Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the 'spectacular urbanism' fueling the urban development of an emerging South Indian city, Cochin. More specifically, it focuses on the everyday hustlings of local real estate builders and investors as they construct/imagine new urban futures in the face of unfulfilled promises

Paper long abstract:

From a Special Economic Zone, an Emerati-backed IT Park called SmartCity, to the construction of the Metro; the promise of these infrastructural projects under the state-driven campaign of "Emerging Kerala" has been the catalyst for a 'speculative urbanism' that has transformed Cochin over the past two decades. In anticipation of future land price appreciation, private real estate developers have flocked to the city, seeking to front-run these large-scale infrastructural projects by developing the surrounding lands. Much of these developments have been high-end residential flats, more than 60-70% of which are said to be unoccupied, held as "long-term investments" by Non-Resident Keralites (mostly living and working in the Gulf), who themselves seek to capitalize on those teleological development narratives of "Emerging Kerala," and the powerful imageries of economic growth they engender.

Cochin is thus a city increasingly being built out of these many dreams, anxieties, desires and speculations. However, when the anticipated infrastructural projects get perpetually delayed, the IT companies thought to be coming never arrive, compounded by a Gulf financial crisis freezing capital financing, those anticipated urban futures go suspended. Yet as Cross (2014) writes "crisis is the ground on which capitalism regenerates itself;" left in a state of anxious suspension between these urban promises and their non-realization (in a perpetual state of 'emerging'), these builders and investors hustle to secure their own socioeconomic futures, finding ways piecemeal to turn these unrealized promises into fertile grounds for the construction of new investable urban futures to be speculated upon.