I am an interdisciplinary geographer interested in the technologies and tactics through which mass displacement is conceived, justified and enacted. My research uses the contemporary politics of urban renewal in India to challenge conventional theories of economic transition, city planning, and political rule. I taught for two years at the London School of Economics before joining Rutgers in 2012. I served as the Director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers from 2013-2020. I am currently an editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and am a 2023–24 Fulbright–Nehru Fellow in India.
I am the author or editor of three books and have published widely on subaltern urbanism, environmental politics, aesthetic governmentality, property, and the uses and limits of gentrification theory.
Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class CIty Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork on mass slum demolitions in Delhi, India. It uses aspirational efforts to transform Delhi into a world-class city to show how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to govern space. The practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms – what I call "rule by aesthetics" – allowed the state to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, declaring slums illegal because they looked illegal, shopping malls “planned” because they looked planned.
More recently, I have worked on the politics of extreme air pollution exposure in Delhi, "the world's most air-polluted city" (WHO 2014), to expose the ethics of the Anthropocene to the challenge of postcolonial justice. This project asks how new patterns in urban planning call for an atmospheric reconsideration of the city. Articles and ongoing collaborations focus, inter alia, on the history of racialized pulmonary medicine, the extension of residential models of segregation into new "premium atmospheres" in gated communities, the city as air conditioner, and new claims to atmospheric citizenship.
I also recently started new research in Central New York on migrant labor camps, carrying out oral history interviews with farmworkers living in the backs of orchards or beside barns on farms. Combined with case law review, the project uses the frameworks of informal housing and improvised infrastructures – drawn from my experience with worker housing in India – to explore immigrant and housing rights in rural America and migrant tactics of everyday placemaking amidst an intensifying surveillance regime on the US's northern border.
I regularly teach graduate seminars in urban theory and have taught the large School of Arts and Sciences Signature course called "Cities" since 2016, an introduction to global urbanism through a multi-media study of cities from the streets up.
My 2023-2024 Fulbright project explores "digital enclosures," or how new digital property registration systems seek to translate and transfer collective and customary land rights into private property.
Education:
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley. 2010.
M.A. University of California, Berkeley. 2004.
B.A. Colby College, 2001.
Recent Courses:
450:250: Cities
450:363: Geography of Development
450:516: Urban Natures
450:516: Urban Geography: Dis/Possession
450:605:03: Critical Ethnographies of Power and Hegemony
450:620: The Urban Revolution
450:516: Subaltern Urbanism
Selected Publications:
- Ghertner, D. A. (2023) Infrastructures of Overlordship: Law, Labor Camps, and the Material Geographies of Servitude. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113(6): 1483–1500.
- Waldman, D. and Ghertner, D. A. (2023) The Enclaved Body: Crises of Personhood and the Embodied Geographies of Urban Gating. Progress in Human Geography 47(2): 280–297.
- Crowley, T. and D. A. Ghertner (2022) Itinerant Urbanization: On Circles, Fractals and the Critique of Segmented Space. Environment and Planning D 40(4): 646–663.
- Ghertner, D. A. and R. Lake (eds.) (2021) Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Ghertner, D. A. (2021) Postcolonial Atmospheres: Air's Coloniality and the Climate of Enclosure. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111(5): 1483–1502.
- Ghertner, D. A. (2020) Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44(4): 561–581.
- Ghertner, D. A. and S. Govil. (2020) Infrastructures of Care in India's Citizenship Battle. Society and Space.
- Ghertner, D. A., McFann, H., & D. Goldstein (eds.) (2020) Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Read our Introduction here.
- Ghertner, D. A. (2020) Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life Amidst Delhi's Polluted Airs. Public Culture 32(1): 133–162.
- Ghertner, D. A. (2017) When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(3): 731-750.
- Ghertner, D. A. (2015) Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Ghertner, D. A. (2015) Why Gentrification Theory Fails in ‘Much of the World.’ City 19 (4): 546–556
- Ghertner, D.A. (2012) Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle-Class discourses of a Slum-Free Delhi. Antipode 44(4): 1161-1187
- Ghertner, D. A. (2011) Gentrifying the State, Gentrifying Participation: Elite Governance Programs in Delhi. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(3): 504-532.
- Ghertner, D. A. (2010) Calculating without Numbers: Aesthetic Governmentality in Delhi's Slums. Economy and Society 39 (2): 185-217.
Current Students: Thomas Crowley, Stuti Govil, Sadaf Javed, Raymond Jennings, Hudson McFann, Sweta Xess
Former PhD Students and Post-docs: Sangeeta Banerji, Sam Bowden Akbari, Ben Gerlofs, Alison Horton Schaeffing, Priti Narayan, Devra Waldman
