Nitin Bathla

Last Name

Bathla

First Name

Nitin

ORCID

0000-0001-9074-8108

Organisational unit

01059 - Lehre Architektur

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Publications1 - 10 of 35

The atmospheres of massiveness: The politics and times of the maybe in Southern megaregions
Akoth, Steve Ouma; Anwar, Nausheen; Bathla, Nitin; et al. (2024)
The Geographical Journal
In this introduction to the special issue on massive urbanisation, the collective that has prepared this issue reviews the thinking and experiences that have been important to them. The reflections centre on the use of ‘massive’ in Jamaican patois, where it has two countervailing meanings. On the one hand, it means an inordinate lack of sensitivity to the real conditions taking place, a sense of extreme self- inflation beyond reason. On the other, it means a collectivity coming into being without a set form, but reflective of a desire for collaboration and mu-tuality. Massive urbanisation thus means here both the voluminous expansion of speculative accumulation, extraction of land value, replication of vast inequities and disfunction, and the continuous emergence of new forms of urban inhabitation, a constant remaking of the social field by what has been called the urban majority. All of the contributions attempt to work with this sense of doubleness, amplifying the creation of particular atmospheres of the urban as a materiality of its heterogeneity.
Cities of Lights: Nocturnal Desires on a Luminous Planet
Bathla, Nitin (2025)
Desired Landscapes
What comes to mind when one hears “City of Lights”? While the term most commonly refers to Paris, over thirty other cities also lay claim to this title – including Eindhoven, due to its association with the light bulb manufacturer Philips; Los Angeles, known for its Hollywood lights; Medina, referred to as the Radiant City; Lucerne, called Leuchtenstadt; Varanasi, known as the Luminous City; and Lyon, often referred to as La Ville des Lumières.
Lively cities: a review in the minor key
Bathla, Nitin (2024)
Urban Geography
Agrarian Urbanism and the Politics of Food and Land
Bathla, Nitin (2025)
NSL Newsletter
Delhi without borders: A critique of everyday life under extended urbanisation
Bathla, Nitin (2021)
Concomitant with India’s spectacular economic growth following the 1990s liberalisation reforms, the Indian countryside, too, has witnessed exceedingly profound transformations. Departing at this spatio-historical conjuncture, this dissertation seeks to critically examine planetary entanglements within the ongoing urbanisation of agrarian land and commons in India through focusing on the transformations in the extended urban region of Delhi, specifically. Employing a transductive and critical ethnographic approach, this research pieces together large-scale urban processes through bringing local frictions and conflicts into a planetary perspective. Precisely, it attempts to locate the role of architecture and urban strategies in enabling global capital accumulation mediated through the production of cheap land, cheap labour, and cheap nature. It does so firstly through following the transformation of existing agrarian villages into tenement towns through the planned exclusion of unprofitable infrastructures, such as workers’ housing, under extended urbanisation. It investigates, in particular, the role that such grey zones play in helping maintain a mobile surplus labour force over an extensive urban fabric, necessary for low-cost global manufacturing. Secondly, this research follows the rapid rollout of economic and infrastructure corridors across India, which are emerging to bypass the still-unfinished land corridors. It locates precisely the role they play in differentially opening agrarian land and commons for enclosure and urbanisation through fabricating the preconditions for exercising India’s eminent domain laws. Thirdly, the study follows the production of extended urban nature through the consolidation and simplification of ecological commons into nature protected areas. This follows, crucially, the semantic construction of ecological commons as ‘wastelands’, which can then be operationalised for new cycles of value extraction through programmes such as carbon trading schemes. Finally, it discusses alternative ecologies and practices of commoning in the unintended landscapes produced under extended urbanisation, through following the adaptive strategies of transhumant pastoral itinerants. In these explorations, this dissertation journeys across multiple scales, spaces, and times, exploring how colonial and postcolonial traces are consecutively redeployed under extended urbanisation.
Political action beyond the city
Kipfer, Stefan; Markaki, Metaxia; El-Husseiny, Momen; et al. (2023)
Extending dialogues on the urban
Simone, AbdouMaliq; Somda, Dominique; Torino, Giulia; et al. (2025)
Dialogues in Human Geography
Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities in increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logic of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, movement and settlement, centre and periphery, and time and space.
India's Highway Revolution
Bathla, Nitin (2022)
The Architectural Review ~ Transit
Nature and the extended city: Wasteland governmentality, the sacred, and anti-wasteland politics in the Aravalli region
Bathla, Nitin (2024)
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
Wasteland governmentality has long shaped colonial and postcolonial landscape governance across the planet. While historically wasteland classification was deployed for agrarian land settlement and silviculture, with extended urbanisation it is increasingly used to consolidate landscapes of extended urban nature. These landscapes are in turn subjected to state-led land enclosures for urban and infrastructure development and for greenwashing. This paper investigates the political construction of one such landscape of extended urban nature, the Aravalli region, a geological feature which runs parallel to the extended corridor urbanisation in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR). Particularly, I examine how in the name of regulating mining, urban development, and pollution in the Delhi NCR, the revenue wastes including sacred groves, hills, and other village commons falling in the Aravallis have been consolidated as a state space. I examine how the patchwork of communities assembled in the extended urban fabric of the region deploys the sacred to counter land enclosure and the emptying out of meaning. I discuss three such modalities of the sacred in the region, namely, its use by agrarian villages to assert land rights over sacred forests, the misuse of the sacred by temple committees to produce faux nature, and its use by emergent urban environmental movements in the region to frame an anti-wasteland politics. Focusing my attention on the state, I discuss the need for a nuanced understanding of emergent urban environmentalism in the region as restorative commoning beyond the binary framings of bourgeois versus the poor.
A Methodological Pluriverse: An Introduction
Bathla, Nitin (2024)
Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies

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