Collapse as Investability: Articulation Work in the Wake of Speculative Urbanism in Noida, India

Abstract

The Supernova Spira, an 80‐story luxury residential tower in Noida, India, stands structurally incomplete and held in insolvency. By every conventional measure, it is no longer investable. And yet portfolio hosts, entering after the developer's default, have assembled its stranded units into a continuously turning short‐stay rental economy. Drawing on on‐going ethnographic fieldwork at the building, this paper argues that investability does not end at formal collapse: it continues at sub‐threshold scales, through formal‐legal instruments parasitic on the specific conditions collapse produces. The paper extends concept of articulation work into the post‐collapse moment, and scholarship on incompletion as a generative condition across a different class register, attending to what becomes of articulation work after the original assembling has collapsed.