Highway urbanization and Land conflicts: the challenges to decentralization in India

Much of the urban growth in developing countries is taking place along infrastructure corridors that connect cities. the villages along these corridors are frenzied and contested sites for the consolidation and conversion of agricultural lands for urban uses. the scale of changes along these corridors is larger than the political jurisdiction of local governments, and new regional institutions are emerging to manage land consolidations at this corridor scale. this article compares two inter-urban highways in India and the hybrid regional institutions that manage them: the BangaloreMysore corridor, regulated by parastatals, and the Pune-nashik corridor, by cooperatives. It traces the emergence of parastatals and cooperatives to the turn of the twentieth century, the ways in which these old institutions are being reworked to respond to the contemporary challenges of highway urbanization, and the winners and losers under these new institutional arrangements. I use the term “negotiated decentralization” to more accurately capture the back-and-forth negotiations between local, regional and state-level actors that leads to context-specific regional institutions like the parastatals and cooperatives.