Over the past few decades, India has experienced a sudden and
spectacular urban transformation. Gleaming business complexes encroach
on fields and villages. Giant condominium communities offer gated
security, indoor gyms, and pristine pools. Spacious, air-conditioned
malls have sprung up alongside open-air markets.
In Landscapes of Accumulation, Llerena Guiu Searle examines India's
booming developments and offers a nuanced ethnographic treatment of late
capitalism. India's land, she shows, is rapidly transforming from a site
of agricultural and industrial production to an international financial
resource. Drawing on intensive fieldwork with investors, developers,
real estate agents, and others, Searle documents the new private sector
partnerships and practices that are transforming India's built
environment, as well as widely shared stories of growth and development
that themselves create self-fulfilling prophecies of success. As a
result, India's cities are becoming ever more inaccessible to the
country's poor. Landscapes of Accumulation will be a welcome
contribution to the international study of neoliberalism, finance, and
urban development and will be of particular interest to those studying
rapid--and perhaps unsustainable--development across the Global South.