Inhabiting the afterlives of extended urbanization in Noida, India: The hauntings of housing in a city stretched between the state and capital
Thursday, 11 September 2025 | 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. | Room 519, Fifth Floor, Kaneff Tower, Keele Campus, York University
With Devra Waldman, Florida State University
The New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (Noida), a satellite of Delhi within the National Capital Region, has long been framed as a solution to Delhi’s industrial, housing, and urban challenges. Governed by a CEO and Board appointed by the Uttar Pradesh state government, Noida lacks municipal electoral representation; instead, it has served as a site for ambitious experiments in land and housing. This paper examines how the state and real estate developers have reconfigured Noida’s imaginary from state-led housing and industry to an investible, privatized real estate destination. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research, I investigate why 63% of housing units remain incomplete, unbuilt, or hollow “ghost” structures despite aggressive state-led land acquisition between 2005 and 2018. Grounded in theories of extended urbanization (Monte-Mor, 2014) and urban extensions (Simone et al., 2023), I argue that these incomplete projects—often dismissed as failures—nonetheless generate unexpected forms of inhabitation. They reveal how urban extensions unfold through uncertainty, insolvency, and persistent material incompletion, while being appropriated and negotiated in diverse, surprising ways
Devra Waldman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sport Management at Florida State University. Her research interests revolve around the contested terrain of land acquisition and real estate development, environmental aesthetics, politics of physical culture in the imagination of urban space, and urban inhabitation in postcolonial urban contexts. She has published on these topics in journals such as the <i>Annals of the American Association of Geographers</i>, <i>International Journal of Urban and Regional Research</i>, and <i>Progress in Human Geography</i>. She is also an editor of the <i>SAGE Handbook on Qualitative Methods in Sport and Physical Culture</i>.
This event is presented by The City Institute and the York Centre for Asian Research.
