Salvage urbanization as earthwork: unsettling anticipatory ruination at the agrarian-urban frontier

Across agrarian peripheries, contemporary urbanization increasingly unfolds within landscapes shaped by layered overlapping histories of speculation, salvage, and anticipatory ruination. Challenging the treatment of agrarian peripheries as ruined landscapes subject to salvage accumulation, this paper advances salvage urbanization to examine the earthworks through which marginalized and subaltern actors inhabit, contest, and rework conditions of ruination. Focusing on Punjabi migrant workers at the agrarian–urban frontier of Agro Pontino in Central Italy, the paper develops a relational analysis linking the settlement histories of Punjab and Agro Pontino. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023, the paper traces practices of salvage urbanization ranging from the reuse of speculative housing and the creation of social infrastructures, to everyday economies and agroecological cultivation. Bringing salvage urbanization into conversation with the concept of anticipatory ruination, the paper shows how climate adaptation and ecological restoration projects selectively recover environmental value while rendering migrant settlements provisional. In contrast, migrant practices of salvage rework ruination from below, sustaining alternative forms of dwelling and social reproduction. The paper argues that salvage urbanization offers a critical lens for rethinking climate justice beyond city-centric frameworks.