The dazzling urban transformation of Indian cities has been subject to an expanding scholarship in urban studies. Llerena Guiu Searle's Landscapes of Accumulation is a welcome addition to the existing scholarship that provides an ethnographic account of the role of the private sector in urban development in India. The book focuses on two groups in the private sector: Indian real estate developers and foreign investors, such as investment banks, mutual funds, and private equity firms. With most of her fieldwork conducted in Gurgaon in the Delhi capital region in the mid-2000s, Searle investigates how Indian developers form partnerships with foreign investors and how they have transformed agricultural and industrial land into high-end residential and commercial properties targeting wealthy global consumers and investors. She argues that large Indian metropolises have been closely integrated in the global circuit of capital, and their land and buildings have been turned into financial instruments for capital accumulation.
The overarching argument of the book is a Marxist one, that Indian cities are sites for “accumulation by dispossession.” Powerful local developers and foreign investors accumulate capital through land and property development, often at the expense of the poor. While the argument is a familiar one, what makes Landscapes of Accumulation stand out from other studies on urban development in India is its focus on accumulation rather than dispossession. Drawing upon more than one hundred interviews with real estate developers, consultants, architects, journalists, and managers of foreign investment companies, Searle tells a story of how local developers and foreign investors create a real estate market that is legible and accessible for global investors who are not familiar with India. Once such a market is created, luxury apartments and high-end office buildings in Delhi and other large Indian cities are turned into financial instruments for speculation. But profit is not guaranteed, and Searle highlights the precarious nature of accumulation: not all investors who rushed to India to invest made a profit, and in fact, many incurred a loss and left the country after the 2008 recession.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section explains the making of the “India story” by real estate developers and professionals to lure foreign investors. Predictions of a prosperous future are ubiquitously used to court foreign investors. The India that emerges from such predictions is a country with high rates of economic growth; rapid urbanization; a large middle class; and rising demand for high-quality buildings, amenities, and world-class infrastructure. In this narrative, the future Indian city is a place for young, high-income urban professionals and multinational corporations. Many foreign investors, seeking new frontiers to invest their capital, bought into the “India story” and joined hands with local developers to partake in property speculation. For foreign investors, the land and property market in India is a murky field lacking transparency, and to succeed they have to find local developers who can assemble land and get government permits for construction.
The second section of the book examines the collaboration between foreign investors and local developers. The collaboration is far from smooth. Searle explains that Indian developers are more interested in land speculation for a quick profit than in constructing quality buildings. But foreign investors put a greater emphasis on delivering quality buildings that can lure wealthy tenants and buyers. The two groups also disagree on how the profit should be divided: local developers think that assembling land is the most challenging part of development, and therefore it should be rewarded the most, while foreign investors would emphasize building design and construction. Searle goes into great detail explaining the dilemma faced by Indian developers: on one hand, they want to be more professional and get rid of the negative image of the real estate industry as murky business, but on the other hand, in order to get land, they sometimes have to do the dirty work such as coercing landowners to sell.
Because of the book's focus on local developers who work with foreign partners, the reader may not get a sense on how the real estate sector in general works in Delhi. For example, what about the powerful Indian developers who are not dependent on foreign investors and who have built much of Gurgaon? Also, as the study focuses on the interactions between Indian developers and foreign investors, it does not offer much detail on how exactly developers execute their projects and accumulate capital. As most of the fieldwork was conducted more than a decade ago, in the mid-2000s, one also wonders if some of the practices described in the book are still the case today, such as the neglect of quality construction and the interest in flipping land among local developers. If China can offer a case for comparison, rampant land speculation characterized real estate development in the country in the 1990s, but starting in the early 2000s, local developers began to pay more attention to architectural design and quality construction, as well as branding and marketing.
Overall, as much of the literature on Indian cities centers on slum redevelopment and dispossession, Landscapes of Accumulation offers a refreshing account of Indian developers and makes a valuable contribution to the field.
