Economic corridors--ambitious infrastructural development projects that
newly liberalizing countries in Asia and Africa are undertaking--are
dramatically redefining the shape of urbanization. Spanning multiple
cities and croplands, these corridors connect metropolises via
high-speed superhighways in an effort to make certain strategic regions
attractive destinations for private investment. As policy makers search
for decentralized and market-oriented means for the transfer of land
from agrarian constituencies to infrastructural promoters and urban
developers, the reallocation of property control is erupting into
volatile land-based social conflicts.
In Shareholder Cities, Sai Balakrishnan argues that some of India's
most decisive conflicts over its urban future will unfold in the regions
along the new economic corridors where electorally strong agrarian
propertied classes directly encounter financially powerful incoming
urban firms. Balakrishnan focuses on the first economic corridor, the
Mumbai-Pune Expressway, and the construction of three new cities along
it. The book derives its title from a current mode of resolving
agrarian-urban conflicts in which agrarian landowners are being
transformed into shareholders in the corridor cities, and the
distributional implications of these new land transformations.
Shifting the focus of the study of India's contemporary urbanization
away from megacities to these in-between corridor regions, Balakrishnan
explores the production of uneven urban development that unsettles older
histories of agrarian capitalism and the emergence of agrarian
propertied classes as protagonists in the making of urban real estate
markets. Shareholder Cities highlights the possibilities for a
democratic politics of inclusion in which agrarian-urban encounters can
create opportunities for previously excluded groups to stake new claims
for themselves in the corridor regions.
