Synoptic Infrastructures

Abstract

The article considers entanglements of finance, governance, data and urbanism in the interruption of Amaravati, a new capital city in southern India. I argue that the terms and conditions of the project’s financial logic had specific spatial consequences at multiple scales. This logic motivated the de-territorialization of an agrarian landscape into a data-scape of real-estate through ‘land-pooling’. Speculation, in turn, depended on an ‘all over, all at once’ infrastructural strategy that organized work synchronously on scattered sites spread across 217 sq km. The expedited construction of government housing blocks with monolithic, cast in place techniques. also supported the financialized terms of development. These decisions performed the capital’s permanence and inevitability, buttressing a need for private investment from around the globe. A digital, smart-city, synopticon broadcast this permanence, ultimately creating conditions for a loss of popular support. The entanglements of Amaravati’s demise suggest how finance has transformed spatial governance, creating the conditions for its own failure.