Thinking Through Urban Fragments: The Making of the Millennium City of Gurgaon, India

Using a case study of the struggle to convert more than 2, 000 disjointed acres of agricultural land to urban land in Gurgaon, India, I address questions about the role the state plays in making land available for privatized development, how tensions between (il)legitimate property claims are fought through documentary evidence, and how competing claims to land are recognized and resolved by the state and court system. Through the theoretical lens of the fragment, I examine how these land parcels are represented, interpreted, and acted against through legal and bureaucratic mechanisms to create certain expectations and foreclose certain futures about Gurgaon’s privatized urban frontier. By unpacking how the state uses threats of intervention through eminent domain to broker private sales, I illustrate the coercive side of hegemonic narratives of privatized development. Considering manipulations of paperwork in land possession documents and their legal interpretations reveals how seemingly secure land tenure based on private ownership is undermined and facilitates dispossession. Analyzing how competing claims to land are reconciled through the court demonstrates how land fragments are a product of hegemonic stories of Gurgaon’s speculative development while interrupting the completeness of this narrative.