Metropolitics

What Is Worth Asking About Our Cities?

Naomi Adiv & Anant Maringanti & Harikrishnan Sasikumar — 2026-03-03T06:00:00Z

What is the state of urban theory from the Global South and how can local research simultaneously advance scholarly research and be a vehicle for advocacy? Dr. Naomi Adiv and Dr. Hari Sasikumar explore these questions in their conversation with Anant Maringanti.
A central guiding idea of our work at Metropolitics is to share the knowledge, concepts and practices that academic and activist scholars generate in contemporary cities. In addition to making scholarship public, the journal is

- Interviews / Global South, India, urbanism, Southern urbanism, Hyderabad

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

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

Planning in the Age of Political Populism: Kolkata's Tram Debate

Tathagata Chatterji — 2025-06-10T05:00:00Z

Using the case of Kolkata's tram system, Tathagata Chatterji shows how two distinct political strategies—populism and clientelism—operate in a symbiotic relationship to circumvent formal planning processes in India's third-largest city.
Political populism and clientelism are two distinct political strategies with significant conceptual overlaps. From a theoretical standpoint, political populism is associated with charismatic leaders who mobilise mass support through ideological and rhetorical

- Essays / India, Global South, Asia, Kolkata, mass transit, rapid transit, transport, transport policy, public transportation, tram, clientelism, populism, streetcar, light rail, tramway

Episodes from the Social Life of the Delhi Metro

Sneha Mandhan — 2023-01-20T06:00:00Z

What is the impact of a new metro on a large and growing city? As new metros are cropping up across Asia, Rashmi Sadana documents the changes brought to the city of Delhi by a sprawling new transportation system. She shows that the Delhi metro is both similar to other subways of the world and unique in its inscription in a distinctive cultural landscape.
Infrastructures straddle the line between large, shiny artefacts imposed on urban landscapes marking modernity, and the backdrop for scenes

- Reviews / India, Delhi, transport, public transportation, mass transit, rapid transit, metro, subway, infrastructure, ethnography, vignettes, public space

Plague and Urban Policy in Bombay, 1896–1914

Vanessa Caru & translated by Oliver Waine — 2022-11-18T06:00:00Z

What consequences can an epidemic have on a city? Vanessa Caru describes the ways in which a plague epidemic in Bombay at the turn of the 20th century changed the British colonial authorities' attitudes, the urban policies they implemented, and ultimately even the very morphology of the city.
On September 18, 1896, the first case of bubonic plague, in all likelihood spread by rats on board a boat from Hong Kong, was detected in Bombay (today Mumbai). As the first Indian city to be infected,

- From the Field / colonial urban planning, Mumbai, India, Bombay, history, urban policy, epidemic

Power in the Periphery: Waste Conflict and Resistance in Periurban Kerala

Ashish Prabhakar — 2022-09-06T05:00:00Z

Ashish Prabhakar analyzes one Indian village's fight against a city waste processing plant in 2011–2012, illustrating the perils of rapid urbanization, increasing consumption, the diminishing carrying capacities of cities, and growing mounds of garbage. The village's pushback not only highlights the tensions between various levels of governance structures, but also signals the need for a deeper examination of urban planning and urbanization.
---- Series: Urban Wastes, Present and Future In

- From the Field / waste, waste management, conflict, periurban, India, Global South, periphery

Inciting Hopes for the Future: Civic Activism in London, Mumbai, and Paris Amid the Covid‑19 Crisis

2021-06-08T05:00:00Z

Ethnographic research in London, Mumbai, and Paris during Covid‑19 lockdowns reveals how civic associations filled the void left by state withdrawal and offered visions of hope for socially excluded populations.
Our current global “human, economic and social crisis” (UN 2020) was driven by a deadly virus and deepened by governments' dedication to market-oriented solutions and to disempowering people deemed to be obstacles to those solutions. The neoliberal state's initial reactions to the

- From the Field / associations, lockdown, Covid-19, coronavirus, activism, civic organizing, civic activism, London, Paris, Mumbai, pandemic, India, United Kingdom

“Land Is the New Sugar”: A Review of Sai Balakrishnan's Shareholder Cities

Thomas Crowley — 2020-12-15T06:00:00Z

Shareholder Cities argues that India's urban corridors are driven by complex negotiations, transformations, and power struggles, often led by the class and caste groups who control agrarian capital in urbanizing regions.
At the start of her book Shareholder Cities, Sai Balakrishnan quickly and convincingly dismisses popular conceptions of present-day India as a collision of superhighways and bullock carts, “modern, urban, Westernized India, and the primitive, rural, superstitious India” (p.

- Reviews / India, real estate, infrastructure, urbanization, Mumbai, power play, rural, agriculture, farming, Global South

Fragile Financialization: The Struggle for Power and Control in Indian Real-Estate Investment

Llerena Guiu Searle — 2020-11-27T06:00:00Z

How does the financialization of real estate—a global phenomenon—affect urban development in India? In this ethnographic essay, Llerena Guiu Searle shows how financialization redefines the balance of power between the real-estate sector, local authorities, and financial investors.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization Advertisements for a residential township 40 km (25 miles) outside of Chennai, India, called Hiranandani Parks Oragadam–Chennai, show cream-colored colonnaded

- From the Field / financialization, real estate, India, urban development