has been an outpouring of media and academic scholarship on agrarian landowners resisting and protesting the acquisition of their land for urban and infrastructure projects. In this context of land dispossession and opposition to

- Essays / India, Global South, land, land use, agriculture, farming, real estate, real-estate turn, periurban, Chennai

Unexpected Outcomes: Land Ceilings, Rent Control, and the Rise of Real Estate in Bombay

Nikhil Rao — 2025-12-09T06:00:00Z

Paradoxically, Mumbai's neoliberal real-estate system has its origins in progressive legislation.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” When the Phoenix Mills compound in central Mumbai reopened in 1999 after a long closure, the former textile factory complex featured a bowling alley and a nightclub. It bore the distinction of being the first mill compound in Mumbai's storied textile mill district—Girangaon, or the village of mills—to transform itself from a manufacturing space

- Essays / Bombay, Mumbai, rent control, land ceilings, real estate, real-estate turn, legislation, governance

Urban Theory and the Cold War: Reflections on the Political Economy of Urban Land and Real-Estate Development in Southeast Asia

Gavin Shatkin — 2025-11-07T06:05:00Z

The Cold War's repressive politics of land and law still underpin the region's contemporary struggles over land rights, urban space and democracy.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” When the non-governmental organization Jakarta Legal Aid sought a legal avenue to confront the Indonesian state over its use of summary eviction as a tool of urban planning, it focused on a Cold War‑era law, Law 51/1960. Commonly used to justify evictions of settlements for urban infrastructure

- Essays / real estate, real-estate turn, Asia, Southeast Asia, authoritarian regime, Cold War, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, The Philippines

Provincializing the “Real‑Estate Turn”

Sai Balakrishnan & Llerena Guiu Searle — 2025-11-07T06:00:00Z

The papers in this collection “think against” the concept of real estate, starting with—and generating—grounded questions about particular places.
---- ▼ Jump to the list of articles in this series ▼ Standing in front of Trump Tower's gold and bronze facade in Lower Parel Mumbai (formerly Bombay), real estate may seem an inevitably global phenomenon. This sleek, American-style building—part of a gated complex with pools, gyms, gardens, and other upscale amenities—has come up in a district

- Series / Johannesburg, Pretoria, Chennai, Mumbai, United States, India, Southeast Asia, Asia, Africa, real-estate turn, real estate, South Africa