The Social Cost of the Price of Land

Welcome to our special session co-organised by South Asia WG, and Urban and Regional Economics WG! We are delighted to have Simone Maria Grabner, Urban and Regional Economics WG as the co-organiser of this session within our larger project!

For this special session, we are excited to have Dr. Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Global Urban Inequalities at the University of California, Berkeley. She will be discussing about the Social Cost of the Price of Land.

We are lucky to have Prof. Dr. Benjamin Davy, currently visiting professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Johannesburg, and at the School of Architecture and Spatial Planning, TU Wien University as the discussant.

Title of the presentation: The Social Cost of the Price of Land: Revaluing Agrarian-Urban Land in Globalizing India

This talk will focus on India's post-liberalization decades of "land wars." India's 1991 economic liberalization reforms augured a market- and urban- turn in political-economy, with a large-scale overhaul of earlier land laws to enable an expedited conversion of agricultural land into new urban land-uses. As policy makers searched for decentralized and market-oriented means for "discovering" the price of land, the core of these land transformations entailed the remaking of agricultural land from a protected commodity into a fungible real estate asset. With the urban turn, as location trumps fertility as the key metric for determining land price, these land revaluations in the urbanizing countryside have erupted into some of the most volatile social conflicts in India's post-colonial history. Using the India case, this talk will address broader questions that are key to land transformations in former socialist and communist countries, of what are the social costs of the price of land, and with the rise of the price system as the key arbiter of land conflicts, what are the institutional arrangements through which land can be re-embedded in social-ecological relations.

Biographies

Speaker

Sai Balakrishnan is an Assistant Professor of Global Urban Inequalities at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to Berkeley, she taught at Harvard and Rutgers, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia Law School's Center on Global Legal Transformation. Her recent book, *Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India* (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), looks at the conflicts and struggles over the commodification / decommodification of land in India's urbanizing countryside.

Discussant

Ben Davy is visiting professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Johannesburg, and at the School of Architecture and Spatial Planning, TU Wien University. He was professor of land policy, land management and municipal geo-information at the School of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund University. Ben was president of the International Academic Association on Planning, Law, and Property Rights (PLPR) and the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP). Among his books are "Essential Injustice" (1997) and "Land Policy" (2012). Currently, he works on land reform, land use ethics, and the dignity of human and non-human animals.

This session is a part of the project:
Expanding the frontiers of economics: Evidence from South Asia

This project aims to organize series of special sessions on emerging areas of research in Economics. By synthesizing theoretical assumptions of sociology, psychology, anthropology and political sciences, a new generation of researchers are rediscovering the principles which govern the actions and interaction among ‘economic (hu)man’.

We aim to organize monthly lectures. In this series, we hope to ensure inclusivity across different schools of thoughts and across genders.

Dr. Balakrishnan's recent book:

Prof. Dr. Davy's recent book: