Collapse as Investability: Articulation Work in the Wake of Speculative Urbanism in Noida, India

Abstract The Supernova Spira, an 80‐story luxury residential tower in Noida, India, stands structurally incomplete and held in insolvency. By every conventional measure, it is no longer investable. And yet portfolio hosts, entering after the developer's default, have assembled its stranded units into a continuously turning short‐stay rental economy. Drawing on on‐going ethnographic fieldwork at the building, this paper argues that investability does not end at formal collapse: it continues at sub‐threshold scales, through formal‐legal instruments parasitic on the specific conditions collapse produces. The paper extends concept of articulation work into the post‐collapse moment, and scholarship on incompletion as a generative condition across a different class register, attending to what becomes of articulation work after the original assembling has collapsed.

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Publication Details

Journal
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie
Published
2026-11-03
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.70120
Primary Topic
Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Collapse as Investability: Articulation Work in the Wake of Speculative Urbanism in Noida, India

Devra Waldman
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie
Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
article

Collapse as Investability: Articulation Work in the Wake of Speculative Urbanism in Noida, India

Devra Waldman
article en

Abstract

Abstract The Supernova Spira, an 80‐story luxury residential tower in Noida, India, stands structurally incomplete and held in insolvency. By every conventional measure, it is no longer investable. And yet portfolio hosts, entering after the developer's default, have assembled its stranded units into a continuously turning short‐stay rental economy. Drawing on on‐going ethnographic fieldwork at the building, this paper argues that investability does not end at formal collapse: it continues at sub‐threshold scales, through formal‐legal instruments parasitic on the specific conditions collapse produces. The paper extends concept of articulation work into the post‐collapse moment, and scholarship on incompletion as a generative condition across a different class register, attending to what becomes of articulation work after the original assembling has collapsed.

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie
University of Prince Edward Island (CA)
Openalex Percentile: Top 12%
Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
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