About

D. Asher Ghertner is a professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University with research interests spanning urban geography, development and displacement, political ecology, aesthetic politics, ethnography, and postcolonialism, particularly in India. He is an interdisciplinary geographer who investigates the technologies and tactics through which mass displacement is conceived, justified, and enacted, using the contemporary politics of urban renewal in India to challenge conventional theories of economic transition, city planning, and political rule. Ghertner has taught at the London School of Economics before joining Rutgers in 2012 and served as the Director of the South Asian Studies Program from 2013 to 2020. He is an editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and is a 2023–24 Fulbright–Nehru Fellow in India. His scholarly work includes authoring and editing three books and publishing widely on topics such as subaltern urbanism, environmental politics, aesthetic governmentality, property, and gentrification theory. Notable publications include 'Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi' and 'Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life,' which explore themes of city-making, security, and land commodification through ethnographic and theoretical lenses. His recent projects focus on the politics of extreme air pollution in Delhi, atmospheric justice, and migrant labor camps in Central New York, examining issues of urban planning, environmental justice, and migrant tactics within surveillance regimes.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Ecology
• Microeconomics
• Environmental ethics
• Law
• Economics
• Economic system
• Geography
• Economy
• Political economy
• Economic geography
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy
• Art

Selected publications

• Introduction: Volume 43, issue 5

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2025-09-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Scripts, scribes and scribbles: notes on drafting the South Asian city

  City · 2024-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper explores the framework of ‘city drafting’ used in this Special Feature to highlight the inscriptive and documentary processes underpinning property making in South Asia. It considers two senses of drafting: as provisional and iterative writing process that sees texts as objects in motion, and as the technical art of drawing, notation, and inscriptional verification. It argues that the papers in this Special Feature, through their focus on city drafting, demonstrate the continuity of what Raman [2012. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] calls ‘document raj, ’ or a colonial bureaucratic system that grounds the logic of property in documentary possession and that administers property through specific dispositions to writing. How property is known and hence possessed rests on a certain grammatology of the state, which can be understood through three ethnographic objects: scripts, or the historically specific orthographic and inscriptive rules for how property is written; scribes, or the bureaucrats and associated technical experts whose graphical and grammatalogical knowledges shape how property is made and unmade; and scribbles, or the notations, jottings, and markings that indexically draw land and documents into different relations. This Special Feature’s ethnographic focus on these three objects reveals the embeddedness of contemporary property and city making mechanisms in colonial documentary practices, thereby showing the epistemological limits of private property both in global metropolitan theory and as fungible economic form.

  PublisherDOI

• Postcolonial repetitions: Distant time in the imaginary of India’s smart cities

  Dialogues in Human Geography · 2024-11-21 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This commentary uses contemporary Hindi cinema to suggest that the strange cosmologies of building files in India and the repetitions and re-narrations of past events that structure the letters and petitions that compose those files are steeped in a wider (post)colonial literary–cinematic imaginary. The technics of time richly explored in Ayona Datta's essay are hence shaped by and shape cultural forms, such as films and state development narratives. The promises of the future smart city cannot be understood outside of the repetitions and deferrals of the past city or the affectively saturated notions of temporality prominent in such cultural forms. Perhaps the fantasy of planning the smart city is as speculative and surreal, as nostalgic of colonial pasts, and as saturated in phantasmic affects, as Bollywood heroism.

  PublisherDOI

• The new informality? The financialization of informal housing as a parasitic relation (2023) Plenary Commentary

  Urban Geography · 2024-10-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

  Progress in Human Geography · 2023-02-06 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  This essay analyzes embodied experiences of enclaving. It argues that by tracking revolutions in built form that gating enacts, urban geography has simultaneously tracked revolutions in urban subjectivity. It highlights three enclaved “body types” within existing literature: securitized bodies in fortressed cities, performative bodies in consumptive enclaves, and hygienic bodies in purified zones. It then offers three ethnographic scenes of gating related to new crises of personhood: metabolic illness, atmospheric breakdown, and resurgent ethno-nationalism. Attention to the psychic forces behind gating, it finally argues, can further show the gender, class, and ethnic underpinnings of what appear as generic architectural zones.

  PublisherDOI

• <scp>SOUTH ASIAN URBAN CLIMATES</scp>: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons

  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2023-04-20 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. We look analytically and linguistically from this region to engage the terms ‘mahaul’, ‘mausam’ and ‘aab‐o‐hawa’ as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory and embodied registers. Gathered together, the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam) and sociomaterial entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab‐o‐hawa). An expansive yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. This essay on South Asian urban climates provides an analytical frame based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms provide evidence of a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates—in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infrastructures of Overlordship: Law, Labor Camps, and the Material Geographies of Servitude

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2023-04-24 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines how the law codifies infrastructural risks into the farm–labor relation, subjecting farmworkers living in U.S. migrant labor camps to conditions considered illegal in otherwise similar residential geographies. To do so, it explores how the labor camp operates as an infrastructure to maximize harvest, arrange labor availability, and embed overlordship—the power to direct other human potentialities through control of their total environment—in a contained geography wherein access to water, shelter, and bodily security is conditional on the employment relation. Using case law pertaining to labor camps in New York, it analyzes the racializing effects of mundane technicalities such as how heating and water systems are inspected, sanitary code is enforced, and housing is classified. Building on insights on infrastructural forms of racial power, it shows how housing and utility systems cement overlordship into the operational landscape of U.S. agriculture and food systems via both the broader immigrant surveillance apparatus and farmworkers’ exclusion from the common-law protections “ordinary” tenants enjoy, such as locally enforced building codes and safety standards. It finds that geographic isolation, infrastructural disconnection, and uneven code enforcement materialize “a pattern of physical restraint” and “real or threatened harm, ” components of the legal definition of involuntary servitude. In doing so, it (1) advances a theory of racial overlordship as an infrastructural relation maintained via uneven standards of human treatment, (2) traces the material durability of postemancipation racial overlordship into the present, and (3) demonstrates the powers of camps to variably confine and banish disposable workers.

  PublisherDOI

• Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2022-06-24 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  This article discusses the ways that Lefebvrian thinking on urbanization has found a purchase in Indian urban and anti-caste scholarship, and conversely, how compelling new figures of the urban have emerged from Indian scholarship that productively enliven Lefebvrian categories, refusing any separation between the experimentalism of everyday life and the political economy of space. The article explores a sense of “itinerant urbanization” at two levels: at an empirical level, it describes the urban as a tentative condition of becoming that is always on the move and inter-mixed with its non-urban other. At a more theoretical level, itinerant urbanization is an acknowledgment of the tremendous generativity of Indian scholarship’s own itineracy, which produces a transversal relation with not only metropolitan urban theory, but also agrarian Marxism and rich scholarship on embedded geographies of caste. The article suggests that theorizations of the Indian urban—some expressly drawing on Lefebvre, but many not—offer spatial figures that work with but extend Lefebvrian dynamics of concentration and extension. It specifically draws from anti-caste thought to discuss circles, fractals and segmented planes as ways to capture emergent productions of space that avoid center/periphery binaries and to add explicitly postcolonial and anti-caste political commitments to urbanization debates.

  PublisherDOI

• Diverging Spaces for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing

  The AAG Review of Books · 2022-10-02 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Colonized Peoples

  2022-11-28

  book-chapterSenior author

  This chapter discusses the trajectories of urban planning policies in the Indian subcontinent from the British colonial period into the early 21st century. The chapter suggests that informality, often seen as a post-liberalization feature of privatized and splintered planning systems, has been a defining feature of planning the Indian city for nearly two centuries. By analyzing the persistent conflicts between the technical and the political, originating as early as the mid-19th century in disputes over municipal governance, the chapter suggests that an alternative planning discourse has silently been operating in the Indian subcontinent. It operates to persistently challenge the normative underpinnings and centralizing impulses of planning principles, inserting subversive demands of the urban majority into the technical operation of planning practice. Urban planning, on this basis, is not something unevenly or fitfully applied in the post-colony, as is often suggested, but as an alternative terrain of democracy in action. India's presumed planning “failures” require careful study both for what they do not achieve and for their effectiveness in prompting political experiments that unevenly incorporate the urban majority.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel M. Goldstein

  6 shared

• Hudson McFann

  6 shared

• Frank Drewnick

  2 shared

• J. L. Jiménez

  2 shared

• Robert W. Lake

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  2 shared

• AbdouMaliq Simone

  2 shared

• Akira Drake Rodriguez

  University of Pennsylvania

  2 shared

• Momen El‐Husseiny

  American University in Cairo

  1 shared

Labs

• D. Asher Ghertner LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., City and Regional Planning

  University of California, Berkeley

  2009

• M.A., City and Regional Planning

  University of California, Berkeley

  2005

• B.A., Environmental Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  2003

Awards & honors

• 2023–24 Fulbright–Nehru Fellow in India