Land and Environment in Asia
I am excited to be offering a new undergraduate course this coming Spring semester that explores the politics of land in South and Southeast Asia. The course covers themes including urban planning, land tenure arrangements, and property regimes, topics that are closely aligned with my current research on the socio-ecological dimensions of real estate speculation in Jakarta and Bangalore. I’m looking forward to bringing my field sites into the classroom, and for students to engage with these cities.
The course examines the following themes and ideas:
The processes through which understandings of land as a resource and its management via private property regimes has become normalized;
How colonial and postcolonial governments use space and spatial tactics (e.g. mapping) to governance and control their populations;
How land is rendered manageable and investable;
Histories of enclosure, dispossession, expulsion and forced evictions;
How transformations in land use are accompanied by processes of accumulation, dispossession, exclusion;
Examples of radical alternative arrangements to private property regimes, including modes of land ownership and management that exceed capitalist structures.
The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, we examine how land has come to be regarded as a commodity, and with what effects. This part of the course will draw on Tania Li’s recent work on land, as well as research examining the commodification of nature. We will examine historical practices of enclosure and accumulation by dispossession under colonial regimes, as well as the recent global land rush and associated processes of land grabbing.
““Although [land] is often treated as a thing and sometimes as a commodity, it is not like a mat: you cannot roll it up and take it away” – Tania Li”
The second part of the course examines a series of conflicts over land ownership and land use in rural and urban areas. We will be drawing on a couple of books in particular: Gavin Shatkin’s 2017 book The Real Estate Turn in Urban Asia, and the edited volume from Derek Hall, Phillip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li, Powers of exclusion: land dilemmas in Southeast Asia, which recently arrived in the mail and which I’m particularly excited to read. I’ll also be incorporating papers on Jakarta and Bangalore from the Speculative Urbanisms NSF project I have been a part of since 2013.
In the final part, we examines forms of land ownership and use that exceed capitalism and offer alternatives to private property regimes and privatization. I feel that this is where the value of a Southern perspective shines most clearly. Many students cannot imagine a world without capitalism and private property regimes, but there alternatives are practiced everyday in the same spaces and places. This part of the course also serves as a counter-balance to the focus on developers, corporations, the state and private finance capital in the first part.