D Asher Ghertner
Biographic Data
| ID | 180364 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Asher Ghertner |
| GIVEN NAMES | D Asher |
| FAMILY NAME | Ghertner |
| SIGNATURE | GHERTNER D A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4871-2456 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 430 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Manufactured housing and the dialectics of enclosure and commoning
This commentary draws on comparative insights from fieldwork on migrant labor camps in the US and informal settlements in India to argue that manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are central to understanding urban marginality in North America. It does so by using three conceptual frameworks: infrastructural violence, territorialized stigma, and enclosure. Infrastructural violence manifests through MHCs’ segregation into hazard-prone geographie…
Consequential theory, consequential geography
Introduction: Volume 43, issue 5
Postcolonial repetitions: Distant time in the imaginary of India’s smart cities
This commentary uses contemporary Hindi cinema to suggest that the strange cosmologies of building files in India and the repetitions and re-narrations of past events that structure the letters and petitions that compose those files are steeped in a wider (post)colonial literary–cinematic imaginary. The technics of time richly explored in Ayona Datta's essay are hence shaped by and shape cultural forms, such as films and state development narrati…
Scripts, scribes and scribbles: Notes on drafting the South Asian city
This paper explores the framework of ‘city drafting’ used in this Special Feature to highlight the inscriptive and documentary processes underpinning property making in South Asia. It considers two senses of drafting: as provisional and iterative writing process that sees texts as objects in motion, and as the technical art of drawing, notation, and inscriptional verification. It argues that the papers in this Special Feature, through their focus…
The new informality? The financialization of informal housing as a parasitic relation (2023) Plenary Commentary
The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating
This essay analyzes embodied experiences of enclaving. It argues that by tracking revolutions in built form that gating enacts, urban geography has simultaneously tracked revolutions in urban subjectivity. It highlights three enclaved “body types” within existing literature: securitized bodies in fortressed cities, performative bodies in consumptive enclaves, and hygienic bodies in purified zones. It then offers three ethnographic scenes of gatin…
Infrastructures of Overlordship: Law, Labor Camps, and the Material Geographies of Servitude
This article examines how the law codifies infrastructural risks into the farm–labor relation, subjecting farmworkers living in U.S. migrant labor camps to conditions considered illegal in otherwise similar residential geographies. To do so, it explores how the labor camp operates as an infrastructure to maximize harvest, arrange labor availability, and embed overlordship—the power to direct other human potentialities through control of their tot…
South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. The authors analyze the terms 'mahaul,' 'mausam,' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historical, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. The stories connect concerns about broader structural conditions ('mahaul'); local and lived experiences in different temporal registe…
Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space
This article discusses the ways that Lefebvrian thinking on urbanization has found a purchase in Indian urban and anti-caste scholarship, and conversely, how compelling new figures of the urban have emerged from Indian scholarship that productively enliven Lefebvrian categories, refusing any separation between the experimentalism of everyday life and the political economy of space. The article explores a sense of "itinerant urbanization" at two l…
Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country
Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country
This book explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource e…
Introduction Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country
Not Just Roads: Nitin Bathla and Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, directors. 2020. Delhi and Zurich (Film, 67 min., color). Details about the film available at www.notjusroadsfilm.com, https://vimeo.com…
What happens when infrastructures embody a constant state of incompletion? What happens when they are initiated for political allegiance rather than actual functioning? How do people engage with th
Postcolonial Atmospheres: Air's Coloniality and the Climate of Enclosure
This article urges a consideration of the atmospheric afterlives of fossil-fueled imperialism as not just accumulated gases and particles but also durable spatial dispositions governing how atmospheres are felt, arranged, and imagined. Focusing on the contemporary air pollution crisis in India, it analyzes how governmental responses to death-dealing airs today draw from colonial logics of bodily sequestration from outside threats, partaking in a …
Futureproof
Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life
Security Aesthetics of and Beyond the Biopolitical
Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life
Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary
This article argues that the theoretical invisibility of non-privatized land tenures constitutes a failure of the urban imaginary, which restricts the ability to forge less commodified urban futures. The article explicates two attributes of non-privatized land-fungibilityandcombinatoriality-that produce an urban land nexus capable of fostering pro-poor agglomeration economies and generating socialities that exceed the model of the separative self…
Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life amidst Delhi's Polluted Airs
Extreme air pollution events have become a regular phenomenon in Delhi, triggering conjunctions of air pollution and death popularly referred to as airpocalypse. The city's collective reckoning with bad air raises the question of how social justice is to be imagined when the source of death is diffuse and leaky. The Indian judiciary has taken up this question in earnest, dispersing the legal treatment of life away from its historical focus on ind…
On dis/possessive collectivism: Comments on Ananya Roy’s 2016 Geoforum Lecture
When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi
This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents' everyday efforts to secure water, ele…
Does violence have a signature
Ayona Datta’s essay, “The Intimate City,” deals with complex questions of violence and intimacy in the city, beginning with the “critical event” that became known as the Delhi rape case—a brutal ac
World-Class City Making
Chapter 1 lays out the political-economic foundations of the world-class city. Analyzing prominent assessments of the growth potential of India’s property market, the chapter shows how the vision of a radically improved urban future is rooted in the speculative drive to valorize the country’s land market and to privatize its vast reserve of public land. This drive is sustained by the promise that those being evicted from slums will in the future …
Calculating without numbers: Aesthetic governmentality in Delhi's slums
This article looks at the manner in which knowledge of slums in Delhi has been collected, assembled and circulated in two different moments of urban improvement to explore the relationship between calculation and governmentality. Based on an extended study of slum enumeration and the politics of slum demolitions in Delhi, I show that each of these two moments relied on an epistemologically different set of calculative practices – one statistical,…
Why gentrification theory fails in ‘much of the world’
In Schafran's (2014, 321) paper for City’s re-inaugurated Debates section, he writes that ‘gentrification has never been more relevant as a global urban force’. Noting that ‘Mumbai is gentrifying
India's Urban Revolution: Geographies of Displacement beyond Gentrification
This paper uses an analysis of key dynamics of sociospatial change in Indian cities to offer a sympathetic critique of recent efforts to extend gentrification theory into the Global South. Despite the postcolonial overtures of this new, Southern gentrification literature, the paper argues that the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification o…
Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum‐Free Delhi
This paper examines the narratives through which associations of private property owners in Delhi depict slums as zones of incivility and “nuisance.” In tracing how this “nuisance talk” travels into and gains legitimacy in popular and state visions of urban space, the paper shows the role of discourse in justifying and enacting exclusionary urban imaginaries. As a lay term, nuisance is widely used to identify forms of aesthetic impropriety. But, …
Gentrifying the State, Gentrifying Participation: Elite Governance Programs in Delhi
Recent scholarship has highlighted the central role of India's ‘new middle class’ in gentrifying and ‘cleaning up’ its cities. According to this literature, this class experienced a political awakening in the 1990s and began mobilizing to reclaim urban space from the poor. Using the example of Delhi's Bhagidari scheme, a governance experiment launched in 2000, I argue that urban middle-class power did not emerge from internal changes within this …
When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi
This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents' everyday efforts to secure water, ele…
Rule By Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi
This book offers a powerful examination of mass demolition in the world’s second largest city of Delhi, India. Using Delhi’s millennial effort to become a world-class city, the book shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. This practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms—what the text calls “rule by aesthetics”—allowed the state…
Postcolonial Atmospheres: Air's Coloniality and the Climate of Enclosure
This article urges a consideration of the atmospheric afterlives of fossil-fueled imperialism as not just accumulated gases and particles but also durable spatial dispositions governing how atmospheres are felt, arranged, and imagined. Focusing on the contemporary air pollution crisis in India, it analyzes how governmental responses to death-dealing airs today draw from colonial logics of bodily sequestration from outside threats, partaking in a …
Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life amidst Delhi's Polluted Airs
Extreme air pollution events have become a regular phenomenon in Delhi, triggering conjunctions of air pollution and death popularly referred to as airpocalypse. The city's collective reckoning with bad air raises the question of how social justice is to be imagined when the source of death is diffuse and leaky. The Indian judiciary has taken up this question in earnest, dispersing the legal treatment of life away from its historical focus on ind…
Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary
This article argues that the theoretical invisibility of non-privatized land tenures constitutes a failure of the urban imaginary, which restricts the ability to forge less commodified urban futures. The article explicates two attributes of non-privatized land-fungibilityandcombinatoriality-that produce an urban land nexus capable of fostering pro-poor agglomeration economies and generating socialities that exceed the model of the separative self…
Trading away damage: Quantifying environmental leakage through consumption-based, life-cycle analysis
Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space
This article discusses the ways that Lefebvrian thinking on urbanization has found a purchase in Indian urban and anti-caste scholarship, and conversely, how compelling new figures of the urban have emerged from Indian scholarship that productively enliven Lefebvrian categories, refusing any separation between the experimentalism of everyday life and the political economy of space. The article explores a sense of "itinerant urbanization" at two l…
Technology and Tricks: Intra-Household Technology Implementation and Gender Struggles
This article argues for non-asset-based approaches to the assessment of technology implementation at the household level. It suggests that most studies of technology and gender focus primarily on the relationship between technology implementation and women’s access to material resources without giving adequate attention to non-asset-based strategic possibilities for social change. Using the case of a cookstove improvement program in rural north I…
South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. The authors analyze the terms 'mahaul,' 'mausam,' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historical, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. The stories connect concerns about broader structural conditions ('mahaul'); local and lived experiences in different temporal registe…
The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating
This essay analyzes embodied experiences of enclaving. It argues that by tracking revolutions in built form that gating enacts, urban geography has simultaneously tracked revolutions in urban subjectivity. It highlights three enclaved “body types” within existing literature: securitized bodies in fortressed cities, performative bodies in consumptive enclaves, and hygienic bodies in purified zones. It then offers three ethnographic scenes of gatin…
Consequential theory, consequential geography
Postcolonial repetitions: Distant time in the imaginary of India’s smart cities
This commentary uses contemporary Hindi cinema to suggest that the strange cosmologies of building files in India and the repetitions and re-narrations of past events that structure the letters and petitions that compose those files are steeped in a wider (post)colonial literary–cinematic imaginary. The technics of time richly explored in Ayona Datta's essay are hence shaped by and shape cultural forms, such as films and state development narrati…
On dis/possessive collectivism: Comments on Ananya Roy’s 2016 Geoforum Lecture
Transforming place, placing transformation: An evaluation of the World Social Forum 2004
This paper describes the political context of the 2004 World Social Forum (WSF) held in Mumbai, India from January 16–21, 2004. Using a concept of ‘place’ borrowed from Doreen Massey, it argues that most academic reviews of the WSF employ an abstract notion of globalization that is detached from the everyday struggles of the majority of WSF participants. These reviews then argue that the WSF should advance a unified ‘alternative globalization’ pl…
Technology and Tricks: Intra-Household Technology Implementation and Gender Struggles
This article argues for non-asset-based approaches to the assessment of technology implementation at the household level. It suggests that most studies of technology and gender focus primarily on the relationship between technology implementation and women’s access to material resources without giving adequate attention to non-asset-based strategic possibilities for social change. Using the case of a cookstove improvement program in rural north I…
Trading away damage: Quantifying environmental leakage through consumption-based, life-cycle analysis
Calculating without numbers: Aesthetic governmentality in Delhi's slums
This article looks at the manner in which knowledge of slums in Delhi has been collected, assembled and circulated in two different moments of urban improvement to explore the relationship between calculation and governmentality. Based on an extended study of slum enumeration and the politics of slum demolitions in Delhi, I show that each of these two moments relied on an epistemologically different set of calculative practices – one statistical,…
Rule by Aesthetics: World‐Class City Making in Delhi
Gentrifying the State, Gentrifying Participation: Elite Governance Programs in Delhi
Recent scholarship has highlighted the central role of India's ‘new middle class’ in gentrifying and ‘cleaning up’ its cities. According to this literature, this class experienced a political awakening in the 1990s and began mobilizing to reclaim urban space from the poor. Using the example of Delhi's Bhagidari scheme, a governance experiment launched in 2000, I argue that urban middle-class power did not emerge from internal changes within this …
Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum‐Free Delhi
This paper examines the narratives through which associations of private property owners in Delhi depict slums as zones of incivility and “nuisance.” In tracing how this “nuisance talk” travels into and gains legitimacy in popular and state visions of urban space, the paper shows the role of discourse in justifying and enacting exclusionary urban imaginaries. As a lay term, nuisance is widely used to identify forms of aesthetic impropriety. But, …
India's Urban Revolution: Geographies of Displacement beyond Gentrification
This paper uses an analysis of key dynamics of sociospatial change in Indian cities to offer a sympathetic critique of recent efforts to extend gentrification theory into the Global South. Despite the postcolonial overtures of this new, Southern gentrification literature, the paper argues that the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification o…
World-Class City Making
Chapter 1 lays out the political-economic foundations of the world-class city. Analyzing prominent assessments of the growth potential of India’s property market, the chapter shows how the vision of a radically improved urban future is rooted in the speculative drive to valorize the country’s land market and to privatize its vast reserve of public land. This drive is sustained by the promise that those being evicted from slums will in the future …
Rule By Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi
This book offers a powerful examination of mass demolition in the world’s second largest city of Delhi, India. Using Delhi’s millennial effort to become a world-class city, the book shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. This practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms—what the text calls “rule by aesthetics”—allowed the state…
Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
Emily T. Yeh. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xvii and 324 pp., maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8014-7832-1), $75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8014-5155-3).So...
Why gentrification theory fails in ‘much of the world’
In Schafran's (2014, 321) paper for City’s re-inaugurated Debates section, he writes that ‘gentrification has never been more relevant as a global urban force’. Noting that ‘Mumbai is gentrifying
Does violence have a signature
Ayona Datta’s essay, “The Intimate City,” deals with complex questions of violence and intimacy in the city, beginning with the “critical event” that became known as the Delhi rape case—a brutal ac
On dis/possessive collectivism: Comments on Ananya Roy’s 2016 Geoforum Lecture
When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi
This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents' everyday efforts to secure water, ele…
Futureproof
Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life
Security Aesthetics of and Beyond the Biopolitical
Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life
Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary
This article argues that the theoretical invisibility of non-privatized land tenures constitutes a failure of the urban imaginary, which restricts the ability to forge less commodified urban futures. The article explicates two attributes of non-privatized land-fungibilityandcombinatoriality-that produce an urban land nexus capable of fostering pro-poor agglomeration economies and generating socialities that exceed the model of the separative self…
Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life amidst Delhi's Polluted Airs
Extreme air pollution events have become a regular phenomenon in Delhi, triggering conjunctions of air pollution and death popularly referred to as airpocalypse. The city's collective reckoning with bad air raises the question of how social justice is to be imagined when the source of death is diffuse and leaky. The Indian judiciary has taken up this question in earnest, dispersing the legal treatment of life away from its historical focus on ind…
Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country
Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country
This book explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource e…
Introduction Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country
Not Just Roads: Nitin Bathla and Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, directors. 2020. Delhi and Zurich (Film, 67 min., color). Details about the film available at www.notjusroadsfilm.com, https://vimeo.com…
What happens when infrastructures embody a constant state of incompletion? What happens when they are initiated for political allegiance rather than actual functioning? How do people engage with th
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (12 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Geography (9 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works)