Seelampur in north-east Delhi is one of the largest
e-waste markets in India. Featured in numerou... more Seelampur in north-east Delhi is one of the largest e-waste markets in India. Featured in numerous non-governmental organisation reports and journalistic accounts, mainly to highlight the environmental perils of informal e-waste dismantling, the e-waste market’s spatial history and underlying social relations have never been systematically studied. Combining 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2021–22 with a quantitative primary survey of 115 traders in Seelampur, this paper offers new insights on the caste segmentation of commerce in urban India and, specifically, the role of kin networks and “community capital” in consolidating Seelampur’s status as a key node within India’s e-waste economy.
The concept of “waste”, operating in multiple registers, forms the basis for a series of forays i... more The concept of “waste”, operating in multiple registers, forms the basis for a series of forays into Marx and political economy. The chapter traverses a wide terrain: from over-accumulation of capital that portends economic crisis, to planned obsolescence as a response to under-consumption, to the proliferation of commodity detritus that threatens the ability of contemporary cities to function, to the artful and arduous toils of waste workers who salvage value from discards, to the wanton expenditure of human potential in precarious forms of employment that involve removal or repurposing of waste matter, to the global multiplication of superfluous populations who can be enrolled in populist mobilizations. Ultimately, the chapter wagers that “waste” can be the heterogeneous site for a generative quarrel between Marxist political economy and postcolonial critique.
If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformati... more If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on detailed interviews with land market intermediaries, operating across different scales, who were instrumental in assembling agricultural land for a large apartment complex, the paper shows how existing forms of social power and local knowledge are harnessed to create inter-scalar linkages that enable the creation and extraction of value in Indian real estate. It makes the case for understanding the economic and cultural work of intermediaries in animating land's value chain as 'articulation work'. Finally, the paper assesses the varying forms and quantum of value that are generated and captured by different actors in the value chain, which stretches from the landowning farmer up to a major real estate company, to reflect on the micro-dynamics of speculative urbanism and agrarian urbanization.
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for pr... more If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail this through three connected instances: infrastructural labour that recuperates the detritus of city life; social reproductive labour that undergirds these systems and life itself; and hands-on repair work inherent to care. By understanding maintenance and repair work as care, our paper demonstrates the importance of this labour to our collective survival in a broken world, and the imperative of embracing a care ethics where we shoulder together the everyday burdens and benefits to live "as well as possible".
This short essay shows how "waste", historically and in the present, has operated as capitalism's... more This short essay shows how "waste", historically and in the present, has operated as capitalism's dialectical frontier: animating its relentless drive for profit, subtending its racial hierarchies, and through its unevenly accumulating burdens, throwing planetary ecosystems and vulnerable lives into mounting peril. P roposition 1: The Production of Waste Capitalism is a historically peculiar system. Money, markets, wage labor, private property, profit-making, and commodities-in short, ingredients that are associated, even conflated, with capitalism-are neither unique nor subsequent to it. It is the historical articulation of these, in spatially heterogeneous forms, into
If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformati... more If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on detailed interviews with land market intermediaries, operating across different scales, who were instrumental in assembling agricultural land for a large apartment complex, the paper shows how existing forms of social power and local knowledge are harnessed to create inter-scalar linkages that enable the creation and extraction of value in Indian real estate. It makes the case for understanding the economic and cultural work of intermediaries in animating land's value chain as ‘articulation work’. Finally, the paper as...
Introduction: Conceptualising the City in South Asia Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane... more Introduction: Conceptualising the City in South Asia Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane Part I: Contested Landscapes 1. The Nuisance of Slums: Environmental Law and the Production of Slum Illegality in India D. Asher Ghertner 2. Poverty as Geography: Motility, Stoppage and Circuits of Waste in Delhi Vinay Gidwani and Bharati Chaturvedi 3. Shillong: The (Un)Making of a North-East Indian City? Daisy Hasan 4. The Divided City? Squatters' Struggle for Urban Space in Kathmandu Urmi Sengupta 5. Spectacular Events, City Spaces and Citizenship: The Commonwealth Games in Delhi Amita Baviskar Part II: Infrastructures and Materialities 6. The Embeddedness of Cost Recovery: Water Reforms and Associationism at Bangalore's Fringes Malini Ranganathan 7. Ignoring Power: Knowing Leakage in Mumbai's Water Supply Nikhil Anand 8. 'No Horn Please': Self-Governance and Sociality in a Kathmandu Housing Colony Andrew Nelson 9. Housing Complexes as Packaged Fantasies: A Meeting of the Local and the Global and the Standardisation of Taste in Colombo Sasanka Perera Part III: Imagining the Urban 10. Sri Lanka: Terror, Anxiety and the Unstable Nation -- A Physical Biography of Violence Anoma Pieris 11. City of Lights: Nostalgia, Violence and Karachi's Competing Imaginaries Huma Yusuf 12. Sacrifice and Dystopia: Imagining Karachi through Edhi Yasmin Jaffri and Oskar Verkaaik. About the Editors. Note on the Contributors. Index.
Seelampur in north-east Delhi is one of the largest
e-waste markets in India. Featured in numerou... more Seelampur in north-east Delhi is one of the largest e-waste markets in India. Featured in numerous non-governmental organisation reports and journalistic accounts, mainly to highlight the environmental perils of informal e-waste dismantling, the e-waste market’s spatial history and underlying social relations have never been systematically studied. Combining 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2021–22 with a quantitative primary survey of 115 traders in Seelampur, this paper offers new insights on the caste segmentation of commerce in urban India and, specifically, the role of kin networks and “community capital” in consolidating Seelampur’s status as a key node within India’s e-waste economy.
The concept of “waste”, operating in multiple registers, forms the basis for a series of forays i... more The concept of “waste”, operating in multiple registers, forms the basis for a series of forays into Marx and political economy. The chapter traverses a wide terrain: from over-accumulation of capital that portends economic crisis, to planned obsolescence as a response to under-consumption, to the proliferation of commodity detritus that threatens the ability of contemporary cities to function, to the artful and arduous toils of waste workers who salvage value from discards, to the wanton expenditure of human potential in precarious forms of employment that involve removal or repurposing of waste matter, to the global multiplication of superfluous populations who can be enrolled in populist mobilizations. Ultimately, the chapter wagers that “waste” can be the heterogeneous site for a generative quarrel between Marxist political economy and postcolonial critique.
If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformati... more If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on detailed interviews with land market intermediaries, operating across different scales, who were instrumental in assembling agricultural land for a large apartment complex, the paper shows how existing forms of social power and local knowledge are harnessed to create inter-scalar linkages that enable the creation and extraction of value in Indian real estate. It makes the case for understanding the economic and cultural work of intermediaries in animating land's value chain as 'articulation work'. Finally, the paper assesses the varying forms and quantum of value that are generated and captured by different actors in the value chain, which stretches from the landowning farmer up to a major real estate company, to reflect on the micro-dynamics of speculative urbanism and agrarian urbanization.
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for pr... more If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail this through three connected instances: infrastructural labour that recuperates the detritus of city life; social reproductive labour that undergirds these systems and life itself; and hands-on repair work inherent to care. By understanding maintenance and repair work as care, our paper demonstrates the importance of this labour to our collective survival in a broken world, and the imperative of embracing a care ethics where we shoulder together the everyday burdens and benefits to live "as well as possible".
This short essay shows how "waste", historically and in the present, has operated as capitalism's... more This short essay shows how "waste", historically and in the present, has operated as capitalism's dialectical frontier: animating its relentless drive for profit, subtending its racial hierarchies, and through its unevenly accumulating burdens, throwing planetary ecosystems and vulnerable lives into mounting peril. P roposition 1: The Production of Waste Capitalism is a historically peculiar system. Money, markets, wage labor, private property, profit-making, and commodities-in short, ingredients that are associated, even conflated, with capitalism-are neither unique nor subsequent to it. It is the historical articulation of these, in spatially heterogeneous forms, into
If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformati... more If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on detailed interviews with land market intermediaries, operating across different scales, who were instrumental in assembling agricultural land for a large apartment complex, the paper shows how existing forms of social power and local knowledge are harnessed to create inter-scalar linkages that enable the creation and extraction of value in Indian real estate. It makes the case for understanding the economic and cultural work of intermediaries in animating land's value chain as ‘articulation work’. Finally, the paper as...
Introduction: Conceptualising the City in South Asia Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane... more Introduction: Conceptualising the City in South Asia Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane Part I: Contested Landscapes 1. The Nuisance of Slums: Environmental Law and the Production of Slum Illegality in India D. Asher Ghertner 2. Poverty as Geography: Motility, Stoppage and Circuits of Waste in Delhi Vinay Gidwani and Bharati Chaturvedi 3. Shillong: The (Un)Making of a North-East Indian City? Daisy Hasan 4. The Divided City? Squatters' Struggle for Urban Space in Kathmandu Urmi Sengupta 5. Spectacular Events, City Spaces and Citizenship: The Commonwealth Games in Delhi Amita Baviskar Part II: Infrastructures and Materialities 6. The Embeddedness of Cost Recovery: Water Reforms and Associationism at Bangalore's Fringes Malini Ranganathan 7. Ignoring Power: Knowing Leakage in Mumbai's Water Supply Nikhil Anand 8. 'No Horn Please': Self-Governance and Sociality in a Kathmandu Housing Colony Andrew Nelson 9. Housing Complexes as Packaged Fantasies: A Meeting of the Local and the Global and the Standardisation of Taste in Colombo Sasanka Perera Part III: Imagining the Urban 10. Sri Lanka: Terror, Anxiety and the Unstable Nation -- A Physical Biography of Violence Anoma Pieris 11. City of Lights: Nostalgia, Violence and Karachi's Competing Imaginaries Huma Yusuf 12. Sacrifice and Dystopia: Imagining Karachi through Edhi Yasmin Jaffri and Oskar Verkaaik. About the Editors. Note on the Contributors. Index.
Red Tape is written with matchless clarity and deliberation, and brims with ethnographic insight.... more Red Tape is written with matchless clarity and deliberation, and brims with ethnographic insight. More importantly, it is a profoundly moral book that joins outrage with cold-eyed analysis of abject poverty that kills. Gupta's book never minces words. Red Tape opens with an admirable directness that the reader quickly recognizes as one of the book's hallmarks. Gupta writes: "Any study of the state in India must try to address one central puzzle. Why has a state whose proclaimed motive is to foster development failed to help the large number of people who still live in dire poverty?" (page 3). An excellent question for the human sciences, but then comes the moral denouement:
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Papers by Vinay Gidwani
e-waste markets in India. Featured in numerous
non-governmental organisation reports and journalistic
accounts, mainly to highlight the environmental perils of
informal e-waste dismantling, the e-waste market’s
spatial history and underlying social relations have never
been systematically studied. Combining 10 months of
ethnographic fieldwork in 2021–22 with a quantitative
primary survey of 115 traders in Seelampur, this paper
offers new insights on the caste segmentation of
commerce in urban India and, specifically, the role of
kin networks and “community capital” in consolidating
Seelampur’s status as a key node within India’s
e-waste economy.
e-waste markets in India. Featured in numerous
non-governmental organisation reports and journalistic
accounts, mainly to highlight the environmental perils of
informal e-waste dismantling, the e-waste market’s
spatial history and underlying social relations have never
been systematically studied. Combining 10 months of
ethnographic fieldwork in 2021–22 with a quantitative
primary survey of 115 traders in Seelampur, this paper
offers new insights on the caste segmentation of
commerce in urban India and, specifically, the role of
kin networks and “community capital” in consolidating
Seelampur’s status as a key node within India’s
e-waste economy.