Plotting the Commons in Central India: The De-Commodification of Urban Space in a SmartCity
November 10, 2025
People
Aman Roy
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Aman Roy is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology. His research is set in Central India, where his interests span urban property-making, the commons and technologies of governance. He is particularly interested in how housing rights activists design tools to defend existing claims to land against speculative real-estate regimes. Aman is a 2025 ERI/ PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
My project builds on the everyday understanding of property by examining how actors interpret it through the language of land rights as they sought to convert tax documents into formal land titles. These processes were driven by activists and residents living on untenured land who invest significant time and political energy engaging with a techno-savvy municipal bureaucracy. The steady, community-driven norms that shape their neighbourhood space are juxtaposed against the rapid, expert-driven processes of table surveys, satellite imaging, and practices of “speed,” used to allot plots, construction rights, and land titles to previously unsurveyed parcels of land.
The ERI/PS2 scholarship enabled me to spend the summer in Nagpur refining my dissertation proposal to investigate how forms of social and caste power are reproduced as land in informal settlements, and how rights to that land are mediated by a new class of experts.Over the course of my summer research, I worked closely with a non-profit organization in Nagpur, Central India. Through their work, I was able to engage with critical dimensions of the term property. These actors are transforming how systems patronage and claims-making are experienced by residents of slums and precarious housing. I conducted mapping exercises into neighbourhoods, developing a set of visual aids that will allow me to compare and contrast how boundaries are drawn and neighbourhoods are visualized. Competing definitions arise as household and neighbourhood boundaries are understood through community-defined uses of streets, sidewalks, and open spaces. I documented instances where kinship ties, memories of labour and community,and new political alignments shape property—not only in how it is plotted but also in how it is distributed according to values that challenge models of commodification and marketization.
