Monetizing Air

Abstract This article is a critical reading of the making of vertical cities through monetizing air. The past two decades have seen the construction of massive resettlement housing complexes in Mumbai, which activists disparagingly call “vertical slums.” These resettlement housing complexes are financed through a land-use instrument called the transfer of development rights (TDRs). At the core of the TDR is the technopolitics of severing: a sociolegal maneuver that makes it possible to delink air rights from a plot of land, transfer these air rights across space, and stack them onto another location. The severing and stacking of air rights rehearses old struggles around enclosure but in the new context of fiscal austerity. Local governments are increasingly deploying their zoning powers to quite literally create public revenues out of thin air. These revenues finance the provisioning of “free housing” for urban citizens. In linking air monetization, slums, and welfare, this article explores the contradictions that emerge when the subnational state relies on air monetization to fulfil its social-welfare obligations. It particularly focuses on the World Bank's infrastructure-resettlement contract that stabilized Mumbai's TDR market while simultaneously depoliticizing its land-use transformation.