Asher Ghertner

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Geography, Faculty Member

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I am an urban geographer interested in the technologies and tactics through which mass displacement is conceived, justified and enacted. My research uses the contemporary politics of slum demolition and world-class city-making strategies in Delhi to challenge conventional theories of economic transition, urban planning and political rule.

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Noel B. Salazar

KU Leuven

Dominik Wujastyk

University of Alberta

Dylan Trigg

Central European University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Murat Cemal Yalcintan

Msgsu

Remo Caponi

University of Cologne

James Mallinson

University of Oxford

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Noe Cornago

University of the Basque Country, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

Crispin Bates

University of Edinburgh

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Papers by Asher Ghertner

$Research paper thumbnail of Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space$

Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This article discusses the ways that Lefebvrian thinking on urbanization has found a purchase in ... more This article discusses the ways that Lefebvrian thinking on urbanization has found a purchase in Indian urban and anti-caste scholarship, and conversely, how compelling new figures of the urban have emerged from Indian scholarship that productively enliven Lefebvrian categories, refusing any separation between the experimentalism of everyday life and the political economy of space. The article explores a sense of “itinerant urbanization” at two levels: at an empirical level, it describes the urban as a tentative condition of becoming that is always on the move and inter-mixed with its non-urban other. At a more theoretical level, itinerant urbanization is an acknowledgment of the tremendous generativity of Indian scholarship’s own itineracy, which produces a transversal relation with not only metropolitan urban theory, but also agrarian Marxism and rich scholarship on embedded geographies of caste. The article suggests that theorizations of the Indian urban—some expressly drawing on...

The Colonial Roots of India S Air Pollution Crisis

Economic and Political Weekly, 2019

Tracing the genealogy of the scientific claim that Indian lung capacity is deficient vis-à-vis th... more Tracing the genealogy of the scientific claim that Indian lung capacity is deficient vis-à-vis the “European norm,” it is argued that the pathologisation of the Indian lung that once justified colonial-era segregation has made a troubling contemporary return, producing state imperceptibility of pollution-induced illness. Specifically, colonial theories of tropical air suggest that the Indian lung is uniquely suited to a dusty environment. When invoked in the present, this obviates the need for urgent pollution abatement action.

Improvised Urbanism in The Design of India’s Unauthorized Colonies

The New Companion to Urban Design, 2019

This chapter explores three design spaces to show how mimicry has become a mode of regulating Del... more This chapter explores three design spaces to show how mimicry has become a mode of regulating Delhi’s booming unauthorized colonies. The first space is the planning department, where planners compelled by pressures to regularize unauthorized colonies create maps depicting those colonies in conformance with planning norms while knowing these “imaginary maps” will never be implemented. Drawing hypothetical roads and parks, planning becomes a practice of reproducing an open fiction. The second space is the unauthorized building, where multi-story apartments on designated agricultural lands are demolished because they are as-yet unoccupied. Mimicking occupancy, developers install air conditioners and hang laundry on vacant buildings to avoid site demolition. Surface embellishments thus become design features central to successful project completion, showing aesthetic appearance to be as significant as calculative protocols for the adjudication of legality. The third space is the improvised water systems of unauthorized colonies, which develop through collaboration with state agents, even though such systems are illegal in unauthorized colonies. The post-regularization ability to network this private infrastructure into state water lines raises the question of when the copy becomes the original. These three spaces together show the design of unauthorized colonies to mock power as much as it centralizes it.

Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life amidst Delhi’s Polluted Airs

Public Culture, 2020

Extreme air pollution events have become a regular phenomenon in Delhi, triggering conjunctions o... more Extreme air pollution events have become a regular phenomenon in Delhi, triggering conjunctions of air pollution and death popularly referred to as airpocalypse. The city’s collective reckoning with bad air raises the question of how social justice is to be imagined when the source of death is diffuse and leaky. The Indian judiciary has taken up this question in earnest, dispersing the legal treatment of life away from its historical focus on individuated life-beings and toward a more atmospheric domain of biological abstractions and vital circulations: aggregate lung capacity, collective asthmatic risk, and distributed body parts. Life in law is now monitored through air quality indexes and climatological reports as much as X-rays or electrocardiograms, making it something not just shaped by the environment but itself an environmental condition. Following judicial discourse stemming from key pollution-related court cases, this article examines how these new distributions of life tr...

When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017

This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of t... more This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents' everyday efforts to secure water, electricity, and building permission, the article proposes two topological figures that move beyond narrower spatial metaphors that read that state either as a fixed, hierarchically scaled entity or as a flat, wholly malleable assemblage without consequential spatial order or historicity. These are the topological state and the state outside itself. The analysis of the topological state centers on how real-time connections are forged between residents and key nodes in the bureaucracy, producing momentary reconfigurations of state form that allow low-level state actors to capture authority even as bureaucratic hierarchy is maintained. The analysis of the state outside itself focuses on how the routine actions of water engineers and municipal officers challenge the common conceptual mapping of the state as a surface with an inside and outside. Taken together, these figures reveal a temporally adept mode of political agency open to conjunctural possibilities and proximate connections but often dismissed as a near-sighted political disposition symptomatic of the poor and marginal classes' submission to clientalist politics.

Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development By Emily T. Yeh Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013

Economic Geography, 2015

Largely due to its daunting inaccessibility, politically and culturally produced, Tibet has not y... more Largely due to its daunting inaccessibility, politically and culturally produced, Tibet has not yet received much sophisticated scholarly treatment, especially by a geographer. Emily Yeh’s Taming Tibet is a timely and laudable contribution, beautifully woven with rich ethnographic illustrations and nuanced theoretical reasoning. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, Yeh brings her considerable knowledge and depth of research to a range of fascinating topics and offers fresh angles to understanding both Tibet and the subject of uneven development in general. It is a thought-provoking study that raises broader questions about how modernity and sovereignty can live in peace with deep-held religious traditions and ethnic identity, something that has relevance far beyond the Tibet issue per se. This book not only is a must read for people who are interested in Tibet’s uneasy relations with the Chinese state but also deserves a wide audience in geography and other social science disciplines. Yeh’s critical and nuanced narratives present a rich and sober account of Tibetans’ involvement in the transformation and production of Tibet’s landscape and socialeconomic structure, as well as the cultural politics of how Tibetans negotiate their desires, interests, and values during the process. The book’s central argument is that the Chinese state’s top-down territorialization of Tibet is best viewed as a hegemonic process of indebtedness engineering. Chinese leaders in Beijing have taken pains to cultivate a sense of indebtedness among Tibetans by generously bestowing various gift projects and massive public spending, wishing to buy the loyalty and obedience of Tibetans to the party state, and thus to tame Tibet. In reality, however, such hegemonic governance, supplemented by harsh crackdowns and heightened surveillance, has resulted in further marginalization and resentment of the Tibetans. Through rich ethnographic materials, Yeh depicts the complexity and contradictions of Tibetan agency with regard to China’s state building and development pushes. Popular narratives about Tibet have generally been crude and polarized: Tibetans are portrayed as either pure victims of the repressive, authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or happy and grateful citizens living in the liberated, modernized postslavery new Tibet. Yeh’s nuanced account interrogates and contests both perspectives. The three parts of the book correspond to the three major stages/types of landscape transformations: Maoist state farms, market-based vegetable cultivation, and urban (re)development. The first part looks at the introduction of state farms and later communes as key sites of state territorialization in the 1950s when Maoist state socialism and the People’s Republic of China’s sovereignty over Tibet was first established. Yeh shows that at the time the Chinese state was actually successful at convincing at least some Tibetans that Chinese presence was positive and desirable. Soldiers were disciplined to respect local people and customs, and elements of consent, especially from young women out of impoverished and landless families, were forged through the promise of gender mobility. The second part focuses on the production of the Lhasa landscape in the 1990s when state socialism was replaced with decollectivization and selective marketization. As a result, Han migrants from Sichuan came to dominate visible economic activities, especially vegetable production, in Lhasa, pushing local Tibetans to the economic 233 BO O K R EV EW

Nuisance Talk: Middle-Class Discourses of a Slum-Free Delhi*

Ecologies of Urbanism in India, 2013

Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum-Free Delhi

Antipode, 2011

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Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life

Security is a defining characteristic of our age and the driving force behind the management of c... more Security is a defining characteristic of our age and the driving force behind the management of collective political, economic, and social life. Directed at safeguarding society against future peril, security is often thought of as the hard infrastructures and invisible technologies assumed to deliver it: walls, turnstiles, CCTV cameras, digital encryption, and the like. The contributors to Futureproof redirect this focus, showing how security is a sensory domain shaped by affect and image as much as rules and rationalities. They examine security as it is lived and felt in domains as varied as real-estate listings, active-shooter drills, border crossings, landslide maps, gang graffiti, and museum exhibits to theorize how security regimes are expressed through aesthetic forms. Taking a global perspective with studies ranging from Jamaica to Jakarta and Colombia to the US-Mexico border, Futureproof expands our understanding of the security practices, infrastructures, and technologies that pervade everyday life.

Not Just Roads

The AAG Review of Books

The "Something Else" of Infrastructure What happens when infrastructures embody a constant state ... more The "Something Else" of Infrastructure What happens when infrastructures embody a constant state of incompletion? What happens when they are initiated for political allegiance rather than actual functioning? How do people engage with the lengthy time of construction and reconstitute other worlds around them? Not Just Roads is an ethnographic documentary of sixty-seven minutes on the nature of city expansions occurring between Delhi and Mumbai, exposing the frustrations of growth with time through the construction of Dwarka Expressway. Advertised as an almost thirty-kilometer-long "world-class" transport infrastructure project, it is a part of the Indian government's Bharatmala Program, which intends to build nearly 40,600 miles of new highways at a rate of fourteen miles per day. The Dwarka Expressway has taken more than ten years already and still the signs of "work in progress" are everywhere. The road cuts through a land that is endless, beyond the capacity of happening, taking all the time in the world with no completion date. The land was originally inhabited by villagers, working-class communities, and herders, and crossed by native trails and ecological commons. Along the road, real estate developments are sold to the "new middle class." Those who invested in these developments are waiting in frustration. Those who did not keep initiating different claims and events along the road hoping that somehow, maybe, it ends in their favor. The unfinished promise of the

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Regularization and the Fictions of Planning “Unauthorized Delhi”

Land Fictions

This chapter explores mimicry as a planning practice central to the development and occupation of... more This chapter explores mimicry as a planning practice central to the development and occupation of what is rapidly becoming the most popular neighborhood form in Delhi, and indeed much of metropolitan India — the unauthorized colony. The chapter describes “unauthorized colonies” as the peripheral neighborhoods located outside the city's master-planned areas that have long been denied state services. As the population and electoral influence of unauthorized colonies have grown, the planning authorities have introduced rules for regularizing these areas, which allows them to be retroactively incorporated into the plan and subsequently supplied with state water, sewerage, and related services. The chapter then shifts to present the three planning spaces — the town planning, water infrastructure, and the unauthorized building — which shows how practices of mimicry build material planned-ness into the core of supposedly unplanned spaces.

Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country

Land Fictions

This chapter explores the “land fictions” underpinning this variable land commodification recipe,... more This chapter explores the “land fictions” underpinning this variable land commodification recipe, without presuming that the cocktail of commodified outcomes it produces follows a single storyline or shares a fixed cast of characters. It emphasizes the continuous work of legal, regulatory, and narrative fictions that go into the making of land as a commodity and that enact and sustain the property relations that underpin linked value projects. This involves following the stories spun by land aggregators, developers, financiers, and marketers in all their guises. To open up the narratives, storylines, and discourses that govern the commodity world of land, the chapter introduces Karl Polanyi's classic argument about the commodity fiction underpinning what he termed market society, by which he meant a political-economic order in which social life is organized to meet the pecuniary, ideological, and administrative needs of a so-called self-regulating market. With the recognition of...

Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

On dis/possessive collectivism: Comments on Ananya Roy’s 2016 Geoforum Lecture

Geoforum, 2017

Does violence have a signature?

Urban Geography, 2016

Technology and TricksIntra-Household Technology Implementation and Gender Struggles

Gender Technology and Development, 2006

This article argues for non-asset-based approaches to the assessment of technology implementation... more This article argues for non-asset-based approaches to the assessment of technology implementation at the household level. It suggests that most studies of technology and gender focus primarily on the relationship between technology implementation and women&#39;s access to material resources without giving adequate attention to non-asset-based strategic possibilities for social change. Using the case of a cookstove improvement program in rural

Why gentrification theory fails in ‘much of the world’

City, 2015

This article challenges the applicability of gentrification theory in post-socialist and postcolo... more This article challenges the applicability of gentrification theory in post-socialist and postcolonial contexts with enduring legacies of large-scale public land ownership, common property, mixed tenure or informality–in other words, much of the world. It does so by highlighting the significance of tenure diversity in such settings and identifying why this diversity requires a different, and more rigorous, set of analytics than that offered by gentrification theory. It contends that if critical urban studies is to reach beyond its post-industrial, Western confines, it has much to learn from agrarian studies and (non-urban) political ecology, especially regarding how customary land use and intermediate forms of tenure can sustain relatively equitable forms of social reproduction—especially when compared to those possible under conditions of outright ownership.

The Propriety of Property

World-Class City Making in Delhi, 2015

World-Class Detritus

World-Class City Making in Delhi, 2015

Aesthetic Criminalization

World-Class City Making in Delhi, 2015

$Research paper thumbnail of Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space$

Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

The Colonial Roots of India S Air Pollution Crisis

Economic and Political Weekly, 2019

Improvised Urbanism in The Design of India’s Unauthorized Colonies

The New Companion to Urban Design, 2019

Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life amidst Delhi’s Polluted Airs

Public Culture, 2020

When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017

Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development By Emily T. Yeh Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013

Economic Geography, 2015

Nuisance Talk: Middle-Class Discourses of a Slum-Free Delhi*

Ecologies of Urbanism in India, 2013

Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum-Free Delhi

Antipode, 2011

Download

Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life

Not Just Roads

The AAG Review of Books

Download

Regularization and the Fictions of Planning “Unauthorized Delhi”

Land Fictions

Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country

Land Fictions

Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

On dis/possessive collectivism: Comments on Ananya Roy’s 2016 Geoforum Lecture

Geoforum, 2017

Does violence have a signature?

Urban Geography, 2016

Technology and TricksIntra-Household Technology Implementation and Gender Struggles

Gender Technology and Development, 2006

Why gentrification theory fails in ‘much of the world’

City, 2015

The Propriety of Property

World-Class City Making in Delhi, 2015

World-Class Detritus

World-Class City Making in Delhi, 2015

Aesthetic Criminalization

World-Class City Making in Delhi, 2015

Introduction to Rule By Aesthetics

Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi, 2015

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Introduction to Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life

Futureproof, 2020

This chapter introduces the framework of security aesthetics that orients the book, asking how th... more This chapter introduces the framework of security aesthetics that orients the book, asking how the look, feel, smell, taste, and sound of security organize contemporary social and political life. In moving beyond a narrower focus on risk calculations, security rationalities, and biopolitical knowledge practices, it suggests that three modalities of security aesthetics help elucidate the everyday violences of security technologies in the twenty-first century. Designing fortresses refers to the ways in which interventions in built form deploy visual and other sensory signals to fashion aesthetic norms about how security looks, sounds, and feels. Screening threats involves the surveillant conversion of corporeal and spatial imagery into ostensibly self-evident, impartial, and predictive knowledge of dangerous aberration, as well as the material and symbolic systems developed to anticipate and respond to deviance. Calibrating vulnerabilities concerns the social regulation of how risks are recorded, imagined, and affectively experienced, often through sensory projections of a threatening Other.

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Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life

by Hudson McFann and Asher Ghertner

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Chapter 5, World-Class Detritus, from Rule by Aesthetics

Rule by Aesthetics

This chapter examines the experiences through which large-scale state violence was greeted with n... more This chapter examines the experiences through which large-scale state violence was greeted with nonconfrontational responses in a single slum in Delhi. It traces how slum residents, denied legal redress through the courts and political redress through electoral channels, try to imagine a place for themselves in a city that declares them outsiders. It argues that despite slum residents’ profound critiques of their displacement, their sense of the possible is shaped as much by embodied experiences of urban change and everyday aesthetic practices as by ideology. It considers how a type of aesthetic hegemony was forged that failed to capture the rational interests of its subjects, but nonetheless drew them into a world-class “community of sense": a shared sense of what the future holds and what is necessary to achieve it. It is this realm of aesthetics that is key terrain on which the urban question must be framed in contemporary India.

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Chapter 6, The Propriety of Property, from Rule By Aesthetics

Rule by Aesthetics, 2015

Chapter 6 follows the political implications of slum residents’ positive identifications with pri... more Chapter 6 follows the political implications of slum residents’ positive identifications with private property, charting how the world-class aesthetic and the restructuring of Delhi’s economy created the structural and symbolic conditions out of which private property emerged as an exalted target and fetishized object. Focusing on residents’ experience of being alienated from the labor process, it examines how land, particularly private property, took on fantastical qualities in residents’ narratives, mobilizing new urban imaginaries and inhering the power to magically transform both self and city. Efforts to conjure a mental image of a better future through the lens of property ownership were simultaneously efforts to align oneself with the speculative promises of world-class development: to index propriety to property, rendering property a vehicle of upward mobility. While chapter 5 points to the openings for the aesthetic reappropriation of dominant norms, this chapter addresses how quickly economic uncertainty can close those openings.

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Rule By Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi

Rule by Aesthetics offers a powerful analysis of the process and experience of mass demolition in... more Rule by Aesthetics offers a powerful analysis of the process and experience of mass demolition in Delhi, India. Using Delhi’s millennial effort to become a world-class city, D. Asher Ghertner shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. The rise of “rule by aesthetics,” or the practice of evaluating territory based on aesthetic norms, allowed the state to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums. Slums were declared illegal because they “looked” illegal, leading to the displacement of a million slum residents in the first decade of the 21st century. Drawing on close ethnographic engagement with residents targeted for removal, as well as the planners, judges, and politicians who targeted them, Ghertner demonstrates how easily democratic procedures can be subverted once democracy’s subjects are seen as visually out of place. Slum dwellers’ creative appropriation of dominant aesthetic norms reveals, however, that aesthetic rule does not mark the end of democratic claims-making. Rather, it signals a new relationship between the mechanism of government and the practice of politics, one in which struggles for a more inclusive city rely more than ever on urban aesthetics, in Delhi and in aspiring world-class cities the world over.

Review of Rule by Aesthetics in Social & Cultural Geography

Reviewed by Rohit Negi (Ambedkar University, Delhi)

Review of Rule by Aesthetics in IJURR

Reviewed by Austin Zeiderman

Review of Rule by Aesthetics in International Sociology

reviewed by Suraj Beri

Geographical fieldwork with philosophers and elsewheres

Ryan Centner (LSE) reviews Rule by Aesthetics in Society & Space

Review of Rule by Aesthetics by Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

Review of Rule by Aesthetics in DECISION

Karthik Rao-Cavale reviews Rule by Aesthetics

Interview on Rule by Aesthetics for New Books Network

D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation in... more D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is destined to be demolished, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) weaves the experiences of these slum dwellers together with an analysis of middle class Resident Welfare Associations, legal rulings, influential reports, and idle chatter to argue that mapping and surveying are no longer the primary means for administering urban space. Rather it is a set of vague and powerful aesthetic norms derived from notions of what it is to be world class that set the contours of Delhi’s change.Theoretically stimulating and rich in narrative drive, Rule by Aesthetics opens up new ways for thinking about urban governance in India and beyond.

Review of Rule by Aesthetics in Asian Review of Books

Delhi's World-Class Hype, review of Rule by Aesthetics

New Books podcast discussing Rule by Aesthetics

Review of Rule by Aesthetics in American Ethnologist

Redistributed: Joseph Rykwert reviews Rule By Aesthetics for The Times Literary Supplement

Joseph Rykwert reviews Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi, alongside Sanjay Sri... more

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Make Way for the 'World-Class' City: Harvey Molotch Reviews Rule by Aesthetics for Public Books

D. Asher Ghertner’s Rule by Aesthetics invites us to interrogate the beauty and allure of moderni... more D. Asher Ghertner’s Rule by Aesthetics invites us to interrogate the beauty and allure of modernization—the aesthetics of “world-class”—as part of the civic system: the intersection of governmental structures and the sentiments of elite and impoverished popular classes alike. In Raymond Williams’s term, it is part of the “structures of feeling,” an internalized sense of inferiority, that brings poor people to defer to their overlords. Ghertner similarly points our vision toward closely held hopes and dreams that, however perniciously, cross and link groups.

Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present (2018)

by Nausheen H Anwar, Tim Bunnell, and Asher Ghertner

Home to more city dwellers than any other continent, and the locus of many of the world’s most po... more Home to more city dwellers than any other continent, and the locus of many of the world’s most populous metropolitan areas, Asia is moving to center stage in popular and academic debates about global urban futures. This volume comprises essays examining the intersections of the urban and futurity. While attentive to emergent forms of urban Asia, contributors also examine futures past, the afterlives of historical projects and archaeologies of the future. Many essays provide ethnographic and field-based empirical insights into emerging urban cultures, while others explore the theoretical and political implications of the urban future in Asia.

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