All Outputs (6)

A Passive Urban Revolution (2024)
Newspaper / Magazine
Cowan, T. (2024). A Passive Urban Revolution

This response builds on the critical insights and interventions provided here, elaborating how Subaltern Frontiers might provide a useful lens to explore the unsettled geographies of passive revolution on India’s urban frontier.

City drafting: property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia (2024)
Journal Article
Jonnalagadda, I., & Cowan, T. (2024). City drafting: property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia. City, 28(1-2), 7-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2024.2321024

This Special Feature explores the negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia. City drafting refers to the flexible and contextual practices, procedures and policies required to haul diverse property regimes into order and pro... Read More about City drafting: property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia.

Urbanization without guarantees: articulation, rentier capitalism and occupancy on the agrarian urban frontier (2024)
Journal Article
Cowan, T. (2024). Urbanization without guarantees: articulation, rentier capitalism and occupancy on the agrarian urban frontier. Urban Geography, https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2308399

This article engages with the work of Stuart Hall to examine conditions of agrarian city-making on India’s urban frontier. The article draws on Hall’s writings on articulation and marxist method to propose an approach to studying the urban frontier “... Read More about Urbanization without guarantees: articulation, rentier capitalism and occupancy on the agrarian urban frontier.

Rethinking “surplus populations” Theory from the peripheries (2023)
Journal Article
Cowan, T., Campbell, S., & Kalb, D. (2023). Rethinking “surplus populations” Theory from the peripheries. Focaal, 2023(97), 7-21. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2023.970102

Critical scholarship on twenty-first century capitalist development has called attention to certain structural limits on employment growth. Large populations excluded from formal employment are seen to eke out a precarious subsistence in informal eco... Read More about Rethinking “surplus populations” Theory from the peripheries.

Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon (2022)
Book
Cowan, T. (2023). Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009118859

UNCERTAIN GROUNDS: Cartographic Negotiation and Digitized Property on the Urban Frontier (2021)
Journal Article
Cowan, T. (2021). UNCERTAIN GROUNDS: Cartographic Negotiation and Digitized Property on the Urban Frontier. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 45(3), 442-457. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13016

Based on ethnographic research with cadastral land surveyors and revenue bureaucrats in Gurgaon, North India, this article examines how the desire to etch out and impose digitized private property titles on India's urban frontier is mediated by the s... Read More about UNCERTAIN GROUNDS: Cartographic Negotiation and Digitized Property on the Urban Frontier.