Neoliberaal agrarisch-urbanisme in de ‘interstitiële ruimten’: het in kaart brengen van ‘verweven urbanisme’ en het verkennen van de mogelijkheid van een ‘onderhandeld stedelijk landschap’ – de casus Gurugram (Gurgaon), India

This dissertation examines the production of urban space in Gurgaon (Gurugram), India, through the lens of agrarian urbanism, with a focus on the interstitial spaces between the newly privatized city and the historically agrarian village of Nathupur. Rather than treating these spaces as residual or transitional, the research conceptualizes them as active sites where urbanization is negotiated, improvised, and continuously reshaped by multiple actors, including state agencies, private developers, migrant populations, and landowning villagers. The study adopts an interdisciplinary methodology combining spatial mapping and ethnographic fieldwork, supported by grounded theory analysis. Interstitial spaces are approached as analytical entry points to understand how agrarian and urban processes intersect materially and socially. The research is structured through three analytical lenses: space and power, space and materiality, and space and identity. The findings demonstrate that agrarian institutions and social relations do not disappear under neoliberal urbanization but are reworked within it. First, village landowners actively participate in urban development processes, transitioning from traditional landlords to shareholder actors who negotiate land, retain spatial footholds, and shape local urban form. Second, the emergence of rental housing typologies—such as EWS units, incremental "jugaad" housing, and informal settlements—reveals how rentier economies are materially produced through hybrid and often informal built forms. Third, kinship-based solidarities and customary land practices continue to structure the governance and re-territorialization of village commons, even within highly privatized urban environments. By bringing these findings together, the dissertation demonstrates that Gurgaon's interstitials are not marginal spaces awaiting absorption into the city, but active stages of agrarian urbanism. Within these spaces, native villagers emerge as active shareholder actors who negotiate land, retain spatial footholds, and shape urban development processes. These interstitials reveal how the politics of land, identity, and livelihood are spatially enacted in ways that challenge conventional binaries such as rural/urban, tradition/modernity, and dispossession/development. In doing so, the study contributes to urban and architectural scholarship by proposing the interstitial as a methodological and conceptual lens through which the co-production of city and countryside can be understood.