Sand, plantation urbanism and the extended political ecology of infrastructures in India

Menon, Siddharth (2025) Sand, plantation urbanism and the extended political ecology of infrastructures in India. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. ISSN 0309-1317

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Abstract

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have witnessed widespread sand extraction from rural sites for urban infrastructure projects, causing extensive environmental damage. Critical scholarship has theorized these sites as new extractive frontiers that facilitate the needs of green energy transitions and planetary urbanization. In this article, I offer a postcolonial decentering of this narrative by examining the commodity chain of ‘m-sand’ or manufactured sand, which binds urban infrastructures in Kochi city in Kerala, India to sand extraction sites in the rural Western Ghat mountain ecologies of southwest India. I argue that sand extraction sites are better analyzed through the lens of ‘plantation urbanism’, a concept that accounts for the failure of colonial-era Western Ghat plantation economies in the free-market era and their ensuing conversion to sand extraction sites. Plantation urbanism also foregrounds how colonial plantation logics shape the production of urban space in Kochi via sand's commodity chain.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Geography and Environment
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor T Technology > TN Mining engineering. Metallurgy G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences
Date Deposited:	24 Jun 2025 07:57
Last Modified:	24 Jun 2025 19:00
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/128542

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