Making Land in the Age of Urbanization

In the second half of 2025, Centre post-doctoral researcher Megan Eardley  will begin a new research project with Alla Vronskaya (University of Kassel) and Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia University) entitled "Making Land in the Age of Urbanization."

Project Description

Attending critically to design histories of the rural, the countryside, and the hinterland, we question why and how land has been conceived, studied, and shaped as the opposite of the modern city within modern bureaucratic regimes. We aim to historicize this process while questioning its epistemological framework, by developing a program to understand land as a spatial construct-- rather than simply a technical-legal product or source of political conflict. Our studies of land-making in the Soviet bloc, Non-Aligned Movement, and Afro-Marxist states provide a starting point for a comparative analysis that will engage scholars working on other geographies where land planning and design was driven by a similar set of economic principles and planning methods, often developed in the course of direct international collaborations. We propose a global interdisciplinary comparative analysis that will expand beyond our personal regional fields of expertise (Africa, Asia, Europe, and Eurasia) and solicit conversation with other scholars to bring competing references for rural development into dialogue.

This project is supported by the Volkswagen Foundation Open Up  funding initiative.