Paper short abstract:

We conduct a conjunctural comparison of two new city developments in Asia: Ravi City and Nusantara, developing the category of 'statist urbanization' that argues that such planned developments concentrate power in the central state through legacies of colonial land laws and devolution struggles.

Paper long abstract:

This paper conducts a conjunctural comparison of two planned new cities in Asia: Ravi City in Pakistan, and Nusantara in Indonesia. Planned urbanization, and infrastructure-led development (ILD) more broadly, has been connected in the literature to a rise in authoritarian urbanism. This paper uses legal sources and analyses to situate the historical-geographical trajectories of Ravi City and Nusantara within the global conjunctural moment of ILD. Our legal lens reveals two features of authoritarian urbanism that connects and differentiates our study sites: (1) the living legacies of colonial land laws and (2) the scalar politics of land governance. The paper highlights how authoritarian urbanism is exercised, and challenged, in legal arenas such as courts, parliaments, and constitutions. Our method of conjunctural comparison demonstrates that authoritarian urbanism is both transregional and historically-geographically situated. This paper thus advances geographic understandings of authoritarian urbanism and comparative methodology.