Chasing land, chasing crisis: Interrogating speculative urban development through developers’ pursuit of land commodification in Mumbai

Mumbai, along with a few other metropolitan cities in India, witnessed an unprecedented flow of finance capital toward the development of new real estate soon after efforts to liberalize the country’s real estate sector took force in 2005. Fifteen years later, however, the reality on the ground looks bleak. Not only does the demand for housing remain as high as ever before in Mumbai, but hundreds of real estate projects lie unfinished, abandoned, and/or unsold. In its attempt to make sense of the city’s real estate crisis, this paper brings to the fore important insights about the organizing logics of urban land markets. Drawing on an exhaustive database of real estate indicators combined with ethnographic fieldwork, the paper reveals a tendency among Mumbai developers to fight competition by chasing land irrespective of long-term financial prudency, which in turn hinders the development and sale of new real estate. The paper therefore proposes that the reproduction of capitalistic arrangements within Mumbai’s land market is precarious because the very lands that are to be turned into commodities inevitably become entangled in new socio-legal encumbrances, just as the separation of “land from man” begins to seem plausible. By demonstrating how real estate activity is nevertheless, centered problematically, around this unceasing yet always incomplete pursuit of commodified land, the paper contributes to the scholarly project of developing a heterodox conceptualization of land.