Uncertain Hazards and Certain Benefits

Abstract This article deals with a case of conflict between industrial and residential uses of land in a chemical industry zone in the city of Thane in western India. While land-use conflicts involving environmental issues have been studied from different vantage points, this article focuses on a relatively underemphasized aspect, viz., how different facets of land feed into the resolution of such conflicts. Specifically, the Thane case discusses two facets of urban land—materiality and building rights—and how they influenced the decision about whether the industries should be relocated, the nature of restrictions imposed on the buffer zone between residential and industrial uses, and how the right to build in the buffer zone was viewed. Further, the interplay between land's complexity and conflicts in land use was affected by the uncertain nature of hazards in the chemical industries and difficult comparisons between benefits from varied uses of land that reflected shifting societal preferences in terms of development. Environmental jurisprudence involving hazards in chemical industries in cities can thus bring out the multidimensionality of urban land within a context of uncertain scientific knowledge about the environment, unpredictable urbanization, and political negotiations about the resolution of the land-use conflict.