Webinar
Dubai Diasporas, Transnational Remittances, and Intimate Infrastructures of Finance in India
by
Dr. Siddharth Menon
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Environment
The London School of Economics and Political Science.
Date & Time: 06th November (Thursday), 3.00 PM-4.00 PM (IST)
Webinar ID: 983 4182 1283
Abstract: Recently, cities across India and the Global South have been constructing ‘world-class’ infrastructures. Scholars have examined the global financial instruments and investment vehicles facilitating this infrastructure boom in Southern cities, which is furthering uneven urban development. But we know little about other more intimate flows of capital that are also supporting Southern urban transformations.
Siddharth Menon examines how remittances from middle-class Indian diasporas in Dubai, UAE become financial instruments to fund luxury real estate projects in Kochi city in Kerala, India. He does this by examining the everyday financial practices of transnational actors, including Kochi-based real estate developers, Dubai-based Indian diasporas and Indian banks and financial institutions. He shows that by packaging remittances into standardized debt-based instruments, Indian banks act as financial intermediaries between developers and diasporas to manage risks associated with transnational investments. Thus, Indian banks and financial institutions act as ‘shadow actors’ during the production of unevenly developed urban spaces in India. Menon’s work extends literature in economic geography, financial geography, and global urban studies by highlighting how informal sources of capital are financialized and made visible to formal financial circuits, furthering uneven development in Southern cities
Dr. Siddharth Menon is an Assistant Professor in Urban Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at The London School of Economics and Political Science. His first book project draws on two years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in India and the Arabian Gulf to examine how the changing built environment of city-regions in Kerala, south India — through the production of “world-class” infrastructures — intersects with wider circuits of transnational remittance investment mediated by Indian Ocean cultures, subnational labour migration fuelled by uneven regional development, and rural-urban entanglements driven by capitalist resource extraction in the climate change era.