Negotiating Land in Rurban Bengaluru, South India

Abstract

Recently, there have been calls to decenter theories of the urban to theorize the rural as a formative force. While recognizing that the urban remains structurally dominant, scholars point towards the interconnectedness of the urban and the rural under present capitalist transformation processes. We proposed to study recent urban–rural entanglements through the heuristic of rurban assemblages. We focused on rural groups and how they negotiate their integration and disintegration into the urban cosmos while remaining embedded within their rural context through the lens of land. This article adds to the debate on the contradictory meanings and uses of land in the context of land dispossession and commodification for urban and industrial development. The work specifically paid attention to the reshaping of subject–land relations and analyzed how implicit or explicit references to the city and the countryside permeate the construction of values and uses of land among the old and new social groups in the metropolitan region of Bengaluru, South India.

Special Issue “Rural–Urban Transformation of Asian Megacities from a Social-Ecological Systems Perspective”

“…The key roles that land and its changing uses play in urbanization processes is also evident in the paper "Negotiating Land in Rurban Bengaluru, South India" by Schwind and Altrock [11]. They point out the complex processes of re-evaluation and negotiation over land among local residents and other actors that take place in the process.…”