Reconciling Ecologies in the Millenium City was a collective project engaging communities to recognise their agricultural ecology and create opportunities for its re-inclusion. Over the last decade, private developers and marketing forces have been fabricating a city in the farm suburb of Gurgaon. Through the economic liberalisation of Gurgaon’s land and ripe real estate demand, fertile agricultural land has given way to commercial and residential complexes through a speculative process of land selling, buying and transformation.

In just five years’ time, the Millenium City has risen; shopping malls, golf courses, luxury shops, gated housing complexes and a new population of workers and residents on land that used to be home to wheat, mustard seeds, barley and sugarcane for hundreds of years. Approximately 40% of Gurgaon’s agricultural land has been lost in these past five years. Officials fear that a continuation of these unchecked land developments will leave Gurgaon without any agricultural land in ten years’ time. Little attention is being paid to this agricultural loss in the face of Gurgaon’s burgeoning formula for materialising a new and novel, magical utopian lifestyle. The allure of seemingly creating a city of wealth overnight and living a ‘comfortable’ life is making the Millenium City an exciting ‘new’ model for India’s future city. Similar rural and agricultural lands are being targeted, acquired and speculated on, to house an increasing urban population and to feed those dying to live and experience a western consumer-based lifestyle.

Gurgaon is serving as the way forward and being copied elsewhere, but individuals and groups are already questioning the Millenium City, its viability beyond the short-term boom, its environmental sustainability and cultural sustainability. Citizens groups like I am Gurgaon are acting as activists and participants in community building and outreach, as they search for a new collective social identity; these are now coming-of-age signs of the liberal middle class. Other individuals are taking on the challenge of replacing the agricultural economies of the recent past, with new consumer-driven models such as organic farming and even privately owned farms for personal consumption.

The project investigated how agriculture is re-formatting itself to adapt to Gurgaon’s transforming built environment and also to test notions of how Gurgaon’s natural ecology can be regenerated. Central questions revolved around the relationship between sustainability and speculation as seen through the urban development of Gurgaon.