2024/02/12 by Thomas Cowan · 1 voice · 2 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Social Sciences · #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance #Political Economy and Marxism
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/02723638.2024.2308399
openalex publication_date 2024/02/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/17
This article engages with the work of Stuart Hall to examine conditions of agrarian city-making on India's urban frontier. The article draws on Hall's writings on articulation and marxist method to propose an approach to studying the urban frontier "without guarantees'. That is without a priori presumption of the total consolidation of the non-urban to a financial-capitalist urban fabric. Examining India's agrarian-urban frontier, the article argues that the expansion of capitalist urbanization is being commanded, appropriated, and rejected by a decidedly agrarian set of actors, social relations, and technologies. On the frontier both the state and capital are subject to a series of agrarian articulations: bargains, compromises, and reformulations with agrarian and non-urban society that alter the very character of urbanization itself and challenge the received grammars of critical urban theory. In contrast to "extended urbanisation" approaches that assert the primacy of macrogeographical capitalist intentions, the article argues following Hall, that these urbanagrarian articulations on the frontier are fundamentally uncertain, requiring specific political and ideological work to sustain and frequently subject to collapse and resettlement. The final section of the article outlines three core conditions of agrarian-urban articulation in the present conjuncture: rentier capitalism; land occupancy and territorial blockade.