 Thank you for coming. Welcome to Made Lands, which is the seventh week in the Puelz Conversations on Architecture and Land in and out of Americas, with Amir Bhuza and Bipara Raswami in response by Van Holen-Martin. My name is Bhucia Alize. I'm the director of the Temple Horned Puelz Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia. This series, I'll just say a little bit about the series, it started about two years ago to showcase the work of scholars and thinkers and designers whose work helps to clarify the implication of land and our culture. We kind of all know that there is an implication. We just felt it needed clarification, even for our own sake. And the plural Americas in the title is intended to complicate the mission of the center in two ways. First, by reminding us all that American architecture exists in hemispheric and global relation with the rest of the world. And secondly, to remind us that there's always several Americas in the United States. And I want to just make a brief comment also for all of our Zoom attendees that today we're reminded of the weight of this globality by the fact that access to this quaint 19th century brick building up three flights of stairs is being restricted by a security operation in apparatus which has everything to do with land, which lies an ocean and a COA. And that this has in part, therefore, made multiple Americas on this campus and indeed transformed the campus a little bit into an image of the violence in its different place in this time far away. So I want to be mindful of that. But we're lucky that we have a Zoom setup so people can attend, even if they don't have the prize CUID. And also, if there are urgencies that require people to not attend academic events in these moments that they can watch it later and that the work that we do, in some ways, contributes to thinking through these issues. So before I introduce our speakers, I want to do a bit of publicity. Season three. This is season three of our land series. It will have three episodes and one very special anniversary episode. The next episode will be take place in Chicago. You'll also be able to see it on Zoom. It will be in collaboration with the University of Chicago. Lucas Shtonik and Anne-Marie Leon. The one after that will be in the spring and that will be still in there. And Carolyn Murphy will talk to us about urban modern infrastructure. And at the end of this month, we will have an anniversary slash launch slash toast slash keynote event called Unsettling Land. And that will take place in April. The launch, there will be a Work in Progress talk by Timothy Hyde, a keynote lecture by Joe Goldie. There will be a launch. The launch is of this book. It's the only example yet, which brings together some of the conversations that have been taking place in this forum over the last two years, along with some of the research that the people have been doing as well. It's also part of an installation that we're doing at the Chicago Art and Tribunal. So we will launch it here since we can't all go to Chicago. And then the toast will be to the 40th anniversary of the Buell Center, which we see passing here. And that will be just a toast, but it will be in the presence of former directors, hopefully as many as possible. So stay tuned for that. Now that I've done that, so I'm not on the way. Here. So this year, and this is the first event in that, we turn our attention to the political economy of land. And this may seem a kind of obvious term, but I think it's especially important to the disciplines of the built environment. The critique of the political history of land is beginning to be folded into architecture, into architectural research, into architectural pedagogy. For example, even since we began this series, it's become much more common to hear in architecture schools, in studios, in seminars, that land is not the kind of natural or endless resource that was promised to white settlers in the 19th century. And so as I said, the idea that we should critique land from a political perspective has easily, not easily, but has done its work, but say in the discipline of the built environment. But still, there are kind of secondhand assumptions that continue to be consumed, as if it was sort of secondhand smoke. In our academic disciplines, we continue to inherit many naturalizing myths that connect building to ground in all sorts of organized organisms' ways. Think of the number of times you've heard about buildings making the land pay, or about buildings, building idioms being somehow connected to or rooted in local or traditional building dwelling styles. And I think that these myths are largely inherited not from political ideology, but more fundamentally from the basic tenets of classical economic theory, namely, according to which liberty arises out of property and property is the result of mixing one's labor with soil. And in some ways, the goal of this semester is to try to untether the industry of the built environment and the natural environment from that assumption that buildings magically grow out of ground in the same way as your trees do. So new economic historians have already begun this work. They're allowing us to imagine that capital is not a thing but a process. And they appeal to environmental histories to do that. So they say, after all, capital formation is not that different than photosynthesis. Photosynthesis was already at work in making land a main thing. And I think that this means that this is wonderful, but we have a lot to contribute because we have better examples than that one. So our speakers today are part of the young cohort of new scholars who look at the built environment through the lens of environmental processes and of capitalist process and tell us even better stories than just saying that isn't capital formation kind of like cyclosynthesis. So with that, and on a personal note, I just want to say that when I first was exposed to both Amiel and Deepa's work, in Deepa's case, I heard the talk at the stage. In Amiel's case, thank you, Cassie, whoever you are, for sending me your written work. There's a kind of pleasure in reading work that really explicates how land and environment arise one another. And a few sentences in you think, oh, no, I'm going to have to translate this into the built environment or into something. But then you don't, because by the end of the text, that too has come with up. And so it's just a real pleasure to read that. So without further ado, I'll do a very quick intro because the orange was on the website, so please just go to the website and read the bigger bios. Deepa Ramaswamy is an architect and historian who grew up in Mumbai. She's assistant professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of Houston. That's it. More to see on her website. And yet we say that the economic anthropologist whose work focuses on social and economic transformations at capitalist margins. She's assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell University. And Reinhold Martin, who has graciously accepted to be our respondent, is a historian of architecture, technology, and media, professor of architecture at GSEP currently the chair of Columbia's Committee on Global Thoughts. So without further ado, please help me welcome Deepa and then Yam. Thank you for a thank you to the Build Center, thank you to the Chair, Reinhold, Michelle, everyone who's involved. I'd like to say that this work is very recent. It's ongoing, and it's a privilege to present it here. I would also like to say that the origin of this research is from a design studio, I thought, where the site was the coast of Mumbai. And when I looked at the map that the students created, it was totally taken with like a palimpsest of land that was created by such a deep history and still the same logic continue into neoliberal Mumbai. So that's where it began. So Mumbai is a highland city built under claimed lands from the sea. The city's coasts are the current sites of ongoing disasters where occasional flooding occurrences have become nearly extreme events. These coasts are also the artifacts of prolonged land reclamation into the sea that began with the British colonial government's territorial expansionism and landscape transformation endeavors, starting in the 17th century. Bombay, which is renamed Mumbai in 1995, was created from the sea by reclaiming land that bridged several islands in an archipelago. That's the going myth also. Map to the left is from 1843. So it was retroactively made. So after reclamation, et cetera, was done. They commissioned maps that kind of magic what the islands would have looked. Map to the center was made in 1812. But the red dotted line was how much recollection had already happened by 1897, 1891. And that is, of course, the current Google map of Mumbai. Just show this. Among the earliest inhabitants on these islands on the western coast of India were the Colies, Bhandaris and Kunwis who practiced small-scale fishing and agriculture. The reclamation activities that bridged the archipelago followed a colonial vision of contiguous and measurable territory. That could be a possible outpost and future port-oriented city of strategic importance for shipbuilding security. The infrastructural project of reclaiming large swaths of land also legitimized the British and East India Company's presence in the west coast of India. They displayed control over land, labor, environment and commodities. One of the first significant acts of reclamation in the archipelago was in 1710. Over the next two centuries, the British government and then the East India Company along with the support of low and private reclamation companies built cost-ways and bankments, dams, breaches and infields. This is the one that was completed in 1784. By the middle of the 19th century, Bombay was a congested port city with reclamation as one of the profitable ways for the city's colonial government to create new land to sail. Bombay had completed two revenue surveys, one in 1827 and one in 1865 with the conversion of agricultural land into mill land, roads and urban dwelling to accommodate an increase in population. These reclaimed lands were now visible sites with the British government and later East India Company built their ports, their factories and railway lines that connected commodities that cotton to the factories in Nagashire and Manchester. These reclaimed lands were also the objects of transactions as territories for development and sales. I would like to pay attention to this. This was, it came in the times in 1911, it was I think like an advertisement of their proposed reclamation, but I really like how they call it free land. They say the above sketch plan shows the great reclamation scheme as present under consideration at Bombay. The Bombay government proposes to reclaim from the sea the area shown on the right-hand side of the line of dots and gashes. The total area first created will be 973 acres. The scheme is expected to pay for itself in I think 69 years. And the government will then enter into possession of a vast new estate, Creotrod. A small portion of the scheme is already complete. The land is rocky and is only submerged at high water. Reclaiming land is risky business. Creating territory from the sea is an infrastructure political and economic move. Reclamation in the simplest terms means creating landforms from the sea by filling it with rocks, clay, soil and dirt. It may mean raising the sea level by moving in dry earth or pumping out muddy water from shallow areas. It involves cutting across mangroves and hills and moving large amounts of soil and rock. Reclamation infrastructure can be read as strata. The layer of invisible stormwater and sewage pipes then the infilling of rock and mud and lastly the visible infrastructure that I showed before of the colonial cities built environment. In addition to being expensive and labor intensive reclaimed lands with susceptible and prone to flooding and sinking, they still are. At different times, various actors from the British colonial machine described the reclamation and bombayers winning land from the sea and epic struggle with the sea and act of keeping the sea out. The project was stealing shallows from the sea. I found a recent one that said chasing the sea out. Phrases that suggest an adversarial and war-like relationship with the sea. Sea and land are ambiguously defined entities in the history of Mumbai. Reclaimed lands are the material artifacts of the city's archipelagic origins that emerge from these ambiguities of the crosshairs of infrastructure risk and speculation. In an island city where expansion to the water seems to be the chosen response to its primary scarcity land. These ambiguities have been weaponized for the promise of development predicated on land availability for the connection, circulation and movement of people and things. So these are quotes. The famous kind of famous, most people in Bombay know about it, the contentious history of the dowry exchange of the islands before reclamation between the Portuguese and British in 1661 best explains these lands sea ambiguities. As the story goes, the Portuguese gave the islands to the British crown as part of a marriage treaty between Charles II and Catherine of Proganza of Portugal. Legally speaking, when the Portuguese handed over these islands, they handed over all the quote, rights, profits, territories and occurrences of Bombay. However, at the core of their quibble between the powers was the question how many of these islands actually constituted Bombay? So the Portuguese claim they were four islands on the archipelago, one of them was named Bombay and all they had to hand over to the British was what they call the island of Bombay. On the other hand, the British claim two, then four and later seven islands constituted Bombay. The differences between the two colonial powers emerged from a core contrast in their geographic conceptions of the archipelago. The Portuguese were more interested in the mainland and thought of the rest of the islands as a collection of distant flooded territories unsuitable for agriculture because there was brackish water. The idea to reclaim these islands only fully emerged after the British crown acquired them and handed them over to the East India Company as part of a royal charter in 1668 calling them the proprietors of the port and islands. These disputes between the Portuguese and the British were played out in multiple maps showing different number of islands to suit specific narratives. And I mentioned this before that I found so many maps and I spent so much time trying to find seven islands in them and it was quite good exercise because I read somewhere else that when they map it depended upon where you were when you map these islands that's why they were so different because there was high tide, there was monsoon. So they said it depends on the vantage point it may be seen one day and three months later after monsoon, it may be land. So that's why they are so different. Most notably in some cases, the British argued that the areas that were routinely under water during high tide which the locals and Portuguese considered to be a pile of the sea was land often qualified as overflown drowned or wasteland. This claim was supported by statements attributed to locals describing how port during low tide one can walk from one end of the island to the other. By claiming the sea as land the British changed the terms of their transactions with the Portuguese and saw the seeds of contiguous territory in place of an archipelago of distinct islands and communities. Historian Tim Riding who has written about this characterizes this discrepancy between land and sea as a deliberate misinterpretation as part of the Allied past troubles of colonial give and take of territory. However, when analyzed through Prenabandar's research and colonial property law this discrepancy is part of the deeper history of British appropriation of land through the distinction between wasteland and cultivated land. Where cultivated land was integral to a linear progression starting from a state of nature for state of civilization. Territorial rights over land stem from the settlement and cultivation of what was wasteland. Calling the sea a wasteland and reclaiming it to create territory for sale ownership transfer and collateral complicates the colonial commodification of land, settlement and occupation. In addition to being risky, reclamation was expensive. The British were conscious of the costs of the risks and the risks involved in reclaiming projects. Considering that by the 19th century landscape reclamation had helped construct the limits of cities in the United States and the Netherlands. Even as early as 1673 they commissioned a report on reclaiming activities in Bombay to the Council of Surabh. The report stated that while reclamation was feasible it needed to be seen that the crown should leave it to the servants, free men or inhabitants to raise a common stock. This meant outsourcing the risk of reclamation to the East India Company or to local traders who could act as proxies willing to take, put in their own money and take the risk. The literature is littered with the words like wasteland, off-loan land and that quote is where it talks about how about we ask somebody else to invest the money. Reclamation activities expanded to their full potential in the 19th century when the Bombay government started to rely on private reclamation companies such as the Back Bay Reclamation Company and the Elphinston Land and Press Company. Many of these companies operated at the intersection of profits from two colonial commodities, cotton and land. The transactions hinging on the prospect of creating developable land in the future. Profits from cotton were parked in reclamation activities. These companies were typically joint stock companies just like the East India Company itself was. They were affiliated with banks and financial associations. The Elphinston Land and Press Company for example was formed in 1859 by two brothers from Glasgow, John and James Nichols. And they had a transaction with the government where a Bombay government who said they gave 100 acres of reclaimed land to the Bombay government in return for reclamation rights for another 250 acres on which they built a dock and permanent walk. That's how that was their terms of exchange. The capital for these projects came from selling shares to British and local merchants. The Bombay government built their railways on this, what they call free land. On the other hand, the Back Bay Reclamation Company was an example of local participation in the unregulated economy of colonial Bombay. The company was started by Bidraki and Poussey businessmen Premchand Roychan and Kojji John here in 1867. Roychan belonged to the JNM Bidraki community which had trading ties with Africa and Persia as part of pre-colonial global milk entire networks. He was already a successful broker in cotton drill estate, bullion exchange, moon security stocks and bills of exchange by 1867. Things took a turn with the start of the American Civil War in 1861 when the Southern American states could not send their cotton to English factories. Turning to their colonies to maintain its supply. The cotton market suddenly boomed in Bombay as cotton from other parts of the Western coast was sold and sent to England from the city sports. This unexpected jump in value and demand made both British and local traders extremely rich. There were stories, this is a line I've seen in so many books by different authors that local people were cutting into mattresses, pulling out the cotton and selling it in the market because of the, they were making so much profits. Three years after the start of the American Civil War there were over 20 banks and financial institutions, eight land companies, over 20 insurance companies and over 5,000 joint stock companies in Bombay. Many of which were the product of local entrepreneurial activities. Businessmen like Roy Chan had understood that the unprecedented amount of local money floating in the city must be invested somewhere and shares such as those of the back bay reclamation company were the answer. It was common for brokers such as Roy Chan to advocate for back bay shares to the customers and the banks he was on the boards of. The banks in turn would acquire shares and companies promoted by Roy Chan. There were several proposed reclamation projects on the Anbu with acres of reclaimed land that were supposed to be available for sale. In 1864, back bay reclamation won the rights to reclaim Bombay's Western foreshore, consequently increasing its price, its share prices. The story of Bombay's boom ended as abruptly as it started with the end of the American Civil War on May 1st, 1865 when Britain returned to the United States to get their cotton. Indian merchants, farmers and traders stopped receiving enormous profits from cotton. This led to an economic crash in Bombay in 1865 where the stocks of back bay reclamation company crashed. While the British government rescued the British owned Elphinstone Nanopress Company by buying their retained land, the back bay reclamation company was bankrupted. Roy Chan and others never reclaimed the full extent of land as promised in their lifetimes and was reclaimed in the 20th century. During the years of Bombay's boom, Roy Chan and other merchants, brokers and traders had started to meet under a banyan tree across the British built neoclassical Bombay town hall to trade in bullion exchange stocks and shares. The banyan tree or the phyton bangerus is a native tree with a huge canopy and roots hanging from its branches. Under the tree, the group along with Roy Chan formed the beginnings of what would be recognized for the British as the native stock brokers association. It eventually, that building still exists, it's called the Asian Society, if you're ever in Bombay, and that is not the original banyan tree. That tree was memorialized and people write about it in books, but I don't think it exists anymore. The native stock brokers association eventually became the BSE, the Bombay Stock Exchange in 1875 with 318 members from the local business community. This was Asia's first and largest stock exchange, internationally recognized stock exchange that preceded the Tokyo stock exchange by three years. That is the current BSE building. Roy Chan and others bounced back after the reclamation debacle. He used some of his new wealth for philanthropy and to fund Bombay's Gothic building, router by clock tower. That is the building still exists in Mumbai. The reclaimed lands acquired by the British from the bankrupt Elphinstone Land & Press Company became the Bombay Port Trust in 1873. The Bombay Port Trust was an autonomous, corporate entity created by the British government to care for the city sports in the 19th century that still exists and operates in Mumbai. Coming a full circle, the Bombay Port Trust recently opened these very lands that were reclaimed in the 19th century for the Eastern Waterfront Project, which is trying to mimic London's Eastern Waterfront, which unsurprisingly, proposes some more reclamation along the coast. Reclaimed land from the sea is a political, infrastructural and speculative act that brings to light the local traders and business people in colonial Bombay who participated in the formation of the city. They have often remained in the fringes of the origin narrative of the city. Local traders and merchants like Roy Chan made profits by making alliances with the East India Company, but they also developed businesses invested in infrastructure and philanthropy, absorbed colonial risk and generated indigenous capital in a very unregulated economic environment. Reclaimed lands were the visible sites of transactions in the form of ports, factories, railway stations and markets. They were also the objects of speculative transactions within colonial banking institutions, private reclamation companies and under a banning tree. They delineated the social stratifications and relationships of colonial society between British and East India Company officers, local merchants, traders and middlemen, residents of Bombay who moved from other parts of the region and the older inhabitants of the archipelago who was suddenly drawn into colonial capitalist modes of accumulation, economies of land, ownership and private property. This paper does not cover other narratives of reclamation that ties into these intersections which are part of my broader research, histories of prolonged ecological damage, displacement and the valorization of coastal land, coastal infrastructure and sea views in Mumbai that extend into contemporary Mumbai. This is from a recent report on reclamation in 2016. Reclamation remains integral to the island city's expansion. In the decades after India's liberalization in the 1990s, reclamation has doubly emerged as a crucial part of Mumbai's neoliberal growth blueprint. Since the 1990s, over 72 kilometers of land have been added to the city by reclaiming the intertidal zones. In 2021, a long city had over approximately 7 kilometers of coastal land reclaimed from the sea. Geographer Adam Brithodge explains how the art of reclamation is not really about gaining lost ground. As the word reclaimed suggests, it is more specifically about the construction of ground where water had once been. Brithodge's description calls attention to the inherent ambiguity between land and sea that is embedded in the constitution of reclamation infrastructures and the history of Mumbai. But sometimes sea becomes land and other times land becomes sea. The ambiguity between what constitutes land and sea that marked the city's genesis in the 17th century is now more evident along than we supposed, which operated static extensions of developmental territory into the water, sinking and flooding with extreme weather patterns every monsoons season. Thank you so much. Yeah, please go ahead. Like once more? Yes. One more? Yes. Okay, one more. Hi, hard-acting follow. Yeah, thank you so much to the Chi and the girls that have turned to Reinhold for having me and creating this opportunity to discuss this work, which is also sort of a mixture of very new and somewhat old. I also wanted to say that what I'm going to be talking about is not unrelated to what's happening on campus today. And so I wanted to just kind of mention that the logics of settler colonialism and property kind of link the securitization of campus with what's happening elsewhere. And yeah, I'll come back to that a little bit, but... Okay, so Western Kenya. I have been doing research in Western Kenya for about a decade now, and I'm tracking de-varianizing rural life, especially near major highways. And something that's been happening there is that agricultural land is being converted into real estate in this kind of accelerating way. So there's a bunch of reasons for this, which I'm not really focusing on, but just quickly. So it's become very difficult to survive as a small-scale farmer in Kenya and around the world under contemporary economic conditions. The country is decentralizing in ways that have led to the growth of regional capitals, which is also expanding them into rural areas. And there's these sort of middle-class aspirations to build houses in the country, and all of those things are, yeah, creating this land process, which is quite similar to what's happening in urban periphery, so maybe familiar to some of you. And like that process, this more rural version often begins with a subdivision or partition of agricultural land. So I'm gonna focus on that partition, and I'm gonna focus a little bit on what comes out after rural land has been subdivided, which is this unit that I'm describing as the plot, or which is described as the plot. And I wanna use the plot to unpack some of the weirdness of what's usually called subdivision, it's kind of banal, eh? And this is a small piece of a bigger chapter that explores how plots as socially defined units facilitate lands extraction from agrarian social relations. Okay, so I'm gonna talk a lot about size today. First, by looking at the plot as a unit of measurement, a very weird unit of measurement, and second, by thinking historically about the politics of smallness. Okay, so during my research, I noticed that the word plot had come to mean something very specific and that it had land use implications as well as size implications. So the plot, the term is an English term, but it's imported into Swaley and into other Kenyan languages and it encodes two things. People call a plot, people call a piece of land a plot when that piece is A, intended for real estate development and B, small. So plot is defined in this kind of, that's the wrong, yeah, it's defined in this kind of dialectical relationship with the word Shamba, which means land or farm and Link's land and farm in that way. So I first perceived this opposition between plot and Shamba as actually an opposition to two different forms of measurement. So that was the acre and the plot. So in Gakuen, which is a place where I did research for a long time, it's a truck stop along King's Main East West Highway. I'd often ask about the land prices and I'd ask about, you know, so how much does this cost per acre? And this didn't work as a question, right? So people kept saying back to me, one friend said, as you get closer to the highway or to town, we don't talk about acres, we talk about plots. People wanna sell in plots so they can make more money. I got the same response when I was asking about the acre price of some fallow land for Shamba along the highway. We are selling by the plots. And again, about land in the settlement scheme a little bit further down the road where I was told that the farms were initially two acres but were now being subdivided and resold as plots. In this case, quarter acre pieces. So calling the land a plot seemed to be vested of its agricultural meanings and advertise its availability for both property development and speculation. So land size and land use are shifting together. Okay, but even as the term plot had, slide it totally off, but that's okay. Even as the term plot had size and efficiencies were imprecise. So unlike the acre, the plot was not a fixed measurement and there was a lot of debate over how many plots were in an acre or even whether the term carried a quantitative significance at all, it's very unclear. So for instance, in Nairobi, the term plot often just referred to a small piece of land or the building on it, or which could have a building on it. In Kaka-Mega, which is another far Western Kenya, the term plot could be thought of as a unit of measure and it was usually described as a percentage of an acre but the percentage varied. So sometimes I was told that an acre was four plots. Sometimes I was told that an acre was eight plots. In Nakuru, which is where the pictures that you're seeing are from, a front end you've done an acre was 10 plots. So a lot of variability. In real estate marketing, and I just want to point out here there are three different sides here, advertising plots for three different companies and one of them advertises 50 by 100, you can't see it at all. The other one advertises an acre. So in real estate marketing, plot operated as a slightly more specific measure, although that measure also changed over time. So right now it refers to the smallest permitted subdivision, which is a unit which is described interchangeably as either an eighth of an acre as large 50 by 100 feet. So even in this somewhat more specific usage, there's still this weird indeterminacy to this unit because the slippage between length and area measurements meant that an eighth of an acre did not precisely align with 50 by 100 feet even as they're used interchangeably. And this was then again complicated by the fact that on title deeds, land sizes all was represented in the area measure. So there's all of this kind of weird translation gaps, which are exacerbated by the fact that of course land doesn't actually come and meet 50 by 100 feet parcels. So the translation between different metrics as well as a translation of the ground into abstraction caused a lot of confusion and there's all kinds of explainer videos and threads online where people are like, wait, how many plots are actually there? What is that meaning like? So this is just one, one, one video. This left room for a lot of wiggle and I think it's commercially significant. So one real estate agent told me like simultaneously that 50 by 100 was the smallest permitted subdivision and told me that a smaller piece, 40 by 80 could be described as a small plot. Meanwhile, a quarter acre could be called two plots or it could be called a large plot. Four real estate listings tended to distinguish between plot and parcel. This is sort of more real estatey language rather than plot in Shamba, which is an earlier word for farm or farmland, but again, in ways that are kind of more impressionistic than precise. So a parcel tended to refer to anything larger than an acre or an acre and above, but sometimes it described something that was just under an acre. So I saw listings, for instance, that said that three quarters of an acre was also a parcel or not a plot. So I just had the sense that somewhere between three quarters of an acre and a quarter of an acre the thing turns into a plot. It stops feeling like agricultural land and starts feeling like something else. So I've been talking a lot about numbers and the weirdness of these numbers, but actually I think it's this feeling that it's really one of the most important pieces of this. And so there's this variability in the precise moment at which land becomes a plot and that has changed over time as you get smaller and smaller subdivisions. But there also seems to be kind of broad agreement around the fact that there is a division that we broadly feel together that at some point this stops being farmland that starts being the state land or rather property development, right? So the land, the unit itself, the unit of plot is dialed into some kind of social sense around what makes land a certain kind of land. So this attunement and this variability are what I'm interested in here and I wanna use it, the question and narrative within which measurement tends inevitably towards increased standardization over time. So I'm gonna unpack this a little bit by talking about Vittal Kula's book, Measures and Men. So the story of measures over time takes more and less celebratory forms, but in most versions modern measures are described through kind of an idea of increased standardization, increased abstraction. So Vittal Kula's book is an example of this, but in its less celebratory form and in it he describes measures as once invested with social content and social meaning that is then lost with the advent of modern netrology and abstraction. So the book is really fascinating and I'm just gonna illustrate with an example from the chapter on land measurements since I've been talking about. So in contrast with today's abstract forms like the metric hectare or the imperial acre, traditional measures Kula said were located in the quote realities of life and labor. So using examples from medieval and early modern Europe, Kula outlines two social ways and this is his term social, social ways of measuring land, by labor time and by amount of time. So for example, in Gourge in the 18th century, a journée described the area that one person could plow in a day, right? Whereas a citrée signified the area of land that could be sown by one citrée of seed and I don't know exactly what is one citrée of seed, but some container of receipt, which was larger or smaller. So the citrée could be larger or smaller depending on how fertile the soil was. So you need more or less seed depending on how, but you need to sow more or less densely according to the fertility. So Kula points out that these measuring styles permit that the basic unit of land can be meaningfully attuned to people's daily lives and labors and to the quality of the land itself. And he makes that incisive point that equalization and standardization are not the same thing. She says, quote, given their arithmetical inequality, indeed, because of their arithmetical inequality, such measures are more homogenous with respect to their social and economic significance. So this seems to me really important and really right on because like any farmer knows that an acre of like sandy rocky soil is absolutely not the same as an acre of fertile well-watered soil, no matter how much an acre is the same as an acre, right? Okay, so I find this all really compelling but I do wanna push back against this rupture narrative that Kula writes through. So a narrative around modernity as a process of alienation that is linked to standardization and abstraction doesn't actually help us to understand that the way the plot as a unit is attuned to the realities of the ground on the ground and is actually facilitating land dispossession in some way. So these realities of the ground include market conditions but also this sort of right social variable sense, this feeling about what is desirable and appropriate for different uses. So put otherwise to describe the intensified modification of land through language of standardization and abstraction seems to me to miss something important about the way that this process is socially mediated. In the longer version of this work, I show how that social sense becomes really relevant to land speculation and to the commodification of ancestral land, so land that hasn't actually been yet marketized. But here what I'm gonna switch to talk about now is actually to talk a little bit more historically about how these feelings about land size are created, and I'm gonna describe a key moment in the history of smallness. I forgot all of my languages, which I'll just, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I right click, like I right click here. Okay, one more. Okay, so as I mentioned earlier, two defining features of the plot are that it is small and that it's for property development. It's not an accident, but these two things go together. Nor is it an accident that subdivision is viewed as the composition of agricultural land. So I wanna think about where the assumption that smaller pieces of land do not lend themselves to agricultural land use comes from. The spoiler alert is that has a lot to do with Southern colonialism. Norms around land were actively crafted during the colonial period as part of Kenya's land reform or land registration process. So I don't have time to talk about the full history of land reform, but I wanna give a little bit of context for those who are not familiar with Kenya as a settler colony. So colonial settlement in Kenya dispossessed indigenous populations of the land's most fertile agricultural land and resettled them onto so-called native reserves. So for the bulk of the colonial period, non-white farmers were barred from growing the more lucrative cash crops like Tienpokni, for instance, or Pyrethrum. This policy was reversed shortly before Independence, which I'm not gonna talk about, but has a lot to do with the movement known as Maomao, but called the Land and Freedom Army, which is when the colonial government under what's called the Swinerton Plan of 1954, the colonial government began to encourage native participation in cash crop production. So the plan argued that in order to intensify agriculture, people would need credit. Land was of course gonna be the collateral for that credit. So in order for that to work, people needed title. This is a really familiar argument I think so many. Yes. So land reform thus actively commodified land by linking economic inclusion to the ability to hold title, the access credit, and to participate in market agriculture. Individual private title contrasted with the complex kinds of rights that characterized many local tenure systems. And so land reform was, for this reason, an effort shipped how agriculture was practiced and how land mediated intergenerational social obligations. And imposing norms around land size was really key to this process. So this had to do with how colonial officials understood surplus accumulation to be tied to land accumulation. In their view, to be a productive farmer was necessarily to want more land. So the plan explicitly links the registration of land to just possession. Okay, so in the past government policy, this is from this one, which is the name that's given to this longer title. In the past government policy has been to maintain the tribal system of tenure so that all the people have had bits of land and to prevent the Africans from borrowing money against the security of his land. In future, former government policy will be reversed and able, energetic or rich Africans will be able to acquire more land and bad or poor farmers less, creating a landed and a landless class. This is a normal step in the evolution of the country. So this document makes no bones about the fact that inclusion in the market is going to create it. What I want to point out though is this term bits of land. My form, I'll change, but yeah. The previous policy was to keep people tethered to the land. That was the reserve policies to keep people on the land. So no matter how small that connection is important, right? For keeping people stable. But the new system is going to require people to have larger pieces of land and therefore that will require the dispossession of some by others. Since the question of redistributing settler land was not at all on a table. So the question of size becomes even more evident in related arguments about the need for consolidation. So land registration and land consolidation were completely went together in the process of land. Colonial agricultural officers had long been commenting on the problem of land fragmentation related to so-called native tenure systems. Inheritance, use of fracked and grazing practices in many of the areas where settled agriculture was practiced resulted in these kind of dispersed and overlapping foldings. In particular, practices of partable inheritance where all sons would inherit a piece of their father's land unlike the British system, which was premature meant that lineage land tended to get subdivided across generations, leading younger generations to seek land elsewhere. So this scattering of holdings, so people would have these kind of very, you know what I said, it's kind of these like shocked statements about one family that have 26 different pieces of land. So the scattering of holdings was considered by colonial agricultural officers to be inefficient and detrimental to soil quality and also hard for them to surveil. So to summarize the overwhelming ideas that small is bad for agriculture, holdings should be of a size economic for the purpose for which they're required, brought about by consolidation of fragmented holdings or by enclosure of communal lands. The able African must not be debarred from acquiring and farming units in excess of any minimum laid down for the area. So this report, this minimum comes in because the Swedish and report is drawing on an idea which is circulating in agriculture economics at the time, which is that there is a minimum land size below which agriculture will be uneconomic. So you get this term uneconomic sized, which circulates. And so this fear of fear of fragmentation of us gets written into a binary economic and uneconomic in which economic carries a sense of viable. When it comes to land, this report suggests more is better, but it's actually better to have none than too little. So in her work on land tenure reform in the central Kenyan Highlands, Angela Kogarou questions the assumption that fragmentation is detrimental. She notes that distributing one's land in smaller pieces allowed people to farm across different ecological microzones, thereby maximizing their ability to endure climate events or crop failure in an area. So where the language of consolidation implies that homogeneity and contiguity are just inherently beneficial, the social and ecological realities on the ground suggest that actually diversity was a valued, such that fragmentation is not a challenge to overcome, right, but a value in itself. And this value of fragmentation is explicit. We are articulated by indigenous cultivators. During the land commission in 1932, so actually 20 years even before the plan, Chief Ogata in Western Kenya rebuts colonial proposals around consolidation with the argument that the colonial government should actually be protecting the reserves from white encroachment. The reason we don't want registered titles to our land is that we go in for fragmentation of cultivation and our cattle graze far and wide. Government is our father and if government sees the right to set a boundary, let it be a boundary between black and white. And there's another person who also uses this language of boundary and says, actually there's a boundary written in our hearts. We don't need a boundary to understand our land. We need you to create a boundary between us and the settlers who are trying to take even more land. So around questions of partable inheritance, right? So we again see that revising and understanding of land tenure and ownership actually tends to reframe partable inheritance less as a problem or a difficulty than as a strength. So where the plan is deeply anxious about inheritance, crazy, yeah, sorry. We can see here, right? They're very anxious immediately before inheritance has a chance of creating fragmentation, conditions must be created to ensure that subdivision does not take place below an economic level. But legal scholar H.W. O'Koth-O'Gendo actually reframes partable inheritance as a strength again, noting that it reflects the multi-generational obligations that are embedded in land and that it is that there are these, the practices of dispersal of land dispersal actually are kind of flexible way of responding to that. So for O'Koth-O'Gendo, it's not fragmentation but this liberal theory of ownership, that's the problem. Okay, so across these conversations, we see that attitudes toward land size reflect and encode different understandings of what land is and this is a question that's been persuasively addressed by Settler-O'Kono studies more generally. So just to come back to this title of the panel, Made Land, I just wanna kind of emphasize that land reform really created land as property in these very specific ways and in ways that have clearly laid the groundwork for the more intensified commodification that's happening now. And this making of land was also really successful in rewriting ideas about how agriculture should be practiced. So the idea that small is bad for agriculture is really hard to shake. And my point is not to say, right, that small is good necessarily, but just to think critically about how that idea really operates in our minds, including mine. And it's important because I think because the sense that the division and dispersal of holdings can only be bad, can only be detrimental, that idea has filtered really uncritically into discussions around agrarian change in ways that one reinscribe these colonial categories, but beyond that, I think they can actually facilitate the separation of people from their land, right? Because if somebody thinks that this land is too small there's nothing I can do with it except sell it to a real estate developer, then I'll just do that. And the specific language of an economic size continues to be taken up unharvalmatically in policy and academic conversations around land tenure. And even actually, Okoko Gendo who's this really critical legal scholar adopts that term without any kind of comment in his work on colonialism in land tenure law. So I think this, in addition to rewriting this, the viability and the meaning of land into this binary of economic and uneconomic, it also gives the impression that small pieces of land can only be suited for real estate development and applies that the problem is small whether agriculture or inheritance patterns, right? So sort of social, social bads rather than the corporate and elite farms that continue to claim huge pieces of land across the country. Okay, so briefly concluding. It's clear, I think that settler colonialism subtends what land has come to be in East Africa and elsewhere, and I think that's certainly in the case here in the United States. And my colleague Paula Holbreys' work on plots and land defense in Palestine shows that these dynamics are also relevant to the terms in which struggle is being reached today. And I wanted to say, this one last quote from Robert Nichols, who I think is really fantastic on land, but he says, he writes that the making of territory into the land, the making of land as property is not just the story of everyone's domination by the commodity form. So it's also that, but he says that it is a more specific story of dispossession. So he writes that generalized concerns with the commodification of land tend to ignore the extent to which this process has been subtended by systematic transfer of loss and group differentiation. All right, well, first of all, thank you. And I'm going to go back for these, you know, I mean, this, we could just go straight to the question because I think there's so much to discuss. I mean, some kind of self-evident intersections and so on. But I also, in the spirit of kind of opening things up a little more broadly to begin with and then narrowing down, bringing this back down to the specifics of your talks. I think, again, Namcheena and team for convening this very constructive way to revisit truly fundamental issues and for providing us with so much to think about together. And, you know, since the connections, I think it's self-evident, I'm not gonna rehearse those. Instead, I'm just gonna first try to do this very briefly, just post a series of general questions that I expect are in everybody's mind in some way, you know, that are transferrable from between these papers and then bring it back down to specifics that may help us synthesize some relevant aspects of these two fascinating and the same about quite distinct studies. So that, you know, there's that balance. So on the problem of making, no, I'm making the name of the name of someone, I wanna ask, I think, with our colleagues, because you've done this, I'm just repeating some things, you know, by whom, for whom and by what means, that seems to be a critical kind of through line through all of this and putting it this way, I suspect that all of us here would acknowledge the usefulness of the kind of constructionism and the anti-foundationalism that this making, this way of thinking about making implies without necessarily, we may not necessarily agree on the implications. Since to denaturalize something like land can, for example, help us demystify fiercely durable origin stories like the Bombay, you know, how many others, by recasting land or territory or indeed the earth itself as what historians of science call it, or have called it, epistemic thing, a thing with which to think, a type of historical making that, you know, and I'm speaking with land in general, in its constructedness, if not its outright artificiality helps us to construct and to understand the ways in which we know the world through the tools of the colonizer, for example, as I'm just pointing out, to the extent that we can even make that thing stand in for an entire way of knowing, like in other words, there's a metonymic dimension to the particulars that you've been offering. And as what is the epistemic regime governed by this thing that we call land, right? In general, and then in these specific cases, you are, you know, for example, with respect to coloniality, is this the same, ultimately, logic at work in these very different places, or is it to be distinguished in some, at the level I'm asking, obviously historically, it's this thing. Now, but to recognize something seemingly natural as constructed compels us further to ask, in what way? And again, we've seen vividly answers to that. And although I invite Amil and Deepa to speak for themselves, this is, you know, on this, I suspect that neither of you, I don't know, would be entirely uncomfortable with the adverbial phrase socially constructed. So in other words, it's not just constructed, it's socially constructed, right? And we, to describe their objects of study, but here too, we can seek, so we can just keep listening at first, you know, we can seek more adverbs and ask, for example, diachronically and or synchronically over time or kind of simultaneous. Again, I suspect that everybody here would answer along with our speakers, everybody in unison, both. But even so, you know, thereby reformulating our characterization as socially and historically, and I think you both demonstrated this constructed, it a little bit retains the passive voice. So if anything, it heightens the curiosity of the listener slash reader, as I was the reader, I was the privileged reader to actually read the papers. You know, who made this land? Who in the end? Who did this? Who made this land? Why and how? Or to put it in the present, that's the past tense, to put it in present tense, who makes this land? Why and how? So who's the, you know, subject of the sentence? Now, of course, both as we again just heard, papers provide partial answers to some questions, both explicitly, but you know, also somewhat implicitly. And so that's what I think we can discuss more specifically with respect to each. But just before that, I just wanna pause one more time and attempt at rephrasing now in something like a more active voice. Since if making implies a maker, instrumentality of some kind seems to be involved, interests, in other words, interest, purpose and reason, in its sort of double sense, reason as knowledge and technique, but also reason as purpose. Alas, my own loyalty is not withstanding the discursive regime that gave us the concept of epistemic things, which is something that I personally found a useful way to think about, about some of these things, has never been quite able to answer the question of regime change. In other words, how do things change? How does this happen? How does these things arise? For example, how and why in a specific locale or in general, the regime of knowing that preceded land, however we may describe it, you know, unenclosed, common, pre-modern, even primordial. How did such a regime give way to the thing that we've seen, the thing with which we're concerned? How did this happen? And to sharpen the point, whose lives were thereby enhanced and whose were ended in the process? Or more urgently, and to join in solidarity with the voices raised with respect to current conflicts. More urgently, again, if not yet though, in the active and mocked voice, how might this regime called land be remade or made differently so that history scales may be, you see I'm still speaking in a passive voice, may be rebalanced to support peaceful coexistence rather than more death. And finally, and more actively still, how to name the makers, those who made this line, hold them to account and begin the remake. So, you know, it seems to me that there are a few of those of these kind of questions in both of your talks. Now, I just, sorry, now we get to specifics and then it's all yours. I just want to, I phrase these remarks in this way since both, I mean, papers seem to me to be animated by such concerns, which does not mean that again, this is your call, each necessarily takes up a motive activist scholarship directly, rather in each though, we can glimpse the remaking of concepts and of historical interpretation such that the current regime, you know, with which her concern, call it land, seems less inevitable and more transformable. So, you know, in the spirit then of bringing this so to speak down to the ground, here are my, you know, it's like a series of more specific questions in each case. So, I guess we'll go on the sequence of the presentation, I think. So, for Debye, I, you know, I very much enjoyed your account of the making of Bombay at its edges and from its, around its original islands. So, my first question, translate the details that you offer from which, you know, I learned a great deal. I too actually did a studio in Bombay and I actually did a studio in the distant past. And so, into these terms that I've just kind of tried to sketch out. So, for example, I'll refer to Page Numbers for your benefit, but you're the, because I learned the PDF. Beginning on Page Two, you suggest, then you read this up, you suggest that the ambiguities arising from Bombay slash Mumbai's long history of territorial expansion into the sea, quote, have been weaponized for the promise of development predicated on land availability, for the connection, circulation and movement of people and things. So, again, so predictably now, I think I have that in mind for you. Say, I therefore ask weaponized by whom? In other words, if you were to rephrase this, what reads a bit like a thesis statement, honestly, for the talk, a little more actively, who would be the subject of the sentence? I mean, it seems that the subject of the sentence changes through the talk and maybe necessarily in the acknowledgement of historical changes. You know, the ones who do the weaponized. And then shifting somewhat away from the metaphorical weapons to maybe more literal ones, what materially, as well as discursively, would be their weapons? You know, what is it, under what material conditions did, you know, what the time scene is the British and others, perhaps a confrador class of merchants and so on, do the work that they do. And then how might we specify in this relation to which I just, I've had a way I'm just trying this out, it's interesting because I'm learning about kind of spatial, as a way to segue also into questions from Amiel. So as I have understood and come to understand Bombay's history, there has long been a function, I think it appeared in the 1911, especially that we showed this game, a functional and symbolic difference between the Eastern and Western waterfronts. And until recently, and you know, as you say, the Eastern waterfront has been rather more industrial, which as I recall, significant military holdings, is that right? Yeah, whereas Bombay's Western waterfront, in addition to featuring substantial public space, has long been associated with a certain kind of cosmopolitan glamour along the marine drive. And maybe more recently, I don't know, it characterizes all the way up to Juhu, where the movie stars live, I think so. So if this is a reasonable characterization, how to explain the difference, which I'm suggesting is actually a topological part of a two-sidedness, both sides of the coin, if you like, in terms, these terms of the weaponization of land, both material and symbolic, so you know, which interests, et cetera. Okay, and finally, Amiel. Again, I'll just say how much I appreciated your talk and your paper and how much I learned from it about a locale and historical situation with which I am notably less familiar, so forgive the distance. Like others, I'm sure I was especially struck by this language of farms versus plots. And then around the Kuru, which as I understand it, is a fairly large town. I think you used both terms, we might call it also a city. Is that right? About 300,000. It just became a city. Yeah, it officially became a city, yeah. So there's a whole U.S., a UN discourse about like what is a city and what is a city's. But also about, what it roughly 80 miles outside of Nairobi, more or less, I mean, something big, whatever, do the math, kilometers. But ambiguity is regarded as the point. Ambiguities were learning smallness, notwithstanding. This was actually, it was more of this in the paper, so for me, I just, you know, responding to these details. I was equally struck by the mathematical exactitude in the proportions of the plots that you described, which if I'm correct, all seen, or at least the ones you described, to adhere to a proportion about one to two, 50 by 140 by 80, and so I don't know, maybe it's sort of a series that way. If so, why? And if this proportion is relatively consistent throughout, is there some sort of logic, you know, spatial or otherwise to it? Does it, for example, is what came into my mind? Is it more easily enabled further subdivision into two adjacent squares and accommodating, for example, building on one side, yard on the other, and something like that. Or if not, are there discernible topographical properties to these plots, in addition, other properties to their plots, in addition to their size? I'm basically just layering in, trying to suggest, I'm sure you do the same thing for the rest of your work, but other dimensions to that size, and to think about the interaction. Similarly, I was also struck that, in one case at least, otherwise identical plots, this was in the paper. In terms of size, acquired different values. I think this is the family where they were extended in a line, and it depended on the proximity to the highway, where Mzé Roberto's, if I'm not saying that right, land was located closer to the highway, and therefore more valuable. So that's a topological difference. That's a difference of adjacency, just different than the topographical, kind of shape and size. So finally, if so, how do we count for the highway? Sounds like you do this, and other features of the extended landscape in all of this, since I imagine that in this case, it inscribed in that particular small plot, ultimately, at an infrastructural scale that included both Nekuru and Nairobi, to some extent, if it's the highway that's connecting them. And so in some, I'm speaking topologically rather, as you do also, just towards the conclusion of your talk in terms of expressing fragmentation versus consolidation, rather than in terms of size and shape. So of the inside-outside properties and properties of adjacency and such. So finally, can we generalize in some degree, I don't know, maybe this is asking too much, about the social and economic, so as it were, laws of subdivision here at a topological level, as well as a topographic one. In other words, is the logic of plots, you know, perhaps topographically ambiguous for the reasons that you explain, you know, I think very, very well, but topologically precise or lawful. That is in terms of what is inside, what is adjacent to what, to whom, and so on. Or in other words, the argument that where we began, socially and historically, right? Those adjacencies and those, what I'm describing, rather abstractly as topological relations, actually it seems to me code social and historical. So, that's what it's all yours. And I mean, that goes again. I think, I hold a lot, I have to look. I think that we'd like to, yeah, you spoke about the, yes, you spoke about the idea that there is no subject to the weaponization question, right? In the sense that who's weaponizing what and where did I write the weaponization? This is the problem with writing for myself. You've got to answer it. Okay, so I'm just gonna answer what I think I heard at that point, so about the question of, can I just say that when I wrote that sentence, I didn't think should this be active or passive? No, no, no. Because, but I did not, but to answer your question, because I did ask that question, I am saying that this ambiguity between land and sea has been weaponized over time. I really come from a very contemporary world view that at this point, there's something called coastal regulation zones in Mumbai where they're doing exactly what colonial logic is still continuing, where they took some land in front of the sea, which first they labeled as Bombay Municipal Corporation and the coastal regulation zones recently started naming shorelines as base. And what this did is it changed the frontage that you have to leave from 500 to 200, so you can actually build. And again, when I saw that, and there's a lot written on this, that who decides what's a shoreline and what's a base? And then I went into the CRZ, this is coastal regulations where they say, oh, what is coastal land? It is that which is touched by water or that which is affected by water and they keep changing these definitions. And it seems like they want to define it, but yet they don't wanna define it because, so that is where the organization came. And I thought during, in colonial times, the 19th century, it's so difficult to pinpoint because it was first the British and then the East India Company, but through their mapping, through cartography, first I saw the transformation of land. First you have the sea, which is shallow, we call it wasteland. We will make it, we'll reclaim it, call it reclaim then, we have a revenue survey, then it's land that is a private asset, right? East India Company has it. And they also have this statement where, we make it into smaller plots, actually that came up after a radio piece, that we don't want to release too much land into the city because the price of land will be upset. So this whole transformation process, I think was based on this vagueness or ambiguities, right? Between identifying what is land and sea, we saw that, I saw that in the cartography, I later saw that again when Premchand Roychan and the other reclamation companies were trading on land that is going to be built in the future, right? It really doesn't matter if it was made, it was traded on and that money found its way back into the city in buildings, right? Rajapetawar, which was oddly gothic. So to answer your question, I don't know. I can't pinpoint, but it came from a very contemporary look at the urbanization of sea and land and trying to define it, but all those definitions really don't mean anything. And with me also struggling with all those maps trying to find seven islands, there's five, there's four and really doesn't matter. I don't know if I answered the question. Sure, okay. And the second one, you spoke with the Eastern and Western border front. Yes, the Western border front of Mumbai was reclaimed earlier. It's the flashy marine ride where the rich people live, et cetera. And the Eastern border front was the port authority and that is the land that was reclaimed in the 19th century by reclamation companies that was purchased by the British and oddly released recently for redevelopment. And there's gonna be a lot of displacement of all people who live there. It is one of the poorest parts. Generally, I grew up in Mumbai. I have never been to that area because it was completely walled in because both authority and defense secrets, et cetera. So you didn't actually see that part of Mumbai at all. Even if you lived, maybe people lived close by. So I think the history of reclamation is also tied Mumbai's history is tied to the way these two posts developed because the Eastern coast was developed earlier. It was opened out of the Eastern coast was purchased by a British government at that point and then handed over to the port authority which held onto it until the early 2000s and released it out. I think hopefully one second, yeah. Thank you. I have no questions for you too, but I'll just, I'll just quickly respond to a couple of the more specific points that you mentioned. First of all, I just really like this idea of thinking kind of topographically, topologically about a JCC and as well as about kind of size. But in terms of this great question about the dimensions, right? Sort of too. And I'll say that that's actually very helpful for me because one thing that you really see across all of the sort of marketing material about the plot, especially the one eighth of an acre plot or it's 50 by 100 is that it is always kind of aligned with the size of the three bedroom house. So this is clearly related to some kind of middle class aspiration about what kind of house you should build and even there's a sort of sense that like everybody understands that three bedroom house is about the same size. And there's actually like tons and tons. You can buy it like on a street in Nairobi, you can buy a little pamphlet that gives you instructions for building three bedroom house, which is a very standardized kind of sense of what that is actually. And so yes, the three bedroom house which takes up almost the whole size with a small kind of kitchen or a small yard space or space for your car, which is actually more important than this. So absolutely, there is a link there that's really helpful to think about. And then in terms of, you brought up this sort of piece, this is a family who has pieces of land arranged from the highway down to the river. They're all the same size, but they have different values. And so this is a bigger question that I'm actually gonna throw back out to everybody, which is that of course, I'm speaking against kind of standardization and abstraction as necessarily logics of modernity, but of course price is the absolute abstraction which can actually bring in differences into itself and abstract them so clearly. And so in this case, price is the logic by which you can really see. So an acre is not an acre, but you can see that price nevertheless commensurates all those differences. And so this is one of the ways in which I've really actually been struggling with writing what exactly I wanna say about abstraction and alienation because I think on the one hand, I do think that there's something really important to pointing out that late capitalism is de-standardizing. Like I think that that's interesting. On the other hand, it's not necessarily de-abstracting like we have actually in extreme. We live in these, as Mark would say, these real abstractions, right? They are simultaneously social, socially mediated and abstract. So to come back to kind of your bigger question about the epistemic object of this land, which I think is really fascinating to think about it. And I say less or socially constructive and socially mediated, but also historically, I do think it's historically constructed, but not in contingent, not in purely contingent ways. Historically constructed in a way just really related to history's power. Yeah, so for me, the big question that I have, which comes back to your paper, Deepa, also is I do think about land, but I was looking more generally about capital and ask this question about, you know, how do we think about capital as an epistemic object? But also then to come back to another part of your question, do we see it as the same everywhere? Clearly land is not the same everywhere, but people tend to just talk about capital more or less as the same everywhere, more so than other things. And so I was thinking in relation to your paper, when we talked about this a little bit already, but you really see that there is a difference between imperial capital and indigenous capital. Those don't operate in exactly the same ways because the company operating on indigenous capital can go bankrupt. The company operating with the imperial capital does not get allowed to go bankrupt. And so I think, so for me, there's, yeah, just throwing that question back. That's the way I'm thinking about it. Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Wow. Questions? I've been posed to the audience. I'll start. Okay. And maybe this is to look back to your, how is land weaponized? Maybe it's more that land is turned first into a weapon in order for them to be able to weaponize land worker. It seems to me that in both your cases, you had a prehistory of that value, so price. You had a moment where that was not price because of juxtaposition or because of proximity. As it would be in any other real estate situation, but because there was soil quality. So soil quality was the value that would be used. And it was in a moment, it was in passing, and I wanted to hear more about that. And in your case, you also have this tree, which may or may not have a thing there. And it strikes me that that differentiated from other form of plantarities that are, yes, of course, subject and equalized to weapon division, whatever, and socially constructed. But where that construction has a reference, however distant in the past or however artificially constructed, which is somehow subject to natural contingencies. I mean, in your case also, you had you didn't talk about environmental contingency, land, what do you call them? I was thinking, my... Hi. Sorry. You know, water going up and down in your case. And these fertility as an idea, which is somehow brought in. So I wanted to hear about that. How does that make your, the case of the standardization or the case of the shocking kind of thing, but... And the simple is here, I can talk more about the tree, I can talk more about the utility. The tree, the tree I really don't know. I mean, it does not exist anymore, is what I found out. But to come back to, I didn't take notes, about the question value, right? With respect to these reclaimed, to the question of reclaimed lands. So there is the first question of the transformation, of course, that, you know, you take, there is sea, the sea is transformed into, you have the whole cartography, it becomes a private asset. Can you start? I'm still... You're still formulating, because the tree is not related in any way Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many things to say about fertility. I feel I also agree, it's really interesting. It's not something that I focus on that much, but I think that there's, I mean, a couple of things. So one is that fertility was a really important question for colonial, for colonial, agricultural officers. And that it was just to use the weaponization term, it was really weaponized against kind of, whatever you want to call it, indigenous tenure systems, which often argued that the form, that the specific form of grazing, because I haven't, I didn't talk that much about the kind of broader picture of settlement process, but actually, you know, the idea that what pre-existed colonial settlement was like a lot of peasants farming in smallholder agricultural ways, it actually nodded all the pace. We had much more kind of agripple, store list, tenure formats, as well as some settled agriculture, but much less settled agriculture, much more semi-settled agriculture, which resembles in that way. So then that way, the kind of contrast between the colonial land logics and pre-colonial land logics, come back again to your question about regime change, right? It resembles, to some more, what you see settler colonial studies really, really arguing for in the context of the United States, which is that what land meant was, was an incrementsable in some ways because had the way that it was used, just so different from the sort of British conceptualization of the spill farmer. So that said, so colonial, so in order to kind of, so there's two processes, right? There's first the process of just settling, and then there's a process of commodification, and those happen to some extent together, and at some extent separately, but land soil fertility is really used as an argument, a weapon against semi-settled, against mobile transhuman patterns, but actually are better. I mean, many people clearly say these are ecologically better, but it's used to say that people's cattle or people's cattle are overgrazing, and therefore ruining the quality of the soil, or these fragments, right? These fragmented holdings do not allow people to invest in the quality of their soil, or cattle wander through in ways that, again, are destructive the crops. So that fertility logic comes in there. I don't have to think more about what to say about it in terms of standardization beyond what I already said, which is sort of that, you know, it's clear that an acre is not a unit that's helpful for understanding, that is not helpful for understanding, or for equating different pieces of land, right? Because the question of the kind of soil, the quality of the soil, the level of its fertility, but also just what kinds of things can grow there, because different soils aren't better for different things. That is something, that is a kind of an inherent variability, logical variability that, again, contemporary agriculture wants to eradicate, right? You could say, like, we have fertilizer, there's many ways you can make your soil, you could just bring soil, like you can use a pile. And yeah, and so there's an effort to abolish that difference, yeah. And I did see the difference between you have the stage of agricultural land, the Mumbai that whole, that part was completely thought of. This land did not grow anything. In fact, there is the statement that, oh, the rice growing on this British water is so bad, it has to become open land. There is no transition from the sea to identifying as waste land, and then reclaiming it, creating land that can be sold. But there's absolutely, when I was reading yours, they said, there is no mention of agriculture at all. There were people who were doing agriculture, but they said the quality of the price was awful. They really should stop growing more. So it was really brackish water. I have a professional tree problem. Yes. It's the tree. Yeah, I've got one. So this tree that is no longer there, first, it had to be, I think the thing that's most shocking about it is that if I were to tell you that's meat under the tree, we have no idea what tree. So first of all, there was an idea of a tree as the landmark. And so the destruction of that tree is also, in a sense, the destruction of that form of knowledge of locating oneself in space. The other thing is that this is a banyan tree, which is, for those of you who've been in Bombay, it's just such a crazy and iconic tree, right? It has these air roots coming down. And I could be wrong about this. Please correct me if I'm wrong. They, the air roots create new trees. Yes, they do. And ecologists actually sometimes call that one tree system. So you know, you could have like, what might look to me who is not trained in those ways as not as many trees, but it's one sort of system. And so first you have this sort of system of trees becoming one tree that is identifiable, but then you even lose that kind of ability to recognize a tree as a thing, and not just some sort of, you know, a mass of greenery or, you know, something. And so there's something about that kind of shifting and understanding of that object as a known object to and replaced with maybe the Bombay Stock Exchange or whatever it is that we now recognize as a place. It's somewhere in Horniman Circle. Yeah, somewhere. But it also doesn't matter. That's why it's not any tree, but for me it is. But it did. That kind of form of knowledge has shifted. And I don't know, it makes me think about this question of why do things change because they do, you know. They do not. We cannot locate the change, but they change. But it does so much in the midst, right? I was reading some Bush Nair has spoken the origin of Bombay Stock Exchange and the tree comes up everywhere, you know. Because they could not enter the building and that is the point. The key was they could not trade in the existing architecture or whatever the buildings that the British, so they have to meet under the tree, very close to the port. And the choice of the tree, there was also a lot written on that. Oh, it was very close to the port where the cotton was circulated. This was in a position there. You can see movement. It is literally inside of transaction. And that's where people meet, right? For shade. And I like what you said. I never thought about the specificity of the tree. I think they have had it. I mean, yeah. I don't know. I didn't see it. I don't know. If you want to go first. Oh, sorry. Okay. So thank you both for this great talk. So I just wanted to ask more about practices of naming in the story that you both know. It seems like in the origin of this baking plan, there's this sort of process in which something is named in a particular way that allows a whole machinery, sort of a technical and economic logic to be deployed, either baseline versus sea or shamba versus the plot. So I'm sort of curious if you could both say more about how this sort of discursive element interacts with these other levels in this process that may be related to something that's valuable, saleable, and as a sort of cognitive accumulation. Fantastic question. I mean, I can, but I also think that you, like this exactly, just if you could say a little more about this idea of just the weird word, reclamation. Yeah. I think that would be it. I was phrasing, I think that comes back to, you're right, throughout the history of reclamation, especially this idea of making land and you have to map it. In mapping, you have to name it. And when you name it, you name it with certain ways that are acceptable and those names get attached to. So at some point they said drowned land and wasteland means this land can be taken over. It is nobody's land, nobody's building anything there. And this origin of drowned and wasteland, of course, as Brenna Hunder says, that wasteland itself is an idea that it is a form of, it is a way to take land. But the second part of the story that what we're saying about reclamation, my mind is the idea of reclamation itself is trying to find the origin of the word reclaimed itself. Why is there this attachment to this thing that we're taking land that existed before? There is a question of, there is violence even in the terminology that they have, right? The pushing the sea away, driving the showers away. And the question of reclaiming means it existed before. And I think Amil saw this strange back and forth because there is a question of future that underlies this whole paper, right? There's a question of imagining a city that would be a great city because it's remote and nobody would attack them. Then there is the futures that was traded on, right? That they, the whole reclamation company, the shares were running on land that was never made. So there was the question of future. But also reclaimed comes down to this past as though there was land and it was ours and we're just taking it back. So throughout all of them, there is the question of the future and there is also this question of acceptable terminology. And I see that again in coastal regulations which I look at, then shore is worse than Bay. I don't know why. So why is shore requiring 500 liters where Bay is requiring 100 liters? So, yes. Yeah, I mean, I just, just to say a little more about your paper, I think that the reclamation, the term reclamation is just so fascinating. And I was, while you were talking just now, I was really thinking about the way that it naturalizes land as the kind of base, the baseline for what territory is, right? So even though it's actually very clear that land did not pre-exist the sea in that place. Right. Nevertheless, the description of reclamation makes it seem as though we are just sort of getting back what is ours versus in this very adversarial way against the sea versus like making something new. And I think that's, I just think that there's something, I think there's even more you could think about with respect to why that term of getting back versus what we knew. Yeah. And again, I think there is like, there's something important about them, that like taking it like this very adversarial logic about it. And about the plot, I mean, I think that's a great question. I think it's actually part of the question that I'm really puzzling over right now is to what extent does it make a difference that this thing is called the plot rather than a Shamba? And is it a difference that makes a difference, right? And I think that it is, but I can't, I'm not sure that I fully figured out exactly why. I think that on the one hand, I think that there is people are not everywhere, like the commodification of land is different in different parts of Kenya. The native reserves have much more ancestral land that has never, the former native reserves that has never been marketized, but still commodification of land is not anything new, right? But I nevertheless think that in order to kind of separate and extract land from a certain set of social relations that are at least ideologized via ancestral connection, even when they're not, I think that the switch of term is important. Like I think that that's meaningfully important in kind of permitting land to become something else. And that's why I think this encoding around size is also important because I think that that kind of an imaginary of something as small is significant because there is a lot of resistance to selling land when it's family land. And people continually spoke to me in the logic sort of when they were doing the logic kind of defending themselves. So, you know, we need to sell lands or an often and I hadn't really talked about this subdivision is actually not necessarily, it's not really the only way that things are happening. So a lot of one thing that people do a lot is just sell a small piece of their land. You know, and they'll say something like, you know, what's the point of me sitting here cold and hungry on my land? Let me let this piece circulate, right? So it's piece will be cut off and circulated. And so I think this also like a slightly different imagination around what that partition is. And I think that the word is important but I'm not totally sure to be honest. You know, there's, you could describe this in a political economic way without it all mentioning. Plus. And I would like to ask you when I read your essay, which I mentioned to you that I was very fascinated that she talks about decomposition where I use the word transformation, right? And when she used decomposition that you say that it becomes from agricultural land to real estate, it's a process of decomposition. Would you speak about that? Because I was very struck by that, the idea of decomposition there. Yeah, I think, I mean, like I said, I sort of use the word, and not in any very precise technical way, but to indicate that what is happening when land becomes pot is not just the sort of dividing of something up into smaller pieces, right? But it is actually the rupture of a certain set of ideas and meanings. And land use practices associated with a particular kind of land that get then like be composed into this smaller. So that's why it's coming back to your levels and just remembering that I was comparing the maps and the maps prepared by locals at that point had no labels, the water had fish. It was completely different from this very organized, this name means this, and that is attached to some legal acquiring of land. And those maps were very different than stuff. First of all, thank you all. It's sort of your tools, which are both different. And if I couldn't hear it incorrectly, I mean, I'll say something about it, we'll go through that in a second. So I was just wondering if, and it could work exactly to those views, but it seems to me that these two stories about how land was made is more about constructing legal trend in the name of example, and executive. And I mean, just in the way that the plots are managed and by them and sold and so on, and working in the way that you said, constantly money was parked in the big land and that was strongly needed and so on. So I just wonder if one way to understand the sort of imperial, imperial capital, the native capital of these kids is to look at our wiggle room may not work for the riser, right? It's a sense, and the way in which we kind of assess the law is brought into place of restrictions or liberty and so on. So clearly we look at the map of the claim or the color of the white and the black, so to say. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. I'm thinking about it right now. Well, I haven't thought about yours. We met before, we discussed each other's paper. No, but I do, I really think that there's, I don't know if this is exactly the same thing as wiggle room, but the fact that... What exactly is big wiggle room? Well, when I'm talking about it, I just mean that there is this gap which becomes, I think, commercially significant in the translation between the different metrics and that specifically the translation, I mean, everybody buying land is told to make sure you look at the hectare, the amount of hectares is actually on the title deed because somebody's gonna sell this to you as 50 by 100 and then they're gonna write some other kind of decimal number on your title deed and that might actually not have aligned and so you gotta really check. And so I think that that's where I was mentioning wiggle room, but more broadly, I mean, I love opening it out as a kind of broader question around sort of what the role of ambiguity and ambivalence plays and I think that for the question of what kind of land reclaimed land is and why it is available for speculation, why it is exciting to think about the future but also why it works in the way that it does historically as something which has not yet come into being and which likely will but might not, I think that that wiggle room around the sort of, yeah, the ambivalence of that space between land and sea, the intertidal zone is really interesting to think about. Even the usage of the word, ambiguity, I think I said, is it vague vagueness or is it, you know, something that is deliberately not? And as the other geographer said, oh, it's a deliberate misinterpretation that was made for colonial give and take and this sort of ambiguity is clearly necessary to make this sort of trading in the future as possible, right? That you really don't want to identify these two areas because like the plan that said, oh, it really depends upon the vantage point, you rule this from, if it's a title, title patterns may mean it's ocean and that day you will draw ocean there and the day during the monsoons it will be ocean too. But the question of ambiguity and wiggle room is pretty interesting and not spend too much time on it. I mean, maybe the opposite is not accuracy but sort of certainty. There is definitely certainty that the government must be accelerated. It was, I guess the 1950s document that they had a plan for accelerating jobs, right? Accelerating subdivisions. Intensify. Intensify, right. So that's a certainty. And you're ambiguity is not numerical, it's kind of elemental. Like, is it cotton or is it a Gothic building? Is it land or is it watered? But there is a certainty that development will happen that speculation will happen. So it seems like also the wiggle room is nice because it's for the sake of something. For the sake of, for score, there will be a two-story house or a three-dimensional house in this spot. Yeah. But also, I mean, to come back to this, like to run the initial questioning, also that, you know, that this isn't land that pre-existed. So therefore whoever makes it claims it, right? And that's really important. So to be able to say, well, we're not really sure what this is that allows for somebody to be an actor to claim it. In a very clear way, like, well, I created it, you know? So. Yeah, it was fun with that. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I was just wondering, like, on this topic of this ambiguous speculation with the kind of wonderful, super complex line between us with these ideas of land-side, social construction there and coding, how could that then be applied to conceptualizing property in the visual space? I applaud it for revoking the buzzword. But what does it mean to kind of build and conceptualize land and sort of the metaverse without a decouple from agricultural roots and how might we read political significance and fertility of such share utility? Hey, what are you talking about? Elevators. Elevators. Well, it's a fun thing to do. Yeah, I'm going to say. Have fun. At level of, like, ability to answer this, sort of that, like, I feel like that comes into, like, the, what do we do now? A question that you're asking this. Well, I, I don't know. I, maybe, but I've been trying it. What's that? You can do it. I can't trust you in the internet. No, I mean, It's talking about actual, like, metaverse land. Metaverse land, right? Yeah. I didn't even know land was solar. Yeah, yeah, I know this. They're fine in selling it, too. Oh, that's probably the problem. Well, wherever. It's not a topological problem, right? This isn't even heard of it. It's not a topological problem. But if I'm not able to, like, just, like, please say, Yeah, yeah. I would be then conceptualized, this idea of, like, it's a rachlamination of the creation. Yeah, I mean, what I was going to say is that the only, the only starting place I can sort of think is to do the kind of work that D.P.O. is doing, right. And to look at the metaphors, right? What metaphors are being used to, to bring into being and articulate a claim to this space. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, can I just, okay, I'll just fill the void for a minute, but I think that just to add to such a two production for, you know, imagination of the other kind of things, because somebody's producing this, and, you know, literally in terms of not just the metaphor of some space out there, but somebody's writing that code. And so that might be going to start. I have a question for Emil, but maybe, well, I was wondering about the reliability of the sales. I think it comes from other places than just government or companies. But I mean, I mean, in particular, you talked about people having kind of like a resignation, like who they are selling to have to. But I'm wondering if there's something else there about, you know, the housing that are being built and the desire to inform the city of the class that we're doing those things with you or with the people that you're talking to. I mean, from the, from the same person who's selling their land? Yeah, if it's done in other ways than just like, oh, I have to, but maybe they're really well-known. Yeah, so in the in the longer version of the paper, I talk about two particular places and one of them, the story of this household that I lived with, who in the process of, I mean, yeah, first lived with them about a decade ago. So in the time intervening, the patriarch has really shifted from I will never sell my land to gradually selling and selling and selling. And I the first time it happened, I was so shocked. I was really shocked. And but people in the family, because it meant that in this kind of one household compound, which was then subdivided among the three sons and the patriarch. So I had to sort of, somebody was literally going to be coming and building their own house right in the middle, right in the middle. And so I was very surprised, but actually the household, the household took it as kind of as a relief. I think that being so close to your relatives is not always ideal. Is this the album? And so they like largely, I mean, and it was also the the ideological defense was also where we're selling land, but we're also buying more and more land elsewhere. And so, you know, we're not completely giving up on the land by doing this. But yeah, I think people really thought of it as a kind of belief. So I think there's just to say that there are many reasons for which people want to sell land. I do think that the most common that I've come across is encountering some kind of medical emergency and or school fees. Those two things are what lead to people telling their land the most. But there is, understandably, this social form of the household is not actually that fun a lot of the time. And so people want to get out. And so there is there is some there is some desire for this commodification as a means of getting out. It's your production production. And it isn't the labor question that other means last night. Well, yes, because you mentioned much earlier metrics by which you know, yeah, metrics which helps which are carried within them a certain type of labor. You know, the theater, you know, the amount of undershink we have. We've done this change we have, which are basically measured to the amount that a single ox could enroll in one. So there's something about learning this fertility and pre even a pre imperial phase where we imagine that it can't be counted in the way to labor. And that gets increasingly detached. But in both of your cases that sound like there's so much preparation for markets. And that on the part of people who are taking out cotton of their that has to qualify in some way as a type of practice that is then makes land. All these people who are somehow preparing reading on the internet, what is inside that they're watching those videos. What is that? Exactly. That's labor in some way. Yeah. Before you sell your land. And similarly, you have to pull out. I mean, you didn't talk about it that much. So many people, but there have to be practices that somehow are equivalent to like I have to send anyone. And I don't need it, but it's worth it. I mean it in terms of carrying the quality. And we make it different than others. To your question kind of with that. Certainly. That's a dimension. So do you see it that way? It's like kind of work that you are doing. You feel we must, you know, labor a way to prepare their assets. I think absolutely. I don't know that it's that it's, I think absolutely there's work. There's absolutely work like this very material and very meaningful. Then that's the again, this is my interest in the plot. Like I think that's a kind of meaningful work also that people are doing to make it, to make the land available. And that means that it's a lot of social work too. It's a making. It's a making. Yeah. I have one question. I had one question for Ramiya, which I found in your essay where you say that, you know, forms of sociality that are invested in agricultural land could not disappear. Right. Once it's commodified, it continues. It exists. They are reworked. Could you, I could you speak a little bit about how they coexist, right? That, you know, this to the socially constructed forms of public land. They are coexisting or reworked into, you know, even after commodification. Yeah. Well, we talked a little bit about land title in particular. And particularly in the debates around De Soto and land titling, that there is sometimes more emphasis put on the impact of land titling. I mean, not merely for its like, you know, liberal dimensions, but that actually what it means to have title doesn't, doesn't mean entirely that you actually have full ownership. So in the case of the same household that I've been talking about, every member or every male adult member of the household who could have had their land through title, their father gave them the titles when he gave them the land. But nevertheless, he the patriarch was the one who oversaw all of the sales, including one that I talked about, which was a sort of much more of an expulsion out of another part of the family. And it didn't matter that he nevertheless, he nevertheless oversaw it through these kind of the sort of, they're called customary, you know, I think that's a tricky term, but customary traditional logics around who is the one who has the right to that land. And so, I mean, the one, I don't want to talk too much, but the one thing I'll say is that I think that the importance of title can be overstated. It's not sort of factual. And to speak about you know, I'm sorry, I'm interrupting. Well, when you were speaking about labor, which I was thinking, I could not find anything but the actual labor of recognition, right? When I was looking, yes, that was the only thing I found where, you know, there is, there are these maps that talk about this process through the processes of naming. Then there is these companies that are trading on the futures and there is this family tree, but there's very little on who were the, who was the labor. I mean, where did these reclamation companies are? Were they locals? Were they not? How, and the only acceptance of, I mean, only time labor was brought in was when they say, oh, we need to outsource this risk, that there is too much risk, there's too much labor, there's too much movement of soil, et cetera, and we need to bring it in. And that is something I've been looking for. I was questioning, there is a lot of labor in creating this land. And it must have been that one photograph is the only one I have. If the theme is transformation, you could also talk about labor that in the United States suddenly was no longer, you know, giving cotton for this. Yes, yes, yes. So it doesn't have to be the little labor. Yeah, yeah. So we have come to our end. Thank you so much for coming and for discussing. Thank you, Brian, all for responding. Thank you to the Zoom audience for sharing with our security states. And thank you to all for coming. Take some cookies on the way out.