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Paper short abstract

Delhi's Land Pooling Policy, framed as an equitable model of land assembly, unfolds through uncertainty and everyday speculation. This paper uses a Speculative and Agrarian Lens to explore how non-state actors reimagine futures via everyday speculative practices rooted in socio-political relations.

Paper long abstract

Delhi’s Land Pooling Policy (LPP) envisions creating world class smart neighbourhoods through conversion of agricultural lands and the active involvement of private sector in the assembly, planning, development, and financing of land. Though the policy is framed as equitable and participatory, its implementation remains fraught with political contestations, negotiations, and everyday speculation. The process of land assembly has become a terrain of uncertainty, hope, aspirations, and contestation, where diverse actors, including landowners, developers, bureaucrats, politicians, and financiers, strategically speculate to undertake various practices on the periphery that disrupt policy outcomes.

This paper examines how non-state actors – landowners, landless, intermediaries, and village collectives - actively reimagine and negotiate through everyday speculative practices that are shaped not only by financial motives but also by social, cultural, and political factors rooted in caste, kinship, colonial legacies, and historical village affiliations over a period. Combining Speculative Urbanism with Agrarian Urbanism, the paper conceptualises the periphery as a dynamic frontier where past claims and future imaginaries intertwine to produce an uneven geography. The framework engages with the concept of Agrarian Urbanism to interrogate the social and agrarian worlds that underpin land speculation.

Methodologically, the paper is grounded in critical ethnography and proposes a multi-method qualitative-spatial approach to uncover counter-stories that challenge power relations and structural inequalities. The research represents an interesting case of state uncertainty, where continuous policy amendments and delays in the implementation have initiated a set of practices from a diverse network of actors living, working, or interested in the periphery.