Urban scholars have increasingly turned to urban peripheries for understanding the emergent urban... more Urban scholars have increasingly turned to urban peripheries for understanding the emergent urban forms, new and old political and economic forces at play, and everyday practices of urban transformation. Joining this peripheral turn, Ayona Datta's paper on the informational periphery makes a rich and timely intervention by tracing the development of urban peripheries as charged theaters where the techno-political drama of information and logistics is currently playing out. Her findings in Bhiwandi complicate the ways in which we have tended to discern the space and category of urban periphery. In thinking with Datta, this paper proposes that, instead of the periphery, peripheralization offers a potential for evaluating the complex and multi-scalar processes that congregate in specific sites in expected and unexpected ways.
City Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 2024
Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices
in India’s agrarian-urban front... more Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices in India’s agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird property-work.
The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies, 2023
As we incorporate comparison and seek a more robust and capacious
conceptual repertoire to analys... more As we incorporate comparison and seek a more robust and capacious conceptual repertoire to analyse contemporary urbanisms, it is imperative that we also reflect and revisit the methodological approaches that are commonly followed in urban studies. Typically, urban studies has maintained a macro-scalar focus on urban policies, governance structures, planning regimes, and politics; although this is beginning to change. I would argue that to grasp the heterogeneous and often contradictory processes of emergent urbanisms, we will have to expand our methodological toolkit and think outside the box. Ethnographic methods are now increasingly recognized as important research methods, and to gain a nuanced and granular understanding of lived experiences, everyday contestations, contingencies, and negotiations that undergird emerging urbanisms, it would be generative to experiment with different methodological approaches.
Amid extensive urbanization and growing weather emergencies, this paper directs its attention to ... more Amid extensive urbanization and growing weather emergencies, this paper directs its attention to the changing politics of ecology in India’s urbanizing frontiers. I focus on the city of Gurgaon, where over a hundred water bodies have disappeared in two decades, and track the life and death of one lake, Ghata Jheel. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and engage first with the challenge of mapping a water body and argue that there is nothing natural about disappearing lakes or urban ecologies at large. I then describe the imbrications of land and water in an arid terrain and show how in this moment of urban transformation the overlapping processes of property making, urban planning, speculation, and ecological restoration erase, obscure, and remake local ecologies. Finally, I emphasize the urgent need to take local hydrologies and geologies as well as the uneven social-political terrain of caste and class into consideration to ensure cities of tomorrow are livable and equitable.
Drawing on their respective ethnographies of urbanisation in Gurgaon (now known as Gurugram) and ... more Drawing on their respective ethnographies of urbanisation in Gurgaon (now known as Gurugram) and thwarted industrialisation in Singur, the authors argue that plots of land owned by smallholders are intermittent commodities. Following Igor Kopytoff's lead, they focus on commoditisation as a process and adopt a biographical approach to consider the social life of land. The article contends that individually owned plots potentially go in and out of circulation but never get fully commodified, nor do they remain fully non-commodified. With the rising speculative value of land, neither market price nor monetary compensation fully substitutes land ownership. Hence, the landholders express regret and even resentment on having to part with their land. The ambivalence speaks, in part, to the complex attributes of land and the relations of authority, distinction and status associated with it. To maintain their caste-based status, the landowners use land as leverage. They hold on to land or demand better compensation to reiterate the land-caste-power nexus spatially.
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ) , 2021
In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologi... more In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2017) deploys the concept of “peripheral urbanization” to conjure “a problem-space that allows us to investigate logics of the production of the urban that differ from those of the North Atlantic … as a means of exploring processes of both socio-spatial formation and theory-making” (p. 4). Along similar lines, in this special issue, we invoke the concept of the periphery to attend to diverse and heterogeneous forms of extended urbanization that are taking shape in India. Instead of considering the periphery as a spatially fixed zone, hinged to the geographies of metropolitan centers, for instance, we mobilize the notion of the periphery as a conceptual and territorial threshold that allows us to explore the urbanisms unfolding across the country. For us, the periphery, or the peri-urban as it is often referred to, may be located on the edges of metropolitan cities and entangled with their regimes of labor, capital, and governance, or it may be further afield, in smaller towns and settlements and enmeshed with agrarian and rural rhythms and dynamics that propel such peripheral urbanization. Irrespective of their location, amid intense competition for land and other resources, peripheries have not only become key sites of contestation, social exclusion, and speculation but they have also come to embody hope and aspirations for diverse social groups. They are attractive to investors seeking to capture gains from rapidly rising land value, to migrants who come from rural areas to live and work in the peripheries, as well as to upwardly mobile city-dwellers who have placed their bets on materializing their middle-class dreams and aspirations in these urbanizing frontiers. Located materially and symbolically at the intersection of multiple modalities of rural, urban, and agrarian; of desire and displacement; of loss and possibilities, the peripheries fully embody and give expression to Doreen Massey’s (2005) conception of space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity” (p. 9).
Amidst extensive peripheral urbanization in India, this paper focuses on the city of Gurgaon and ... more Amidst extensive peripheral urbanization in India, this paper focuses on the city of Gurgaon and describes how the forms and processes of sub/urbanism not only exceed the confines of the city but also of the urban. It argues that even though the questions of land and peasantry have changed, the agrarian question remains at the heart of contemporary urban transformation. It forges a conversation between urban and agrarian studies and outlines the contours of an urbanism it identifies as agrarian urbanism, an urbanism that can explain how changing relations of caste and land endure and produce an uneven geography of spatial value. Such an urbanism does not erase or assimilate the rural but shows how agrarian and urban dynamics sustain and produce each other. Agrarian urbanism, it suggests can help stretch the comparative register of urban studies that tends to be largely city-centric or even urban-centric. ARTICLE HISTORY
In this conjuncture of extended urbanization, this Special Issue moves beyond the landscape of th... more In this conjuncture of extended urbanization, this Special Issue moves beyond the landscape of the city and explores the changing agrarian dynamics, namely of land and livelihoods, in the unfolding frontiers of urbanization in South Asia. It identifies the feverish non-metrocentric remapping of the urban-agrarian hinterland as “frontier urbanism” and argues that in contemporary South Asia, the urban question is the agrarian question and if we wish to generate a new epistemology of the urban, then it is critical to forge a conversation between urban studies and agrarian studies and seriously engage with the question of land. As part of a larger conversation on global suburbanisms, the papers draw on ethnographic and archival research in the hinterlands of Karachi, Kathmandu, Kolkata, Mumbai, and New Delhi and describe how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are being spatially fixed, negotiated and contested and how they coproduce agrarian and urban subjects and landscapes.
This essay makes a case for centering the questions of ecological knowledge in order to understan... more This essay makes a case for centering the questions of ecological knowledge in order to understand how environmental governance and resource access are being remade in the frontier ecologies of Asia. These frontiers, consisting of the so-called uplands and coastal zones, are increasingly subject to new waves of extractive and conservation activities, prompted in part by rising values attached to these ecologies by new actors and actor coalitions. Drawing on recent writings in science and technology studies, we examine the coproduction (Jasanoff 2004) of ecological knowledge and governance at this conjuncture of neoliberal interventions, land grabs, and climate change. We outline the complex ways through which the involvement of new actors, new technologies, and practices of boundary work, territorialisation, scale-making, and expertise transform the dynamics of the coproduction of knowledge and governance. Drawing on long term field research in Asia, the articles in this special section show that resident peoples are often marginalised from the production and circulation of ecological knowledge, and thus from environmental governance. While attentive to the entry of new actors and to the shifts in relations of authority, control, and decision-making, the papers also present examples of how this marginalisation can be challenged, by highlighting the limits of boundary-work and expertise in such frontier ecologies.
Keywords: ecological knowledge, frontier ecologies, co-production, environmental governance, Asia
Urban scholars have increasingly turned to urban peripheries for understanding the emergent urban... more Urban scholars have increasingly turned to urban peripheries for understanding the emergent urban forms, new and old political and economic forces at play, and everyday practices of urban transformation. Joining this peripheral turn, Ayona Datta's paper on the informational periphery makes a rich and timely intervention by tracing the development of urban peripheries as charged theaters where the techno-political drama of information and logistics is currently playing out. Her findings in Bhiwandi complicate the ways in which we have tended to discern the space and category of urban periphery. In thinking with Datta, this paper proposes that, instead of the periphery, peripheralization offers a potential for evaluating the complex and multi-scalar processes that congregate in specific sites in expected and unexpected ways.
City Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 2024
Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices
in India’s agrarian-urban front... more Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices in India’s agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird property-work.
The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies, 2023
As we incorporate comparison and seek a more robust and capacious
conceptual repertoire to analys... more As we incorporate comparison and seek a more robust and capacious conceptual repertoire to analyse contemporary urbanisms, it is imperative that we also reflect and revisit the methodological approaches that are commonly followed in urban studies. Typically, urban studies has maintained a macro-scalar focus on urban policies, governance structures, planning regimes, and politics; although this is beginning to change. I would argue that to grasp the heterogeneous and often contradictory processes of emergent urbanisms, we will have to expand our methodological toolkit and think outside the box. Ethnographic methods are now increasingly recognized as important research methods, and to gain a nuanced and granular understanding of lived experiences, everyday contestations, contingencies, and negotiations that undergird emerging urbanisms, it would be generative to experiment with different methodological approaches.
Amid extensive urbanization and growing weather emergencies, this paper directs its attention to ... more Amid extensive urbanization and growing weather emergencies, this paper directs its attention to the changing politics of ecology in India’s urbanizing frontiers. I focus on the city of Gurgaon, where over a hundred water bodies have disappeared in two decades, and track the life and death of one lake, Ghata Jheel. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and engage first with the challenge of mapping a water body and argue that there is nothing natural about disappearing lakes or urban ecologies at large. I then describe the imbrications of land and water in an arid terrain and show how in this moment of urban transformation the overlapping processes of property making, urban planning, speculation, and ecological restoration erase, obscure, and remake local ecologies. Finally, I emphasize the urgent need to take local hydrologies and geologies as well as the uneven social-political terrain of caste and class into consideration to ensure cities of tomorrow are livable and equitable.
Drawing on their respective ethnographies of urbanisation in Gurgaon (now known as Gurugram) and ... more Drawing on their respective ethnographies of urbanisation in Gurgaon (now known as Gurugram) and thwarted industrialisation in Singur, the authors argue that plots of land owned by smallholders are intermittent commodities. Following Igor Kopytoff's lead, they focus on commoditisation as a process and adopt a biographical approach to consider the social life of land. The article contends that individually owned plots potentially go in and out of circulation but never get fully commodified, nor do they remain fully non-commodified. With the rising speculative value of land, neither market price nor monetary compensation fully substitutes land ownership. Hence, the landholders express regret and even resentment on having to part with their land. The ambivalence speaks, in part, to the complex attributes of land and the relations of authority, distinction and status associated with it. To maintain their caste-based status, the landowners use land as leverage. They hold on to land or demand better compensation to reiterate the land-caste-power nexus spatially.
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ) , 2021
In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologi... more In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2017) deploys the concept of “peripheral urbanization” to conjure “a problem-space that allows us to investigate logics of the production of the urban that differ from those of the North Atlantic … as a means of exploring processes of both socio-spatial formation and theory-making” (p. 4). Along similar lines, in this special issue, we invoke the concept of the periphery to attend to diverse and heterogeneous forms of extended urbanization that are taking shape in India. Instead of considering the periphery as a spatially fixed zone, hinged to the geographies of metropolitan centers, for instance, we mobilize the notion of the periphery as a conceptual and territorial threshold that allows us to explore the urbanisms unfolding across the country. For us, the periphery, or the peri-urban as it is often referred to, may be located on the edges of metropolitan cities and entangled with their regimes of labor, capital, and governance, or it may be further afield, in smaller towns and settlements and enmeshed with agrarian and rural rhythms and dynamics that propel such peripheral urbanization. Irrespective of their location, amid intense competition for land and other resources, peripheries have not only become key sites of contestation, social exclusion, and speculation but they have also come to embody hope and aspirations for diverse social groups. They are attractive to investors seeking to capture gains from rapidly rising land value, to migrants who come from rural areas to live and work in the peripheries, as well as to upwardly mobile city-dwellers who have placed their bets on materializing their middle-class dreams and aspirations in these urbanizing frontiers. Located materially and symbolically at the intersection of multiple modalities of rural, urban, and agrarian; of desire and displacement; of loss and possibilities, the peripheries fully embody and give expression to Doreen Massey’s (2005) conception of space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity” (p. 9).
Amidst extensive peripheral urbanization in India, this paper focuses on the city of Gurgaon and ... more Amidst extensive peripheral urbanization in India, this paper focuses on the city of Gurgaon and describes how the forms and processes of sub/urbanism not only exceed the confines of the city but also of the urban. It argues that even though the questions of land and peasantry have changed, the agrarian question remains at the heart of contemporary urban transformation. It forges a conversation between urban and agrarian studies and outlines the contours of an urbanism it identifies as agrarian urbanism, an urbanism that can explain how changing relations of caste and land endure and produce an uneven geography of spatial value. Such an urbanism does not erase or assimilate the rural but shows how agrarian and urban dynamics sustain and produce each other. Agrarian urbanism, it suggests can help stretch the comparative register of urban studies that tends to be largely city-centric or even urban-centric. ARTICLE HISTORY
In this conjuncture of extended urbanization, this Special Issue moves beyond the landscape of th... more In this conjuncture of extended urbanization, this Special Issue moves beyond the landscape of the city and explores the changing agrarian dynamics, namely of land and livelihoods, in the unfolding frontiers of urbanization in South Asia. It identifies the feverish non-metrocentric remapping of the urban-agrarian hinterland as “frontier urbanism” and argues that in contemporary South Asia, the urban question is the agrarian question and if we wish to generate a new epistemology of the urban, then it is critical to forge a conversation between urban studies and agrarian studies and seriously engage with the question of land. As part of a larger conversation on global suburbanisms, the papers draw on ethnographic and archival research in the hinterlands of Karachi, Kathmandu, Kolkata, Mumbai, and New Delhi and describe how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are being spatially fixed, negotiated and contested and how they coproduce agrarian and urban subjects and landscapes.
This essay makes a case for centering the questions of ecological knowledge in order to understan... more This essay makes a case for centering the questions of ecological knowledge in order to understand how environmental governance and resource access are being remade in the frontier ecologies of Asia. These frontiers, consisting of the so-called uplands and coastal zones, are increasingly subject to new waves of extractive and conservation activities, prompted in part by rising values attached to these ecologies by new actors and actor coalitions. Drawing on recent writings in science and technology studies, we examine the coproduction (Jasanoff 2004) of ecological knowledge and governance at this conjuncture of neoliberal interventions, land grabs, and climate change. We outline the complex ways through which the involvement of new actors, new technologies, and practices of boundary work, territorialisation, scale-making, and expertise transform the dynamics of the coproduction of knowledge and governance. Drawing on long term field research in Asia, the articles in this special section show that resident peoples are often marginalised from the production and circulation of ecological knowledge, and thus from environmental governance. While attentive to the entry of new actors and to the shifts in relations of authority, control, and decision-making, the papers also present examples of how this marginalisation can be challenged, by highlighting the limits of boundary-work and expertise in such frontier ecologies.
Keywords: ecological knowledge, frontier ecologies, co-production, environmental governance, Asia
How do “peripheries” form? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripheralization? Tod... more How do “peripheries” form? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripheralization? Today, urban research is increasingly confronted with processes of extended urbanization that unfold far beyond cities and agglomerations: novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in agricultural areas and in remote landscapes, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded and dense settlement type. While certain territories of extended urbanisation experience growth, others are affected by peripheralisation, experiencing deep socio-economic and ecological restructuring, marginalisation and inequality, and the re-articulation of power and privilege. These observations advocate for a radical reconceptualization of the experience of periphery at various spatial scales.
In this podcast, we discuss peripheralization not as a static spatial condition, but as a dynamic process that is shaped by uneven urbanization and complex multi-scalar relations, strongly put forward through moments of “crisis”. We debate on perpheralisation processes which manifest in different scales and geographies and discuss both their socioeconomic and ecological implications, as well as the emancipatory potential in ex-centric territories in times of exception.
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in India’s agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is
colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and
ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade
on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the
private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in
their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours
of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices
and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban
real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and
capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics
of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread
consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent
agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque
and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature
of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird
property-work.
conceptual repertoire to analyse contemporary urbanisms, it is imperative that we also reflect and revisit the methodological approaches that are commonly followed in urban studies. Typically, urban studies has maintained a macro-scalar focus on urban policies, governance structures, planning regimes, and politics; although this is beginning to change. I would argue that to grasp the heterogeneous and often contradictory processes of emergent urbanisms, we will have to expand our methodological toolkit and think outside the box. Ethnographic methods are now increasingly recognized as important research methods, and to gain a nuanced and granular understanding of lived experiences, everyday contestations, contingencies, and negotiations that undergird emerging urbanisms, it would be generative to experiment with different methodological approaches.
special issue, we invoke the concept of the periphery to attend to diverse and heterogeneous forms of extended urbanization that are taking shape in India. Instead of considering the periphery as a spatially fixed zone, hinged to the geographies of metropolitan centers, for instance, we mobilize the notion of the periphery as a conceptual and territorial threshold that allows us to explore the urbanisms unfolding across the country. For us, the periphery, or the peri-urban as it is often referred to, may be located on the edges of metropolitan cities and entangled with their regimes of
labor, capital, and governance, or it may be further afield, in smaller towns and settlements and enmeshed with agrarian and rural rhythms and dynamics that propel such peripheral urbanization. Irrespective of their location, amid intense competition for land and other resources, peripheries have not only become key sites of contestation, social exclusion, and speculation but they have also come to embody hope
and aspirations for diverse social groups. They are attractive to investors seeking to capture gains from rapidly rising land value, to migrants who come from rural areas to live and work in the peripheries, as well as to upwardly mobile city-dwellers who have placed their bets on materializing their middle-class dreams and aspirations in these urbanizing frontiers. Located materially and symbolically at the intersection of multiple modalities of rural, urban, and agrarian; of desire and displacement; of loss
and possibilities, the peripheries fully embody and give expression to Doreen Massey’s (2005) conception of space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity” (p. 9).
governance and resource access are being remade in the frontier ecologies of Asia. These frontiers, consisting of the so-called uplands and coastal zones, are increasingly subject to new waves of extractive and conservation activities, prompted in part by rising values attached to these ecologies by new actors and actor coalitions. Drawing on recent writings in science and technology studies, we examine the coproduction (Jasanoff 2004) of ecological
knowledge and governance at this conjuncture of neoliberal interventions, land grabs, and climate change. We outline the complex ways through which the involvement of new actors, new technologies, and practices of boundary work, territorialisation, scale-making, and expertise transform the dynamics of the coproduction of knowledge and governance. Drawing on long term field research in Asia, the articles in this special section show
that resident peoples are often marginalised from the production and circulation of ecological knowledge, and thus from environmental governance. While attentive to the entry of new actors and to the shifts in relations of authority, control, and decision-making, the papers also present examples of how this marginalisation can be challenged, by highlighting the limits of boundary-work and expertise in such frontier ecologies.
Keywords: ecological knowledge, frontier ecologies, co-production, environmental governance, Asia
in India’s agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is
colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and
ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade
on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the
private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in
their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours
of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices
and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban
real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and
capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics
of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread
consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent
agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque
and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature
of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird
property-work.
conceptual repertoire to analyse contemporary urbanisms, it is imperative that we also reflect and revisit the methodological approaches that are commonly followed in urban studies. Typically, urban studies has maintained a macro-scalar focus on urban policies, governance structures, planning regimes, and politics; although this is beginning to change. I would argue that to grasp the heterogeneous and often contradictory processes of emergent urbanisms, we will have to expand our methodological toolkit and think outside the box. Ethnographic methods are now increasingly recognized as important research methods, and to gain a nuanced and granular understanding of lived experiences, everyday contestations, contingencies, and negotiations that undergird emerging urbanisms, it would be generative to experiment with different methodological approaches.
special issue, we invoke the concept of the periphery to attend to diverse and heterogeneous forms of extended urbanization that are taking shape in India. Instead of considering the periphery as a spatially fixed zone, hinged to the geographies of metropolitan centers, for instance, we mobilize the notion of the periphery as a conceptual and territorial threshold that allows us to explore the urbanisms unfolding across the country. For us, the periphery, or the peri-urban as it is often referred to, may be located on the edges of metropolitan cities and entangled with their regimes of
labor, capital, and governance, or it may be further afield, in smaller towns and settlements and enmeshed with agrarian and rural rhythms and dynamics that propel such peripheral urbanization. Irrespective of their location, amid intense competition for land and other resources, peripheries have not only become key sites of contestation, social exclusion, and speculation but they have also come to embody hope
and aspirations for diverse social groups. They are attractive to investors seeking to capture gains from rapidly rising land value, to migrants who come from rural areas to live and work in the peripheries, as well as to upwardly mobile city-dwellers who have placed their bets on materializing their middle-class dreams and aspirations in these urbanizing frontiers. Located materially and symbolically at the intersection of multiple modalities of rural, urban, and agrarian; of desire and displacement; of loss
and possibilities, the peripheries fully embody and give expression to Doreen Massey’s (2005) conception of space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity” (p. 9).
governance and resource access are being remade in the frontier ecologies of Asia. These frontiers, consisting of the so-called uplands and coastal zones, are increasingly subject to new waves of extractive and conservation activities, prompted in part by rising values attached to these ecologies by new actors and actor coalitions. Drawing on recent writings in science and technology studies, we examine the coproduction (Jasanoff 2004) of ecological
knowledge and governance at this conjuncture of neoliberal interventions, land grabs, and climate change. We outline the complex ways through which the involvement of new actors, new technologies, and practices of boundary work, territorialisation, scale-making, and expertise transform the dynamics of the coproduction of knowledge and governance. Drawing on long term field research in Asia, the articles in this special section show
that resident peoples are often marginalised from the production and circulation of ecological knowledge, and thus from environmental governance. While attentive to the entry of new actors and to the shifts in relations of authority, control, and decision-making, the papers also present examples of how this marginalisation can be challenged, by highlighting the limits of boundary-work and expertise in such frontier ecologies.
Keywords: ecological knowledge, frontier ecologies, co-production, environmental governance, Asia
In this podcast, we discuss peripheralization not as a static spatial condition, but as a dynamic process that is shaped by uneven urbanization and complex multi-scalar relations, strongly put forward through moments of “crisis”. We debate on perpheralisation processes which manifest in different scales and geographies and discuss both their socioeconomic and ecological implications, as well as the emancipatory potential in ex-centric territories in times of exception.