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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
- I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
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or all the critical scholarship on capitalist urbanization and uneven development in the postcolonial city over the past two decades, we know curiously little about rent. Properties of Rent, Sushmita Pati’s stunning and meticulous account of urban villages on the outskirts of Delhi, India, provides a corrective, starting from the premise that the margins of this global city “run on rent”. Rent is far more than an economic relation denoting the temporary use of property. Rent is also a social, political, and emotional relation woven together by caste, kinship, and community; as such, rent decides who lies inside and who lies outside registers of value. A brilliant book that is a must-read by urbanists of South Asia and beyond, Properties of Rent tells us first and foremost why vernacular theories of capitalism matter. Here is a work of small political economy in a world of big theory.
To understand how cities in the global South are made and remade, it is not enough to study the circulation of finance capital and the speculative nature of global property markets. We must also pay attention to traditional exchanges of cash rooted in ancestral collectivities such as bhaicharas (brotherhoods), kunbas (families), and other jati or caste networks. It is these on-the-ground cartels of rentier capitalism that churn elections and voting behaviors; violence against women, the caste-oppressed, and minoritized groups; and claims to national and city belonging. In an era of rightwing populism in India and around the world, we need sharp theories of capitalism. Pati’s book is a most welcome addition not just to urban studies, but to the political economy of this historical moment more generally.
I had the pleasure of inviting a range of critical urban scholars to participate in this review forum for Pati’s book. Shubhra Gururani underscores how Pati skillfully narrates the strategic import of villages to rent economies, and how rural proprietors mobilize the space of the village and its traditional institutions to articulate with expanding reaches of global capital. Ben Theresa focuses on how two critical “properties” of rent, control and collectivity, are foregrounded in Pati’s story. Finally, my own review credits Pati for telling an untold story of caste and the city—how intermediate landed castes known as Jats shape transformations at Delhi’s turbulent frontiers.
Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the School of International Service and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. An urban geographer and political ecologist by training, her research in urban India and the U.S. studies the political economy of land, labor, and environmental injustices, as well as intellectual histories of anticaste, abolitionist, and anticolonial thought. Her coauthored book, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in April 2023. She is co-editor of the 2022 book Rethinking Difference in India through Racialization: Caste, Tribe, and Hindu Nationalism in Transnational Perspective published by Routledge in 2022.
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