Below is the abstract and link to my PhD dissertation (2025) from the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. I am grateful to my PhD adviser, Prof. Stephen Young (Geography), and my PhD committee members, Prof. Kris Olds (Geography), Prof. Matt Turner (Geography), Prof. Mou Banerji (History), and Prof. Claire Wendland (Anthropology), for their kindness, generosity, and support in seeing this project to its fruition.

ABSTRACT

This dissertation project draws on two years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in India and the
UAE to critically examine how the changing built environment of city-regions in India intersects
with wider circuits of transnational migration, capital investment, and resource extraction in the
climate change era. The starting point for my research is Kochi, the largest city in the south Indian
State of Kerala, and one that has been experiencing an acceleration in the construction of “worldclass”
infrastructures over the last two decades. Beginning from a single infrastructure construction
site, I deployed a “follow the thing” methodology to trace the translocal networks of money,
materials, and labor that are producing new roads, flyovers, malls, and condominiums in Kochi.
This methodological approach took me to real estate expos in Dubai, UAE, sand extraction sites
in the ecologically sensitive Western Ghat mountains of south India, and migrant worker camps in
Kochi’s peripheries. There is rich literature examining the circuits of finance and expertise that
connect aspiring “world cities” of the Global South through the concept of “worlding”, showing
how they inter-reference and compete with one another to attract transnational capital for
infrastructure projects. In contrast, my work starts from the mundane built environment of one
such infrastructure project to develop a more complex set of social and environmental
relationalities that link Kochi’s rapid transformation to wider geographies and longer histories in
uneven and contradictory ways. My work draws attention to emerging remittance investment
patterns and discreet plantation logics in Kochi’s urban landscape that have long connected Indian
cities to other parts of the Indian Ocean rim much before the advent of neoliberal globalization.
My dissertation offers a postcolonial decentering of economic geography and global urban studies
by situating uneven urban development and environmental injustice in India within the diverse
cultures of the Indian Ocean world.