New Paper: Nature and the extended city

Happy to report the publication of my new paper in the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

The paper, Nature and the extended city: Wasteland governmentality, the sacred, and anti-wasteland politics in the Aravalli region, https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231187811 draws upon extensive fieldwork in the Aravalli region in North India since 2017. In the paper, I look at the formation of extended urban natures, extractivism, and wasteland politics. As a counter to these I dwell upon the use of the sacred as an anti-wasteland paradigm, focusing largely on restorative commoning. I use wasteland governmentality and arboreal biopolitics as conceptual lenses for my analysis. The paper is relevant especially in the current era of green-washing where arboreal carbon targets have become a new opium for the masses. Locally, it is relevant to understand how the Indian state is constructing the Aravallis as a state wasteland that can offset its ecological destruction of primal forests in the Nicobar islands.