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Articles by Nitin Bathla
India’s Cockroach Movement : Metamorphoses and Algorithms
In an increasingly repressive India, a new resistance movement suddenly emerged this summer. Where will the “Cockroaches” go from here? The cockroach as an expression of the many frustrations experienced by young Indians: a protester at the Jantar Mantar protest site in Delhi on 23 July.
Inhabiting the surrounds: urbanity, critique and speculative practice—a manifesto by the Turin-Lisbon 21
This text was produced by participants in the summer school that took place between Turin and Lisbon, in September 2024 and June 2025, jointly organised by the Beyond Inhabitation Lab and the Urban Transitions Hub.
Salvage urbanization as earthwork: unsettling anticipatory ruination at the agrarian-urban frontier
ABSTRACT Across agrarian peripheries, contemporary urbanization increasingly unfolds within landscapes shaped by layered overlapping histories of speculation, salvage, and anticipatory ruination. Challenging the treatment of agrarian peripheries as ruined landscapes subject to salvage accumulation, this paper advances salvage urbanization to examine the earthworks through which marginalized and subaltern actors inhabit, contest, and rework conditions of ruination.
A faulty model: India continues to bet heavily on rapid expansion of greenfield highways as growth strategy - Telegraph India
A recent macroeconomic study by IIM Bangalore found that highway investments since 2014 have had a multiplier effect on GDP; the quality of this GDP growth though remains questionable Nitin Bathla Published 10.04.25, 05:35 AM Representational image File picture One of the most consequential developments during the over-decade-long rule of the Narendra Modi government has been what is often described as India’s ‘highway revolution’.
Authoritarian urbanism beyond the city: Infrastructure-led extended urbanisation and India’s more-than-neoliberal configurations
Abstract Introduction Authoritarian urbanism and extended urbanisation Infrastructure-led extended urbanisation and the rise of authoritarian urbanism Infrastructure and the national-popular project A view on authoritarian urbanism from the agrarian periphery Authoritarian urbanism in the Indian borderlands Conclusion Acknowledgments Declaration of conflicting interests Funding ORCID iD Footnotes References PDF/EPUB More Cite Share options Information, rights and permissions Metrics and...
Producing New India
Periodising India’s Infrastructure-led Extended Urbanisation New highway corridors are being implanted at various scales—local, metropolitan, regional, and interregional—often bypassing existing routes and opening new speculative frontiers for urban land markets. This article periodises the different stages of highway construction in India during the neo-liberal era.
In Conversation with Jean-David Gerber (The Urban Lives of Property Series III)
Download it: MP3 | AAC | OGG | OPUS This episode of the Urban Lives of Property Series expands discussions geographically and conceptually: Our guest in this episode, Jean-David Gerber, helps us think property from Switzerland and other places. Starting off with the observation that there is no single understanding of property, Jean-David argues that it is important for any consideration to be context-specific and to realize that property is not the same as propriété or Eigentum.
the Far Right and the City
Tune in for our new episode on the far-right and the city! In this discussion, members of the Terra-R (Territorialisations of the Radical Right) network examine the developments of the radical right in Germany beyond simplistic urban-rural and East-West attributions, and outline the current and future challenges for academia and civil society alike.
The atmospheres of massiveness: The politics and times of the maybe in Southern megaregions
1 INTRODUCTION For those of us who live and work as researchers in the largest urban regions of the so-called Global South, we are always grappling with salient conceptualisations, practices of engagement, and strategic positionalities capable of addressing and enduring the oscillating, volatile compositions of space and time.
Property Rights Versus Tenants in Poland
Download it: MP3 | AAC | OGG | OPUS Unregulated restitution of property to prewar owners (or rather their legal successors) remains a major source of conflict over housing in Poland, most notably in Warsaw. This episode features Beata Siemieniako, a Warsaw lawyer and urban activist who has been supporting tenants in their struggle against ruthless developers for years. In her book „Re-privatising Poland. The History of a Great Scam“ (Reprywatyzując Polskę.
Are Community Land Trusts Transformative?
Community land trusts are proliferating across the globe, promoted as a potential solution to the ever-worsening affordable housing crisis. CLTs provide a mechanism for decommodification, collective ownership, and community control; however, those ideals are hard to operationalize, and many CLTs function more as traditional affordable housing providers than as urban commons.
Inside the Woman Life Freedom Movement in Iran
Listen to this gripping account from the current „Woman Life Freedom“ movement in Iran and its impact on cities and their inhabitants. The movement was sparked by the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini in the custody of the Islamic regime’s „morality police“ in September 2022. After several weeks of uprising, the media coverage in Western countries has become more silent, in part, due to the extremely repressive acts of the government in which several people have been killed and many imprisoned.
Forums of Discussion: sub\urban - journal for critical urban research
Having just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the important German-language journal for critical urban research, Ross speaks with sub\urban editorial members Gala Nettelbladt and Nina Gribat about why it is important to foster discussion around urban research in German, the challenge of organizing a horizontal editorial collective, of realizing an open access publication strategy, and of relating to political struggles of the current moment - among many other topics! First part of a series...
Urban autopia: the architecture of car-oriented capitalism
Even as we face climate breakdown, cities continue to be shaped by the automobile and a reliance on fossil fuels Arecent promotional video explaining The Line in Neom – a linear city in Saudi Arabia initially proposed in October 2017 – came under heavy criticism from architecture critics and academics. In his scathing critique of the project in the Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote described the project as ‘dystopia portrayed as utopia’.
Highway revolution: the politics of India’s rapid road-building programme
Thousands of miles of new roads, constructed under the promise of economic development and triggering rapid urbanisation, are the battlegrounds for religious nationalism On 16 November 2021, a heavy-body Air Force aircraft carrying the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi made a spectacular landing on a newly constructed six-lane motorway set in a nondescript and remote agrarian hinterland in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
By sealing Delhi NCR borders, Covid has ended fluidity between where labourers live and work
Representational photo | Noida | Anindito Mukherjee | Bloomberg Text Size: The gradual opening of the economy after the coronavirus pandemic-induced lockdown has highlighted major flaws in the metropolitan governance of the Delhi National Capital Region, which has grown increasingly distant from the fluidity of its urban form and labour mobility. The metropolitan region comprises multiple district and state jurisdictions, split across 24 districts in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh.
Housing the migrant worker
Written by Nitin Bathla | Published: May 16, 2020 7:00:23 am Migrant workers in Jaipur walk towards their respective hometowns and villages (Express photo by Rohit Jain Paras) The scheme to provide free food grains and rental housing support to labour migrants announced by the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, on Thursday — if implemented — can spur meaningful change when it comes to ameliorating urban disparities in India.
Housing the migrant worker
Written by Nitin Bathla | Published: May 16, 2020 7:00:49 am Migrants on the Pune-Ahmednagar highway at Karadi walk to their home states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh on Thursday night.
The Delhi-Mumbai Expressway Is a Short-Cut to Socio-Ecological Disaster
The felling of trees in Mumbai’s Aarey forest to make way for a shed for the Mumbai Metro exemplifies the government’s disregard for the environment in its pursuit of economic growth. The people called out Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hypocrisy, with reference to his comments when he was on the show ‘Man Versus Wild’, and the doublespeak of Union environment minister Prakash Javadekar’s defence of tree-cutting.
Book review: Suburban Planet: Making the World Urban from the Outside In
Book review: Suburban Planet: Making the World Urban from the Outside In Authored by Roger Keil and reviewed by Nitin Bathla Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018; 258 pp.: 978-0-7456-8312-6, £13.50 (pbk) Suburban Planet is an intelligent and timely assessment of the contradictory trends in the current modes of urban production; ‘the urban age is in fact the suburban age’ as Keil frequently quips in the book.
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