Tom Cowan is to be congratulated for a contribution of remarkable ethnographic richness as well as theoretical depth. But since other contributors to this Forum are much better placed than I am to savor (or contest) the finer contextual points of Subaltern Frontiers, my comments are deliberately focused more on the book’s comparative resonances and reach. As a geographer and urbanist who has worked mainly on Malaysia and Indonesia, I am in a stronger position to offer thoughts on how Tom Cowan’s framing and conceptualization of subaltern urban frontiers might be extended beyond Gurgaon in Haryana – indeed beyond India – to engage dynamics of social and spatial change in Southeast Asia. My comments are divided into three parts: the first drawing out some points of differentiation between Tom Cowan’s take on Gurgaon and conceptualization of contemporary urban change elsewhere; the second drawing agrarian city-making in Gurgaon into more specific comparative relation to processes of urban development in greater Jakarta (in Indonesia); and the third concerning wider debates about the incorporation of agrarian and rural dynamics into studies of urbanization.

Building from geographies of contrast

In a variety of ways, and at multiple scales, Subaltern Frontiers unsettles urban developmental expectations established elsewhere. From my own institutional base and vantage point in a university research institute which is pan-Asian in scope, Tom Cowan’s book might first of all be noted as a welcome addition to Asia-centred postcolonial urban theory. It uses in-depth historical analysis of Gurgaon to expose explanatory limits to North Atlantic-derived theories of post-industrial urban transformation. More specifically in this vein, although Gurgaon is acknowledged to have experienced post-industrial tendencies – in terms of finance capital-driven landscapes and immaterial labour – it is also shown to be a story of commodity-producing industrial migrant labor and even of ongoing (post-)agrarian dynamics. This amounts to more than contextual embellishment to the prevailing North Atlantic-derived post-industrial meta-story line; it compels a rethinking of the practices and processes underlying urbanization in much of Asia.

Yet the comparative geographies underpinning Cowan’s work also far exceed contrast between an Asian case and North Atlantic derived urban/theoretical expectations, not least through foregrounding Gurgaon’s difference to (studies of) other cities in India. In part, such difference is recognized in established depictions of Gurgaon as a flagship private sector-led city. Unlike most other parts of India where land for urban or industrial development has typically been acquired by the state through powers of eminent domain, in parts of Haryana south-west of Delhi, private developers were able to negotiate licencing and acquisition of land directly from agrarian landowning castes. Cowan draws attention to the contribution of those agrarian landowners to urbanization through a loose coalition with industrial and real estate capital. In addition to facilitating urban expansion through bureaucratic “clearing” and through the sale and rent of land, Cowan shows how landowning Jats and Ahirs help to control and keep down the cost of labor through tenement housing for migrant workers. And despite the temporariness of those workers – ensured by the disciplinary practices of local tenement landlords as much as the flexible labor preferences of industrial employers and investors – they too constitute an indispensable group of actors in the development and functioning of the urbanizing subaltern frontier.

Most significant of all, then, the frontier understandings that are central to the book do more than differentiate Cowan’s version of the Gurgaon model from critical scholarship on other cities and urban regions in India (or in the global South more widely). They entail a rather different conceptualization of subaltern(ity) from that underpinning most postcolonial urban studies literature. In particular, rather than approaching subalternity as an identity category or as an identifiable social position, Cowan considers subalternity as “a processual relation of subordinated difference” (2023, p. 19, emphasis in the original). A range of institutions and logics as well as actors are never merely subordinated to urban capital. Rather, the subaltern frontier encapsulates their existence in a dynamic (and fragile) relationship of domination and dependence. Ultimately, while the subaltern frontier takes a geohistorically specific form in the southwest of Haryana, the multiple ways in which this is contrasted with practices, processes and conceptual frames employed elsewhere is not intended as an exercise in delineating an exceptional case study. Through Tom Cowan’s work, Gurgaon becomes an academic “truth spot” (Bunnell et al., 2023; Gieryn, 2006), inviting further rounds and new geographies of comparison from novel, Haryana-derived conceptual ways of seeing.

Extending the frontiers of subaltern city-making

Among the distant urbanizing regions where insights from Tom Cowan’s book have comparative resonances are parts of Southeast Asia. I was struck in particular by similarities with recent urban studies research on Indonesia and, more specifically, in peri-urban areas of West Java. That specificity is important because the sprawling archipelagic expanse of islands which is today “Indonesia” manifests (as in India) significant subnational developmental variegation. Much of my own knowledge of recent urban and industrial development dynamics at Jakarta’s peri-urban frontier is derived from research that Miya Irawati conducted as part of her doctoral studies in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore (Irawati, 2022). That included documentation of how local (agrarian) landowners have been key players in mechanisms of land acquisition, consolidation and control for both industrial and real estate development. Not only that, but there are also agrarian landowners who have built row (terraced) houses as rental accommodation for industrial migrant workers. These function in some similar ways to the village tenement arrangements that Tom Cowan describes as “extended industrial infrastructure” some 5,000km away in Haryana.

Drawing these two rich studies into even necessarily brief and loose comparative conversation inevitably also brings contextual differences to mind. Empirically, among the key differences is the attention that Miya Irawati gives to “local” (i.e. non-migrant) actors who have been left out or even suffered materially as a result of agrarian-urban developments in peri-urban Jakarta. The crudest forms of land appropriation diminished following the end of the authoritarian Suharto era in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, stories of under-compensation for land acquisition have continued through the subsequent era of political economic decentralization and democratization, often intertwined with historical memories and legacies of more blatant dispossession during earlier decades. In addition, many long-time regional inhabitants have experienced the loss, or significant erosion, of agrarian livelihoods through no longer being able to access land for cultivation (Irawati, 2022). In short: it is not only or primarily migrants who continue to experience (and express) feelings of precarity or vulnerability. This is a different scenario from the way in which Tom Cowan sketches the main actors in Subaltern Frontiers, with lines in Haryana drawn clearly between local agrarian rentiers and the migrant worker precariat. Are there also undercompensated, frustrated, or marginalized locals – less well-to-do Jats or Ahirs, or locally-based members of other castes (including farm workers and former farm workers) – in and around Gurgaon?

It may well be that socio-spatial identities simply map much more closely onto contemporary economic positioning and horizons of opportunity in Haryana than in West Java. Certainly, there is no clear equivalent in peri-urban Jakarta to the non-alienable, caste-specific village lands that feature so prominently in Tom Cowan’s account of Gurgaon. However, such contrasts give rise to further comparative questions as the subaltern frontier is extended from South to Southeast Asia (and potentially beyond). What are the conditions of possibility for counter-hegemonic solidarities – especially between unprivileged locals and migrant workers – or alternative coalitions to those forged between agrarian landowners and industrial (or real estate) capitalists? How do such possibilities variously relate to – or compensate for the relative absence of – formal labour organization and struggle? In what ways do gender relations inflect these possibilities? It seems likely that broad-brush similarities between tenements built on village land in Haryana and cheap row houses in villages in greater Jakarta obscure quite different degrees of patriarchal control and surveillance. If so, what does that mean for the political potential of village sociality in Haryana (where female migrant life in particular appears to be more strictly delimited to “worker-tenant subject”) as compared to in greater Jakarta? These are just some of the questions that the two contexts beg of each other, iterations of which could also be posed elsewhere across a globally-extended (but spatio-temporally variegated) subaltern frontier.

Agrarian-urban frontiers and future geographies of ruralization

Given the prominence of agrarian landowners in Tom Cowan’s account of the historical take-off of Gurgaon, it is perhaps unsurprising that a notion of “agrarian frontiers” forms a significant component of his wider theorization of subaltern frontiers. It is important to note, however, that the agrarian frontier here is understood as more than just a spatial threshold. More specifically, the agrarian frontier is not simply a shifting boundary line that marks urban expansion at the expense of the agrarian. Rather, Cowan draws attention to bureaucratic inheritances, social relations and ongoing struggles through which agrarian institutions, logics and actors inflect ostensibly new urban and industrial landscapes as much as established village spaces. This opens possibilities for some valuable cross-regional consideration of the active (and ongoing) role of the agrarian in processes of urbanization. Building primarily upon work in Southeast Asia, Jamie Gillen, Jonathan Rigg and I recently proposed “geographies of ruralization” (Gillen et al., 2022a) as a way of drawing attention to the continued salience and significance of rural dynamics in an era when regional change is conventionally attributed to – and described as – urbanization. There is a long history of research on Southeast Asia that has noted the persistence of rural spaces and agrarian work in extended urban and industrializing regions, most famously Terry McGee’s writing on “desakota” (McGee, 1991). However, the rural/urban patterning of desakota regions – at least in McGee’s original formulation – does not adequately capture the tendrils of interconnection that enfold supposedly rural and urban spaces in Southeast Asia today (Gillen et al., 2022b). Such patchwork spatial demarcations also fail to do justice to agrarian dynamics in parts of Haryana examined by Tom Cowan, particularly those that are no longer visibly nor functionally agrarian.

Wider ongoing debate around such matters includes consideration of how to encapsulate dynamics that confound conventional partitioning the world into separate urban and rural/agrarian realms. Leaving aside what is at stake in use of the “rural” as opposed to the “agrarian” (which would be fodder for a separate commentary in its own right), the predominant way in which the binary has been unmoored from inherited scholarly mappings over the past decade has been through expanding the reach of the urban – as in extended or planetary urbanization (Brenner, 2014). Work on geographies of ruralization is thus partly about offering a corrective to everywhere urbanization through similar expansion of the where of the rural. That is captured in particular by “extended ruralization”, whereby rural people, practices and imaginaries continue to shape the life, social relations and futures of the city – the quintessentially “urban” environment – in Southeast Asia (Gillen et al., 2022a). I see Tom Cowan’s work in a similar light. For him, the agrarian world has not been swept away by the development of Gurgaon but is a constituent part of its making. Of course, there is much more to Subaltern Frontiers than extended ruralization, and that term may not even be preferable to (what Tom Cowan himself refers to as) “agrarian city-making”. Others have objected that ruralization reinscribes the very binary – rural(ization) versus urban(ization) – that needs to be overcome (Baird, 2022; Ortega, 2022). Yet both ruralization/urbanization and agrarian city-making follow desakota (a composite term from the Bahasa Indonesia words for village and city) in struggling to find suitable nomenclature to describe geographies of regional change.

Whatever we term more-than-urban(izing) dynamics, and whatever the limits to their comparative traction, for me, Tom Cowan’s important book also impels further consideration of their temporal extension or endurance. Subaltern Frontiers is not only about agrarian histories or pasts, but also about the ongoing salience of the agrarian in Gurgaon. What does this mean for agrarian futures? Cowan deploys Gurgaon “against urban modernisation theories that assert a linear ‘capital switch’ from commodity-producing industrial production to extractive circuits of rentier and finance capital laced through the built environment” (p. 231). Are switches (back) to agrarian production inconceivable in this context? Once again, that question is spurred by my (mostly second-hand) knowledge of parts of Indonesia. Interviews in the desakota landscapes of greater Jakarta confirm that much agricultural land is acquired with a view to future development – and so is effectively proto-kota, rather than simply desa – years before urban/industrial development begins. But there is also land that had been cleared (bureaucratically and physically) for development in anticipation of an upturn in the real estate market – so-called tanah kosong or ‘empty land’ – only to be converted back into agricultural use (Irawati, 2022). What do such observations imply for the agrarian in Gurgaon’s agrarian-urban development and for future geographies of ruralization in regions well beyond South Asia?

References

Baird IG (2022) The problem of the urban–rural binary in geography and political ecology. Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(2), 218-222.

Brenner N (2014) (ed) Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis.

Bunnell T, Aung-Thwin, M, Clendenning JN, Goh DPS and Smith NR (2022) Points of persuasion: Truth spots in future city development. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 40(6), 1082-1099.

Cowan T (2023) Subaltern Frontiers: Property and Labour in the Neoliberal Indian City. Cambridge University Press.

Gieryn TF (2006) City as truth-spot: Laboratories and field-sites in urban studies. Social Studies of Science, 36(1), 5-38.

Gillen J, Bunnell T and Rigg J (2022a) Geographies of ruralization. Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(2), 186-203.

Gillen J, Bunnell T, and Rigg J (2022b) Beyond binaries? Spatial possibilities in Southeast Asia. Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(2), 227-231.

Irawati M (2022) Situating practices of desakota transformation: A study of urbanisation in the extended metropolitan region of Jakarta. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore.

McGee T (1991) The emergence of Desakota regions in Asia: Expanding a hypothesis. In: Ginsburg, N. and McGee T (eds) The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 3-25.

Ortega AA (2022) Beyond the rural–urban aporia. Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(2), 223-226.

Tim Bunnell is professor of human geography and director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.