[CSH-CPR Urban Workshop #198] Urbanisation and Land Rent: A Genealogy of Property, Caste and Capital in India (P. Sampat)
The Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) & Centre for Policy Research (CPR)
are pleased to invite you to an Urban Workshop N°198
by
Preeti Sampat
(Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Krea University, Andhra Pradesh)
on
Urbanisation and Land Rent: A Genealogy of Property, Caste and Capital in India
on
Tuesday, 25 August 2026, at 3:45 pm IST onwards
(Please note: The speaker and the moderator will be joining online Via Zoom)
The event will be held in hybrid mode at CPR Delhi & Zoom
About the talk:
Land price spirals along India’s urbanising frontiers are now well documented. How might contemporary discussions of land rent theory, where rent is understood as the contracted rent paid by tenants and land’s purchase price, help make sense of this phenomena? What is the genealogical relation of land rent to the history of property, caste and capital in India (and more broadly the subcontinent)?
Preeti Sampat draws on long term anthropological research around urban infrastructure projects in Goa and Gujarat, to develop land rent as a conceptual category for insights into India’s contemporary urban development processes.
Speaker:
Preeti Sampat is associate professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Krea University in India. Her research interests include overlapping thematic clusters around land, infrastructure and urbanisation; capital, value and economic growth; the metabolics of nature and labour; caste and rent; and state, sovereignty and social movements. She has contributed several book chapters, research papers, civil society reports, and media articles along these themes. Her forthcoming co-edited volume, Unsettling Land: Relational Practice for Contemporary Politics (University Press of Colorado), examines land and its affordances relationally, challenging the familiar sociomaterial binaries centered on nature/culture, Indigenous/capitalist, and land/water dichotomies. It brings together anthropologists and geographers studying land relations in diverse historically mediated sociomaterial contexts across the globe. A recent article, The Rentier Economy of Growth Infrastructures: Value Appropriation without Adequate Accumulation in India examines the value relations of land rent and ‘growth infrastructures’ in India. Preeti has curated the Living Histories of Land in Goa Mobile Museum with support from the WennerGren Foundation’s Engaged Anthropology Grant. She is currently finalizing her monograph examining social relations around land rent, infrastructure, urban development, economic growth, law and resistance in India.
This is the one hundred and ninty eighth (198) in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi, and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on the city’s development issues and address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society, and politics. For further information, please contact: Rama Devi at ramadevi2487@gmail.com, Champaka Rajagopal at champaka@cprindia.org or Partha Mukhopadhyay at partha@cprindia.org.
