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Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on the everyday networks, local knowledge, quotidian practices and expertise of a set of intermediaries ( land brokers and map leakers )that help negotiate large scale projects of development and infrastructure in a rapidly changing urban periphery.

Paper long abstract

This paper is an ethnographic study of socio-spatial practices that constitute large scale urban transformation in contemporary India. Drawing from empirical data, secondary sources and a methodological focus on tracing biographies of disputed land plots in NCR , India, the paper maps how macro projects of urban planning, highways, roads or smart cities are contingent on micro histories and relations of caste, kinship, ownership and conflict over land. To do so, the paper focuses on the quotidian practices and informal networks of local residents working as intermediaries, land Brokers and map leakers that help negotiate these land based urban changes. For instance- many small-scale land dealers or contractors talk up and speculate about the emerging high rises, help book flats in emerging residential projects, help win public bids or help hike housing prices. Actors I call map leakers circulate knowledge through kin-caste networks and through information leaking that then determine the nature of state led urban planning initiatives. In doing so these actors form an ‘ecology’ or a network of intermediaries that rely on each other, travel between multiple worlds ( of the state, village council, kinship or caste), hustle, sell, leak and help ‘get things done’ around land. How this ecology of intermediaries operate, what constitutes their everyday practice and how their local knowledge, forms of capital, expertise, and connections assemble and curate land into urban infrastructure will be the subject of this paper.