Land, Logistics, and the Making of Urban Peripheral Property

A wave of industrial and infrastructural corridors is emergent across India today. As part of the central government’s approach to jumpstarting the national ‘Make in India’ industrialization project, attracting transnational investors, and reducing the nation’s logistics cost, up to 5.5 kilometers of six lane highway are constructed daily for over 100 new infrastructural corridors. Even as the state assumes a pre-existing property landscape, these corridors spaces are hotbeds of social and political contestations over the (re)making of landed property. In this paper, I examine the subterranean processes of producing, coding, and legalizing private property that underpin India’s logistical turn through the urban peripheral warehouse. India’s warehouse sector attracted investments of over $3 billion between 2017-2022 as commercial storage and delivery warehouses have become a readily identifiable feature of Indian urban peripheries. Beyond highly publicized industrial development agencies, it is the ostensibly agrarian land revenue departments and village councils (panchayats) who are central to emergent logistical urbanism on account of their role in registering, revising and regulating property ownership and land use. Logistics capital, I suggest, draws on the fragmentary and multi-scalar character of state authority at the urban periphery to perform legal compliance within frontier logistics economies where governance norms remain ambiguous. By overlooking complex questions of illegality, regularization, and demolition, these localized state institutions are key to the capacity of urban peripheral land to emerge as logistical nodes in global value chains. Through these institutions, sociological hierarchies, like caste, are reproduced in the production of urban peripheries and logistics economies. My research along Bangalore’s infrastructural corridors draws on observation and interviews conducted with warehouse brokers, logistics and transporter firms, local landowners, panchayat members, and government officials.