The Politics of Urban Land in South Asia: Current Challenges and New Directions

Cities in South Asia are homes to one of the highest concentrations of people anywhere in the world and the allocation of land and urban resources and the benefits that can be derived from them in this region have become increasingly contested. This book explores the politics of urban land in South Asia and the challenges related to their respective urban futures.

For most people, land comes at a premium, and as a result conflicts and contestations over land and urban resources are rife in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, as witnessed in the many struggles of low-income groups and vulnerable or marginalised communities to fight off dispossession or displacement. This book maps current challenges shared across national borders and charts out new directions for future research and land policy. With contributions from emerging and established authors, the book offers a critical accounting of the situation that exists in urban South Asia, while also critically engaging with the current challenges and future directions for land use and land politics.

The book will be useful to students and researchers of public policy, development studies, economics, urban and regional development studies, and sociology as well as to policy makers, real estate professionals, and commercial firms engaged in property market/real estate study in Asia.

Urmi Sengupta is a Reader in School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, and a Research Associate at the Department of Sociology, University of Pretoria, South Africa.