Theorising Urban Development From the Global South 3030824748, 9783030824747

Table of contents :
Preface and Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction—Exploring Urban ‘Southernness’: Praxes and Theory(s)
1.1 Introduction
1.2 The Southern Turn: New Geographies of Theory
1.3 The Simultaneously Homogeneous and Heterogenous Southern City
1.3.1 The Homogeneous South: Emerging Planning Territories
1.3.2 The Heterogeneous South: Conflicting Rationalities
1.4 Discussion
1.4.1 The Homogeneous South
1.4.2 The Heterogeneous South
1.5 Conclusion
References
Part I The Homogeneous South: Emerging Planning Territories
2 The Production of Suburban Space Through Metropolitan Governance in a Global South City Region
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Research Methods
2.3 Metropolitan Governance—Suburban Space in Kolkata
2.4 From Rural Periphery to Suburban Town: The Case of Pujali
2.5 Municipal Re-Delineation—Merged Towns: The Case of Bally
2.6 Suburban Space—Metropolitan Governance and the Regional State
2.7 Conclusion
References
3 Planning for the Urban Mosaic of a Megacity: The Case of Urban Villages in Delhi
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Villages and Planning in Asian Cities
3.3 Delhi: Framing the Village in the City and Its Planning
3.3.1 The Planning of the Colonial Capital
3.3.2 The Post-Independence Population Rush
3.3.3 Master Planning
3.4 Selectively Undoing Unplanned
3.4.1 Managing the Everyday City
3.4.2 The Urbanisation of Villages
3.4.3 The Provision of Services
3.4.4 Building Construction
3.5 The Thriving Urban Village
3.6 Conclusion
3.6.1 Back to City Planning and the Urban Village
3.6.2 About Modernity and Temporality
3.6.3 It’s About Language
References
4 Reimagining Urban Development in a Tribal Region: Readings on a Fifth Schedule Area of India
4.1 The Context of Tribes and Indigenous People in India
4.2 Tribes and Land
4.3 Greater Ranchi: From a Symbol of the New India to a Contested Capital City
4.4 The Development of Greater Ranchi: Politics of the Master Plan
4.5 Legal Plurality
4.6 Legal Intricacies in the Case of Greater Ranchi
4.7 Resistance and Protest
4.8 Towards a More Sustainable Urban Development from an Indigenous Perspective
4.9 A Policy Framework for Urban Development in the Tribal Areas of India
References
5 Urban Planning Practices in China: Struggling Between Politics and the Market
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Urban Planning as a Technical Process
5.2.1 The Evolution of China’s Urban-Planning System
5.2.2 The Evolution of China’s Urban-Planning Profession
5.3 Urban Planning and Politics
5.4 Urban Planning in the Socialist Market Economy
5.4.1 The Missing Public Spaces
5.4.2 Copycat Towns
5.4.3 Urban-Village Redevelopment
5.5 Conclusions
References
Part II The Heterogeneous South: Conflicting Rationalities
6 Invisible Territories: The Visibility of an Urban Crisis in Medellín
6.1 Introduction
6.2 The Production of Marginal Neighbourhoods: The Formation of “Invisible Territories”
6.3 The Politics of Invisibility: Sociospatial Alienation
6.4 Invisibility as a Homogenising Force
6.5 Mapping “Invisible” Territories in Medellín: a Multidimensional Challenge, but a Good Starting Point
6.6 Legitimising Visibility: Unidades De Vida Articulada (UVAs) (Units for Articulated Life)
6.7 Conclusion
References
7 Defensive Urban Citizenship: A View from Southeastern Tel Aviv
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Urban Citizenship and Policy: a Theoretical Prelude
7.3 A Brief History of Planning in Tel Aviv
7.4 New Plan, Old Rhetoric: ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ and the ‘New South’
7.4.1 Shapira: A Frontier Neighborhood
7.5 Threats, Identities and Defensive Urban Citizenship
7.6 A Final Word
References
8 Everyday Practices and Public Space (Re-)Appropriation in El Cisne Dos, Guayaquil
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Everyday Life and Informality
8.3 The Appropriation of Public Space
8.4 Methodology
8.5 The Upgrading of Public Space in Guayaquil’s Informal Areas
8.6 Public Space in El Cisne Dos
8.6.1 La Pista
8.6.2 Tramo 5—Guayaquil Ecológico
8.6.3 Las Palmeras
8.7 Multiple Re-appropriation Practices
8.7.1 Re-appropriation and Livelihood
8.7.2 Re-appropriation and Recreation
8.7.3 Re-appropriation and Socialization
8.7.4 Re-appropriation and Personalization
8.8 Conclusions
References
9 Situated Modernities: Socio-Spatial Co-Production in Namibia
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Modernity and Spatial Production
9.3 Namibia’s Emerging Modernities
9.3.1 Modernist Planning: Property and State-Led Housing Production in the 1980s
9.3.2 The Emergence of Co-Produced Urban Development
9.4 Contrasting Statutory and Bottom-Up Processes of Land Delivery
9.5 Conclusion
References
10 Planning and Pentecostalism in the Spatial (Re-)Configuration of Lagos
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Obfuscating the Interface Between Religion and Urban Land-Use Planning
10.3 The Nexus of Planning and Pentecostalism in Lagos
10.4 The Institutional Framework for Urban Planning in Lagos
10.5 Case Studies
10.5.1 New Town Development: Redemption Camp
10.5.2 Religious Gentrification/Enclaving: The Onike Community
10.5.3 Interim Spaces: The Iwaya Community
10.6 Conclusion: Pentecostal Urbanism as a Complex Planning Approach in Lagos
References
11 A Grammar for Transformative Urbanism
11.1 Introduction
11.2 A Grammar for the Tower of Babel3
11.2.1 Towards a Grammar
11.2.2 The Rebel Is from the South
11.3 The Autopoietic Production of Space
11.3.1 Insurgent Citizenship: From “zombie” Cities to Thinking Cities
11.3.2 Urban Dialectics
11.3.3 Generative Urban Designs
11.4 Transformative Cities
11.4.1 In-Betweenness as a Transformative Moment
11.4.2 Suffering and Violence
11.4.3 Urban Sovereignty
11.5 Conclusion
References
Correction to: Theorising Urban Development From the Global South
Correction to: A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4
Index

Citation preview

Theorising Urban Development From the Global South Edited by Anjali Karol Mohan Sony Pellissery Juliana Gómez Aristizábal

Theorising Urban Development From the Global South

Anjali Karol Mohan · Sony Pellissery · Juliana Gómez Aristizábal Editors

Theorising Urban Development From the Global South

Editors Anjali Karol Mohan Institute of Public Policy National Law School of India University Bengaluru, India

Sony Pellissery Institute of Public Policy National Law School of India University Bengaluru, India

Juliana Gómez Aristizábal Center of Urban and Environmental Studies EAFIT University Medellín, Colombia

ISBN 978-3-030-82474-7 ISBN 978-3-030-82475-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2021 Chapters 1 and 11 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapters. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface and Acknowledgements

The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the Southern city at the centre-stage of policy and scholarly debates. Gradually, with the global South establishing itself as the epicentre of urbanism, the twenty-first century is increasingly recognised as the century of the city. Notably, the twenty-first- century city is vividly and vastly distinct from the earlier cities, located primarily in the Euro-American world. Paradoxically, urban theories and ensuing planning practices that attempt to manage and steer the twenty-first- century Southern city continue to be embedded within the urban experience of global North. That these are not contextual renders them both inappropriate and inadequate while triggering a call for new planning pathways and vocabularies that speak to, and derive from the socio-cultural, political and economic contexts of the global South. This volume is a response to this call. The works contained in this edited volume marks the culmination of a two-year engagement that included a two-part Seminar Series funded by the Urban Studies Foundation (USF). Organised in Medellin in Colombia (Latin America) in 2019 and Bangalore in India (Asia) in early 2020, the series titled as “The ‘Southern Turn’ in the Urban: Embedded Wisdom and Cultural Specificity as Pathways to Planning,” sought to engage with the larger, oft-repeated ontological question that continues to hold—why and what does theory from the South mean? John Friedman’s observation in the early 1990s on a shift to a ‘nonEuclidian world of many space-time geographies’ was among the early v

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

calls to re-inventing planning theory and practice. As scholarly and policy debates gain momentum, deeper acknowledgements that position the global South as a relational geography with distinct, intersecting histories embodying specific socio-cultural and political dynamics, as against it being positioned as a static location or mere set of places, further strengthens the call for context-specific planning theory and practice. The two seminars explored historical trajectories of the global South, their juxtaposition with contemporary urbanisation processes, attendant challenges and creative responses across diverse, yet similar contexts of the global South. The series put forth a two-fold objective: to unpack and foreground the inefficacy and inappropriateness of the formal planning and governance mechanisms that aim to steer the burgeoning Southern City; and, explore the urbanising logic and embedded knowledge systems of distinct socio-spatial signifiers that characterise the Southern city as conduits to planning theory(s) and praxes. Apart from research shared and discussed during the series, keynote addresses by Alejandro Echeverri, Director URBAM, Prof. Smita Srinivas (Technological Change Lab, MIT), Justice Gautam Patel (High Court of Bombay) and Bijal Brahmbhatt (Director, Mahila Housing SEWA Trust, Ahmedabad) were insightful and thought-provoking. In addition, city visits in Medellin and Bangalore provided an opportunity for mutual learning and collective thinking on a grounded understanding on cities of the global South. Though geographically and culturally apart, this collective reflection reinforced the conviction to work towards a theory from the global South. Taking cues from the collective engagement across the two seminars, this volume conceptualises the global South as a simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous geography, while endorsing it as one that is relational and processual. Accordingly, the volume is divided into two parts. The first part—‘The Homogeneous South: Emerging Planning Territories’ has four chapters that speak pre-dominantly to the homogeneous mode of space production. The second part—‘The Heterogeneous South: Conflicting Rationalities’ has five chapters that speak to the heterogeneous mode of space production. The Southern city is positioned as a result of the interaction between the homogeneous and heterogeneous modes of space production. In categorising the chapters our intention is to move away from a binary and discrete mode to one that is recursive. Chapters in both sections direct their enquiries to the other.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Several academics and scholars and practitioners participated in the seminars at both universities. Though we could not include all the papers presented, their participation and engagement is acknowledged and highly appreciated. These include Mariana Alegre (Peru), AGA Studio (Venezuela), Isabel Basombrío (Colombia), Pedro Henrique de Cristo (Brazil), Santiago Mejía-Dugand (Colombia), Alfredo Hidalgo Rasmussen (Mexico) and Humberto Barrera (Colombia), Debarun Sarkar (Mumbai), Bianca Shah (Ahmedabad), Cheshta Arora, Shantala V and Roshan Thomas (Bangalore) and Marianne Millstein (Oslo). Their presence while adding value to the discussions during the seminars, also contributes to the reflections in this volume. Finally, this volume would not have been possible without the support of The Urban Studies Foundation which continued its support much beyond the organisation of the Seminar Series, and, Ian McDonald for his impeccable copy-editing skills. In solidarity with those seeking a new urbanism in the global South. Bengaluru, India Bengaluru, India Medellín, Colombia

Anjali Karol Mohan Sony Pellissery Juliana Gómez Aristizábal

Contents

1

Introduction—Exploring Urban ‘Southernness’: Praxes and Theory(s) Anjali Karol Mohan

1

Part I The Homogeneous South: Emerging Planning Territories 2

3

4

5

The Production of Suburban Space Through Metropolitan Governance in a Global South City Region Sarani Khatua

31

Planning for the Urban Mosaic of a Megacity: The Case of Urban Villages in Delhi Banashree Banerjee

57

Reimagining Urban Development in a Tribal Region: Readings on a Fifth Schedule Area of India Aashish Xaxa

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Urban Planning Practices in China: Struggling Between Politics and the Market Zhi Liu and Peiming Wang

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CONTENTS

Part II The Heterogeneous South: Conflicting Rationalities 6

7

8

9

10

11

Invisible Territories: The Visibility of an Urban Crisis in Medellín Edwar A. Calderón

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Defensive Urban Citizenship: A View from Southeastern Tel Aviv Oren Yiftachel and Nir Cohen

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Everyday Practices and Public Space (Re-)Appropriation in El Cisne Dos, Guayaquil Xavier Méndez Abad, Hans Leinfelder, and Kris W. B. Scheerlinck

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Situated Modernities: Socio-Spatial Co-Production in Namibia Guillermo Delgado

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Planning and Pentecostalism in the Spatial (Re-)Configuration of Lagos Taibat Lawanson

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A Grammar for Transformative Urbanism Sony Pellissery and Juliana Gómez Aristizábal

Correction to: Theorising Urban Development From the Global South Anjali Karol Mohan, Sony Pellissery, and Juliana Gómez Aristizábal Index

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Notes on Contributors

Juliana Gómez Aristizábal is an architect from the National University of Colombia with an MSc in Urban Planning and Policy Design from the Politecnico di Milano. She worked for the Urban Development Enterprise (EDU) as an architect in the Integral Urban Project (PUI) of the central-eastern zone as part of the implementation of the Social Urbanism strategy in Medellin. She was the designer of one of the educational parks of the regional development plan ‘Antioquia la más Educada 20122015’. Since 2014 she is part of the multidisciplinary team of the Center of Urban and Environmental Studies—urbam at EAFIT University in Medellin where she has worked in different strategic planning projects and urban design projects that integrate the social, the physical and the environmental dimensions from a more comprehensive perspective. Since 2020 she is leading the Master’s programme in Urban and Environmental Processes at urbam EAFIT. Banashree Banerjee is an architect, urban planner, researcher and teacher. She works as an independent consultant and also as an associate staff member of the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Rotterdam and visiting faculty member at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and CEPT University, Ahmedabad. In a career spanning more than four decades, the focus of her work has been on inclusive approaches to urban planning and management and city-wide approaches to improvement of informal settlements in a number

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of cities. Her other interest is urban land management, in which she has considerable experience related to practice, research and teaching. Edwar A. Calderón is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad EAFIT, on the GCRF PEAK Urban Project. His interdisciplinary research spans urban development, human geography, architecture and education in geographies of conflict, with a specific interest in the (re)production of space, spatial justice, and urban transformations in marginal contexts. Since 2008, he has been working on community participatory researchbased projects. From 2016 his research interest has focused on sociospatial transformations in vulnerable communities in Colombia. His current research ‘Urban morphology of displacement in Medellin’ focuses on the socio-spatial analysis of displacement resettlement process of victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. Recently, he led a research project combining quantitative and qualitative research methods that investigates ways to improve housing policies for displaced communities who live in marginal settlements. Nir Cohen is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environment at Bar Ilan University. His research interests include state– diaspora relations, the politics of migration and citizenship and urban social geographies in Israel. His work on policies towards skilled migrants, stratified citizenship and socio-spatial relations in Israeli cities has appeared in such journals as IJURR, Cities, Population, Space and Place, Environment and Planning D, Social and Cultural Geography and Geoforum. In spring 2018 he was Visiting Fellow of Jewish Migration at The Parkes Institute for Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton, UK. In 2019 he was Visiting Professor for Urban Studies at TU Vienna, Austria. His co-edited book Care and the City: Encounters with Urban Studies is forthcoming (Winter 2021) with Routledge. Guillermo Delgado is an architect from Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA, Mexico City). He holds a master’s in architecture from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and a doctoral degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. Currently he is an adjunct researcher at the Department of Land and Property Sciences, at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) where he coordinates the ‘Land, livelihoods and housing’ Programme at the Integrated Land Management Institute (ILMI), and has supervised students in their theses and work-integrated learning. He has also taught research methods, urbanisation and housing at NUST. He was previously an associate researcher at the Labour Resource and Research Institute (LaRRI)

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from 2011 to 2014, where he worked on issues of housing and living conditions. He also worked with Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra) in projects about alternative urban development in the Netherlands, France and Canada. He has served on different public projects and committees in Namibia. Sarani Khatua is a Geographer and a former Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Urban Economic Studies (CUES), University of Calcutta with UGC-Dr S Radhakrishnan Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences. She was an ICSSR-Doctoral student at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) and obtained her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Calcutta. Previously, she has also worked in field-based projects in research think-tank, Centre for Policy Research and Kolkata-based NGO, Change Initiatives. She is interested in contemporary issues of low-income urban settlements, urban space, and their relevant policies, politics and processes. Taibat Lawanson is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Lagos, Nigeria where she leads the Pro-Poor Development research cluster, and serves as Co-director of the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. Taibat’s research focuses on the interface of social complexities, urban realities and the pursuit of spatial justice. Over the last twenty years, she has taught, conducted research and published over 60 papers in the areas of informality, urban management, pro-poor development and governance in African contexts. She is a member of the editorial/editorial advisory boards of Urban Studies, Urban Forum and Area Development and Policy journals. She also serves as advisory board member for UNHABITAT flagship ‘State of the World’s Cities’ report. Taibat is a member of the board of directors of the Lagos Studies Association, an alumna of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre and a pioneer World Social Science Fellow of the International (Social) Science Council. Hans Leinfelder Hans is an Associate Professor in planning policy and planning theory at the Faculty of Architecture and a member of the P.PUL research group at the Department of Architecture of KU Leuven, Belgium. He has more than 25 years of experience, both in academia and in policymaking at the national level in Belgium. His academic research has focused on substantive and instrumental aspects of planning policy,

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with a specific preference for planning challenges concerning open space in peri-urban contexts. Zhi Liu is a Senior Research Fellow and China Program Director, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and Director of Peking UniversityLincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy; coeditor for International Housing Market Experience and Implications for China, Routledge. Previously as an infrastructure specialist at the World Bank, Dr. Zhi Liu had operational experience in East Asia and South Asia, where he managed investment lending projects and analytical and advisory activities in the infrastructure and urban sectors. Before joining the World Bank, he was a research associate with the Harvard Institute for International Development. He also taught city and regional planning at Nanjing University. He serves as a member of the Expert Committee for Human Settlements, Ministry of Housing and Urban and Rural Development, China. Xavier Méndez Abad is a Ph.D. candidate at KU Leuven, Department of Architecture, in the Research Group Urban Projects, Collective Spaces and Local Identities. After graduating as an architect from the University of Cuenca, he obtained a Master of Science in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano in 2016. His ongoing research explores the interplay between collective spaces, everyday practices and urban informality in consolidated informal urban areas in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Currently, he is also involved in academic activities focusing on urban co-production and participatory design. Anjali Karol Mohan is a Geographer Planner with a Ph.D. in urban (e)governance and management. She is a partner at Integrated Design, Bangalore where her practice and research experience for close to three decades straddles urban planning and management, organisational and institutional frameworks and information and communication technologies and development (ICTD) She is a faculty at the Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University, Bangalore. She teaches courses on cities, urbanisation and planning and, urban governance and management with a special focus on the Southern city. She has published in academic journals and in popular media, in addition to delivering talks and presenting her work globally. She is a Council Member of the International Federation for Housing and Planning as well as the Institute of Town Planners of India.

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Sony Pellissery is Professor and Director of the Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University, Bangalore. His special interests are in the areas of distributive justice, land policies and social rights. After his doctoral degree from Oxford University, he served as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He has won the India Social Science Research Award (2009) and Ram Reddy Memorial Social Science Award (2015) for his academic contributions. His papers have appeared in Town Planning Review, Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Social Policy, Gender and Development and International Journal of Social Welfare. Kris W. B. Scheerlinck is an architect, urban designer and the founder and director of the Streetscape Territories Research Practice. He is an Associate Professor at KU Leuven where he is Head of the Research Group ‘Urban Projects, Collective Spaces and Local Identities’. He directs research and design projects on the making of the urban landscape and, besides consultancy and teaching, promotes related Ph.D. research projects at several universities. Peiming Wang is a Professor of City Planning, School of Architecture and Planning, Yunnan University, China. Prof. Wang is a member of City Planning Association of China, and the elected vice chair of Urban Science Research Association of Yunnan Province. She serves as a planning adviser to a number of local government agencies in Yunnan, including the Provincial Department of Housing and Urban and Rural Development, Provincial Department of Natural Resources and Kunming Municipal Bureau of Planning. She was a professional city planner with the Yunnan Urban and Rural Planning and Design Institute before joining the faculty of Yunnan University. Aashish Xaxa has been an ICSSR Doctoral Fellow in the School of Development Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He has recently completed his Ph.D. His broader research is on the urbanisation and the changing cityscapes of India with a focus on unexplored aspects of equity and social justice. His Ph.D. research looks into the interests of tribes/indigenous peoples of Central and North-East India, with special reference to urbanisation, constitutional and legal provisions, and the issues of development, land tenure systems, local governance and democracy, alienation and deprivation, from a comparative perspective. He has been trained in development theories and histories, tribes in the contemporary world, as well as in qualitative and quantitative methods of research in urban sociology.

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Oren Yiftachel teaches political geography and urban planning. He holds the Lloyd Hurst Family Chair in Urban Studies at Ben-Gurion University, Israel and is an Honorary Professor at UCL Departments of Geography and DPU (Bartlett). His research has focused on critical understandings of the relations between space, power and society, with particular interest in an international comparative analysis of Israel/Palestine. He has published more than 100 papers and ten books. In addition, he is an activist associated with a range of human rights and civil society organisations such as the regional council for unrecognised Bedouin villages, Charing B’Tselem—monitoring human rights violations in the Palestinian Territories; and researcher at Adva—Center for Equality. Recently, he co-founded a new decolonising peace movement for Israel/Palestine—‘A Land for All’.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Plot Map of the Greater Ranchi Area (Adapted from map available on Greater Ranchi Development Agency [GRDA] public domain) Typical gated community design in China (Source Downloaded from a Chinese website: http://www.lus hifu.cc/other/136324.html, accessed May 10, 2021) A copycat town in the city of Hangzhou (Source Sui et al., 2017) An urban village being demolished for redevelopment in Guangzhou, 2019 (Source Lan Song) Left—1500 social-housing “solutions”, MIA (Mestizo-Indigena-Afrodescendiente) on the outskirts of Quibdó, Chocó, Colombia; Right—Massive social-housing project, “Ciudadela de Occidente”, in Medellín (goal to 2020: 23,000 housing units) (Source Left—Photo courtesy of Santiago Chiquito; Right—Alcaldía de Medellín) Google Earth snapshots of the informal settlement of Granizal on the outskirts of Medellín at three different dates: September 2009, September 2011, and June 2014. This is the second-largest informal settlement in the country caused by the resettlement of displaced populations (Source © 2019 Maxar Technologies via Google Earth Pro)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.4

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 11.1

Map 2.1

Map 2.2

Participatory community mapping methods: community leaders drawing and “visibilising” their own territory over a map of the city (Source Photos by author) A. location of the 32 water tanks; B. UVA Los Sueños: water tank in 2004; C and D. Project aerials in 2016 (Source Images courtesy of EPM and Alcaldía de Medellín) Tel Aviv 1940: primary northward development trajectory (Source The authors, adapted from Marom [2009]) The southern and eastern neighborhoods forming south Tel Aviv Temporary food kiosks in the perimeter of La Pista Photograph taken in El Cisne Dos in 2018 Neighbors playing bingo on the streets in front of La Pista Photograph taken in El Cisne Dos in 2018 Fenced gardens along Tramo 5—Guayaquil Ecológico Photograph taken in El Cisne Dos in 2018 Diagram of actors involved in the development of land for housing in urban areas in Namibia throughout the decades. Red lines indicate actors involved in the bottom-up processes described below (see 9.3.2) (Source Delgado [2018, 2019]) Twahangana Fund since 1995: channelling over N$180 million (about US$11 million) directly to the urban poor of Namibia (Source Adapted from NHAG and SDFN [2019, p. 12]) Comparison of statutory and bottom-up processes. Half squares in the diagram indicate only partial engagement (Source [Statutory processes—Genis, forthcoming; Ulrich & Meurers, 2015]. Bottom-up processes—National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading [2020a]) Communication model for transformative urbanism (Source The authors) The Kolkata Metropolitan Area, with New Town in the east (Adapted from KMA map from the KMDA available on public domain http://kmdaonline.org/ ludcp/home) Pujali Municipality in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (Adapted from KMA map from the KMDA available on public domain http://kmdaonline.org/ludcp/home)

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156 157 187 189 191

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212 261

38

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LIST OF FIGURES

Map 2.3

Map 10.1 Map 10.2

Howrah–Bally in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (Adapted from KMA map from the KMDA available on public domain http://kmdaonline.org/ludcp/home) Lagos and Ogun states, showing the peri-urban interface (Source Taibat Lawanson field work) Prayer camps and cities along the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, September 2020 (Source Taibat Lawanson field work)

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 7.1

Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 10.1

Distribution of population in different housing typologies in Delhi, 2001 ‘Please assess the threat to Shapira from these future developments’—Entire survey population (in %; N = 242) ‘Please assess the threat to Shapira from the entry of foreigners’ (in %; N = 242) ‘Please assess the threat to Shapira from high-rise buildings’ (in %; N = 242) ‘Please assess the threat to Shapira from gentrification’ (in %; N = 242) Planning-permit applications by MFM

66

164 165 165 165 236

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction—Exploring Urban ‘Southernness’: Praxes and Theory(s) Anjali Karol Mohan

1.1

Introduction

The Global South is an acknowledged enigma—a site that simultaneously evokes anxiety and excitement. The realization that soon, a majority of the world’s population will reside in cities of the developing world has led to a call for a corresponding shift in urban theory—away from the current dominant theorization and practice anchored within the geopolitical realities of the Global North. Epistemologically, this shift engages with the Global South as a project, perspective and provocation (Bhan et al., 2018). While there is no unified conceptualization of what constitutes the Global South, there is an emerging consensus on what it isn’t and a recognition of (if not consensus on) the fragments that constitute it.

The original version of this chapter was revised: The author’s last name is corrected from ‘X. M. Abad’ to ‘X. Méndez Abad’. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_12 A. K. Mohan (B) Institute of Public Policy, National Law School University of India, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_1

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Scholars distance themselves from the notion of the Southern city as a discrete, static and bounded geography. Instead, they highlight its relational nature in terms of overlapping territories and intertwined histories (Miraftab & Kudva, 2015, p. 4) and its processual nature in terms of transmutable forms of movement, encounter and exchange (Roy, 2009a, p. 821). Thus, while some view it as ‘post-colonial contexts where local and provincial governments are rather belated constructions with limited fiscal and human capacity and with incomplete administrative systems at their disposal’ (Parnell & Pieterse, 2010, p. 150) others see it as ‘modes of production of space marked by a specific temporality and agency that engages transversally with official logics of law, property, and labour’ (Caldeira, 2017, p. 3). Largely, however, the ‘Southern city’ refers to geographies in which assumptions of techno-managerial determinism and the modernistic ideals of entrenched planning models borrowed from the North are both inappropriate and inadequate for conceptualizing and intervening in its urban realities. The Southern city represents ‘new’ materialities of socio-spatial forms, modes of space production and state– society relations (McFarlane, 2008; Roy, 2012), and therefore demands a retelling—in theory and in praxis. Arguments that position the Southern city as a ‘new geography of theory’ (Roy, 2009a, p. 819) demand a simultaneous grounding in and ‘worlding’ of the South (Roy, 2009a, p. 828). Framing the rapid urbanization processes and attendant dynamics of inequality, informality and spatial fragmentation of Southern urbanism as agendas for action and sites of knowledge production (Watson, 2009a) can potentially allow for a pragmatic and ambitious reimagination of the Southern city. Pragmatically, such framing should respond to the socio-environmental challenges in grounded, feasible and meaningful ways. Ambitiously, it should bring together the specificities and similarities of these myriad sites of knowledge production in order to establish the specific materialities and modalities of Southern urbanism as the ‘ordinary’ (Robinson, 2006, p. 1), in relation not just to urban realities but also to the global urban question (Mabin, 2014). Embarking from such a standpoint, this volume acknowledges and embraces the contrariness of the South—not as matter of concern but as a ‘new geography of theory’ (Roy, 2009a, p. 819). Its chapters— spanning cities in India, Colombia, Ecuador, China, Israel, Namibia and Nigeria—critique existing and entrenched planning models and explore the urban reality created because of, and around, these institutionalized

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models in order to discuss context-specific forms of practice, intervention and engagement. While leveraging the contradictions, complexity and hybridity of empirical specificities as entry points for understanding and theorizing the Southern city, the volume maintains a simultaneous view for generalizability towards mutual learning within and across contexts (Roy, 2009a, p. 820). Overall, this volume focuses on two issues: (a) how, and to what extent, these geographies can learn from each other given their commonalities as well as their sociocultural specificities, and (b) how this mutual-learning process can inform a planning approach and theory seen ‘from the South’. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to what Galland and Elinbaum (2018, following the concept coined by Bourdieu, 2002) refer to as the ‘field’ [of urban planning] under construction. It offers ‘fragments’ of the urban that provide clues to the larger, oft-repeated ontological question that continues to hold: Why and what does theory from the South mean? (Mohan et al., 2020, p. 6). The objective it sets for itself is not the production of neat theories or models but an assemblage of anchored conduits that can be contextually adapted to respond to the ephemeral, complex and dynamic nature of Southern urban realities. In setting the tone, this introductory chapter seeks to distil and discusses the call for new geographies of theory. Drawing on the thematic conceptualization of the South as a simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous space (Mohan et al., 2020), the volume embraces the Global South as a relational and a ‘process geography’ having emerged as a product of the interaction between two planes of space production: the homogeneous and the heterogenous. The homogeneous is the space of institutionalized practices—deriving from shared colonial history and postcolonial development narrative—that seeks to control, codify and categorize the urban. That these homogenizing practices occurred over varying timelines, intersecting with distinct and specific precolonial histories, brings in a degree of heterogeneity, which manifests itself in emerging urban forms—slums, sprawls, the peri-urban, suburban settlements—marked by temporal, incremental and flexible dynamics. The heterogeneous is thus the empirical space that has emerged as a result of the overlaying of homogeneous codifications—‘boundaries drawn onto’—on context-specific everyday practices, knowledge and imperatives—‘boundaries drawn by’.

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Speaking to the South as being simultaneously homogeneous and heterogenous, the volume is divided into two parts. Part I, ‘The Homogeneous South: Emerging Planning Territories’, draws on four chapters that conceptualize homogeneity along two dimensions: (a) the transnational historical processes that have generated similarities in the urban experiences of diverse contexts, and (b) the homogenizing practices embedded through these processes and their operation in the contemporary context. Part II, ‘The Heterogeneous South: Conflicting Rationalities’, has a further five chapters, which draw upon the heterogeneous nature of urban reality and the logics that often subvert homogenizing practices. These latter chapters conceptualize heterogeneity along two dimensions: (a) the recursive processes of ‘drawing onto’ and ‘drawing by’ that result in the creation of heterogeneous urban realities, and (b) the intrinsic knowledge systems, modalities and materialities embedded within these heterogeneous realities and their potential in triggering urban innovation. Notably, the volume conceptualizes the homogeneous and heterogeneous not as binaries—rather, these realms of space production are positioned as recursive (as against being discrete). While being anchored within a particular mode of production of space, chapters in either section direct their enquiries to the other section. In doing so, they tease out the juxtapositions that dislodge the binary conceptualization of the two modes of spatial production while foregrounding spaces of mutual learning between the two. The categorization, rather than connoting operational distance between the two modes of spatial production, is thus representative of the direction of theoretical enquiry. While the four chapters in Part I engage with a dominant theoretical lens that moves from the normative, institutionalized and abstracted space of urban planning to the reality of urban experiences, the five chapters in Part II invert the direction of theoretical enquiry by anchoring themselves within empirical specificities in order to move towards institutionalized practices of spatial production. Following this introduction, Sect. 1.2 traces the burgeoning body of Southern theory in order to highlight the imperatives upon which it builds itself and the explorative directions that it identifies for itself. Leveraging this understanding, Sect. 1.3 validates the conceptualization of the South as a simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous space towards enabling an ethos of mutual learning across and within contexts.

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Subsection 1.3.1 draws out the characteristics that define the homogeneous realm of space production-boundaries ‘drawn onto’—in Southern cities by focusing on the recursive processes of boundary-making and unmaking that they engender. Subsection 1.3.2 draws out the characteristics of the heterogeneous realm of space production in Southern cities by focusing on the manner in which boundaries ‘drawn onto’ are subverted into boundaries ‘drawn by’, leveraging embedded knowledge systems and capacities. The insights from these two subsections are brought together in the Discussion (Sect. 1.4), which highlights the acknowledged and unacknowledged interlinkages between the homogeneous and heterogeneous realms of spatial production along three dimensions: power, intention and modality. Subsection 1.4.1 draws out these interlinkages from the standpoint of the homogeneous realm of space production while Subsection 1.4.2 draws them out from the standpoint of the heterogeneous realm of space production. The Conclusion (Sect. 1.5) leverages these interlinkages to argue for mutual learning between the homogeneity and heterogeneity of Southern contexts as pathways towards alternative, radical and grounded theory ‘from the South’.

1.2 The Southern Turn: New Geographies of Theory While the emerging call for Southern theory is a reaction to the perception of crisis within the global consciousness, it is also triggered by a shift of majority of the urban population to the Southern cities (Bhan et al., 2018; Mabin, 2014, p. 25; Watson 2009a; Roy, 2009a). The unprecedented scale and pace of urbanization in these locations and their manifestation in crises of climate change, resource depletion and rising income inequalities is fast emerging as a stark reality, one that has triggered a postcolonial shift in most social disciplines (Mabin, 2014)—the urban included. This shift, in turn, has marked a self-reflective commitment towards societal and moral objectives that marks a rejection of the domination of theories and models from the North while exploring the South as the new centre for urban-theory generation (Mabin, 2014). The shift advocates foregrounding the complexity and diversity of the South as precedent urban futures in order to build a ‘singular script’ (Mabin, 2014, p. 22). That script, this chapter argues, should derive from and highlight the inability (and, by extension, the inefficacy) of imported urban planning models and theories to acknowledge and account for the urban

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reality, and the ability of the latter to confound these borrowed models. Currently, within the dominant discourse on the urban in general and planning in particular, urban reality is reductively problematized while in fact it embodies practical innovations (Mahadevia & Joshi, 2009; Nandy, 1998, p. 2; Watson, 2009a). The inception of planning and urban governance in most Southern cities arose through the vehicles of colonial occupation and imperialism. Planning in these contexts began with the imperatives of creating acceptable urban environments for foreign settlers, and extending administrative control and sanitary conditions to the growing numbers of Indigenous urban poor. Planning legislation, regulatory mechanisms and urban forms carrying with them visions of the ideal, modernist city were embedded by colonial governments in Southern contexts (Watson, 2009a). This notion of modernity, imported from Euro–American contexts, privileged positivist rationality and instilled techno-managerial determinism into planning praxis. This imposition of the rational order (often equated with the scientific) over all others (which were, by extension, irrational/disorderly) devalued, disrupted and marginalized other knowledge systems and socio-spatial orders even as cities continue to grow, inflected by transnational processes and ideologies (Mohan et al., 2020, p. 6). Post-independence these models/narratives continued with minimal reform, with the dominant discourse of master plans or land-use plans being applied across most Southern cities. The hierarchical and linear ordering of such urbanisms continues to drive context-blind approaches that pursued urban imaginaries of the ‘First World’ as the ideal and framed urban realities of the ‘Third World’ as the problem (Mabin, 2014, p. 25). Concerns for urban aesthetics, modernization and functional specializations continue to dominate urban planning praxis. In effect, this highly regulatory approach coupled with tendencies to prioritize market interests has rendered the planning praxis in Southern cities culpable in the creation and exacerbation of socio-spatial exclusion. Its stagnancy, therefore, is not accidental—nor is it easy to change (Watson, 2009a). Scholars link the rigidity of these established planning mechanisms to the institutionalization of the politics of accumulation and dispossession directed by entrenched sociopolitical hierarchies and global market restructuring (Mahadevia & Joshi, 2009, p. 3). However, it must be noted that the power behind these models is not totalizing; within multiple spaces of agency, mobilization and resistance can—and do—break out. As has been previously argued within Southern scholarship, and is evidenced by

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several scholars in this volume, imposed visions are subverted, adapted and contested—often resulting in socio-spatial forms that operate outside the realm of the formal. The regulatory and context-blind approaches of the state implicitly, if not explicitly, create the unplanned city (Nandy, 1998, p. 2) and its socio-spatial signifiers—slums, squatter settlements, urban villages and peri-urban communities, among them. Positioned as the ‘other’, these are classified as the ‘informal’, which operate as exceptions to state-instituted mandates of taxation and the supervisory and legalized regime of the state. However, against the binary conceptualization of these informal modes of praxis as either manifestations of economic marginality or heroic entrepreneurialism, arguments that informality is in fact created by, embedded within and extends to the differentiating practices of the state (Appadurai, 2001; Roy, 2009b, 2012) are gaining momentum. Empirical evidence of the embeddedness of and interaction between the formal and the informal reveals how, rather than reflecting any intrinsic distinction, the institutionalized binary categorizations of the formal– informal, modern–provincial and rational–irrational are a reflection of power hierarchies (Roy, 2012). This bolsters the proposition that it is these institutionalized binaries that exacerbate spatial exclusion and inequalities (Watson, 2009b). With formal mechanisms unable to render cities liveable, a hybrid network of actors, modalities and processes outside the formal develop in order to meet these requirements. Embodying varying degrees of power and exclusion, these informal networks and attendant modalities manoeuvre, negotiate and protect spaces of opportunity through complex processes of alliance-making and deal-breaking (Watson, 2009a). While representing structural constraints perpetuated by sociopolitical institutions, these informal practices are also representative of agency that leverages embedded knowledge systems and practices (Ahlers et al., 2014; Bakker et al., 2008). This realm of knowledge and capacities embedded within the lived space (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 362) of everyday interactions, relations and practices directs the incremental, flexible, pragmatic, transversal and rooted nature of these informal modes of space production (Bhan, 2019). The fact that these informalities constitute the dominant mode of service delivery in southern cities (Watson, 2009a, p. 2263) highlights the need to conceptualize them as ‘multiple modernities’ (Roy, 2009a, p. 828) capable of ‘deepening the pot’ (Watson, 2014, p. 63) of planning ideas and approaches.

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The burgeoning body of Southern theory therefore anchors itself within the ‘gap’ between displaced planning models and place-specific urban realities. An acknowledgement of this fact is critical in enabling a Southern retelling of urban trajectories. Towards this end, this scholarship encourages scholars and practitioners alike to think in terms of intersections, interchangeability and in-betweenness in order to focus on the frontiers that defy categorization. This process begins with the definition of where the Global South manifests itself. In answer to this question, scholars emphasize the relational nature of the Global South: rather than comprising of discrete territories coterminous with national or administrative boundaries, it represents overlapping territories and intertwined histories (Miraftab & Kudva, 2015, p. 4). Across shared colonial histories and trajectories of postcolonial development, the relationality of urban experiences generated in diverse contexts constitutes both its validation and its potential as an emerging epistemology. Within these contexts, it emphasizes the existence of ‘process geographies’ that defy the neat categorization of trait geographies—i.e. bounded regions with immutable traits (Roy, 2009a, p. 822). These process geographies can be said to develop at the interface between imposed models and specific histories, ecologies and sociocultural systems. Within these contexts, the arrival of modernity is not experienced as something that replaces the ‘old’ or pre-existing world. Rather, it juxtaposes different materialities in order to embrace tradition and modernity—in turn, creating hybrid societies (McFarlane, 2008; Roy, 2009a; Watson, 2009a, p. 2271). A ‘conflict of rationalities’ thus arises between the governing rationality, driven by notions of modernisztion and technocratic control of urban environments, on one hand and the survival rationality of everyday interactions, needs, practices and knowledge on the other (Roy & Ong, 2011; Watson, 2003, p. 395). This conflict of rationalities characterizes the contestations, adaptations, evasions and hybridizations that constitute the process geographies of the Global South. Southern urban theory finds itself at a critical juncture. Enquiries into the nature of Southern cities carry within them an explicit call for action: ‘it is not enough to understand how we got here but also answer the question of where from here’ (Bhan et al., 2018, p. 1). If the epistemological relocation into the grounded modes of praxis reveals natures of ‘deep differences’ (Watson, 2006, p. 33), ‘conflict[s] of rationalities’ (Watson, 2003, p. 395) and ‘shadow materialities’ (McFarlane, 2008,

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p. 341), then the subsequent question we have to ask is: How can the planning discipline respond to these specific natures? This will require an ‘auto-construction’ of the planning field through a delineation of the knowledge that should underlie it, the ethics and politics that should drive it and the professional praxis and institutional mechanisms that should characterize it (Bhan et al., 2018, p. 7). In the interest of generating such profound, exciting and less-sectional approaches, scholars highlight the importance of a carefully constructed comparative method—one that allows for indirect and uncertain learning (McFarlane, 2010; Mabin, 2014, p. 31; Roy, 2009a). This auto-construction will require framing the Global South through a paradoxical combination of generalizability and specificity—i.e. the homogeneous and the heterogeneous South. While generating theory anchored within place, it should allow the appropriation, borrowing and remapping of these theories across places. While producing authoritative knowledge that is fine-grained and nuanced, it should exceed its empiricism by allowing theoretical generalization for and from the South (Bhan, 2019; Roy, 2009a). It is this ethos of mutual learning that directs the present volume and validates its sectional orientation in discussing the homogeneous and the heterogenous South.

1.3

The Simultaneously Homogeneous and Heterogenous Southern City

The aim of conceptualizing the South as being simultaneously homogeneous and heterogenous is twofold. First, it is intended to trigger mutual learning within contexts, with the heterogeneous natures of localized forms of knowledge, praxis and materialities coalescing to generate frameworks, approaches and models that can inform urban planning at scale. Second, it should trigger a mutual learning across contexts, with the homogeneous urban experiences across diverse contexts being gathered to ‘speak’ to each other, even while it is their intrinsic heterogeneity that is acknowledged and positioned as central to theory generation. 1.3.1

The Homogeneous South: Emerging Planning Territories

The homogeneous is anchored in the represented, normative and institutional space of urban production. The four chapters in Part One of this book, ‘The Homogeneous South: Emerging Planning Territories’,

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draw out the homogeneity along two dimensions: first, the shared colonial history and postcolonial development narratives that have created similar yet distinct layering, evolution and contestations among socio-spatial orders; second, the homogenization processes of boundary-making, categorization and control that were embedded through these historic trajectories and continue to dominate the planning practices of the state. In the contemporary context, these have interacted with processes of neoliberalization and globalization to consolidate existing and generate new modalities of techno-managerialism. Across Latin America, Asia and Africa, urban trajectories have been marked by the overlaying of colonial forms, systems and processes on existing socio-spatial orders, followed by postcolonial interventions of nation-building. Historically, socio-spatial orders in these places have embodied (and continue to embody) an intimate and evolved understanding of ecological relations: everyday practices, livelihoods and infrastructure were premised on these relations and configured accordingly. The arrival of colonial systems and their ideologies gradually replaced, disrupted and even marginalized these historically evolved traditional practices. The importing, imposition and mimicking of Euro–American urban aesthetics, planning legislation and land-tenure arrangements often veiled insidious aims of repressing the cultural life of the colonized people while creating a social divide between native, affluent and common masses (Tom et al., 2019, p. 8). The decline of colonialism post-World War II, and the rise of sovereign states across Africa and Asia, marked the possibility of creating a home-grown script of urbanism and modernity. Yet, the newly formed governments, tasked with carving out a new identity for their nations while also addressing housing, services and employment requirements, accepted, reinforced and entrenched colonial spatial plans and land-management tools—sometimes in even more rigid form than colonial governments (Njoh, 2003, p. 2). Urban planning and governance became oriented around land-use control based on static master plans developed through bureaucratic, top-down processes and driven by visions of the ‘good city’ where ‘proper citizens’ live in ‘proper communities’ (Watson, 2003, 2009a, p. 2268). The importing and entrenchment of static planning models that continue to marginalize embedded sociospatial orders and knowledge systems in Southern cities is, therefore, neither unique nor accidental. It was these historical trajectories that led to homogenizing governance and regulatory mechanisms and exercises of boundary-making,

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categorization and control, instituted largely to direct urban growth. The rigidity of these homogenizing practices is linked to the state’s imperative of consolidating, maintaining and negotiating social hierarchies of class, caste, race and ethnicity (Roy, 2012, p. 2). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the neoliberal turn and the retreat of the welfare state led to the orientation of all spheres, planning and urban governance included, towards economic and market rationality. The politics of accumulation and dispossession underlying these homogenizing practices has led to the development of urban forms, materialities and modalities that embody the contrast between the survivalist rationality of inhabitants and the governing rationality of planning practices. With urban reality rarely conforming to homogeneous categories, scholars underscore that it is the boundary-making of the state that requires explanation rather than the existence of territories that defy such categorization (Roy, 2009b; Yiftachel, 1998). The four chapters constituting Part One of this volume and discussed in the rest of this section speak predominantly to this homogenization while simultaneously foregrounding heterogeneity as a lens of theoretical enquiry. They draw out the two interrelated dimensions explained above—the relationality of urban experiences resulting from transnational processes and the entrenched, homogenizing practices of the state. The chapters analyse institutionalized urban planning and governance praxis in Indian and Chinese contexts while drawing on similarities across other Southern cities. The first chapter, by Sarani Khatua, ‘Production of Suburban Space through Metropolitan Governance in a Global South City Region’, investigates the suburban peripheries of metropolitan Kolkata as one of the ‘cities within the city’. It evidences how the boundary-making processes of the state integrate and segregate urban space for extractive or welfare agendas, and are often mediated by underlying political motivations. While being only tangentially linked to quality-of-life improvements for inhabitants, this boundary-making exercise results in the disruption, displacement and determination of sociospatial identities. Responding to the disjunction between socio-spatial outcomes and planning praxis, Khatua argues for the need to imbue a non-hierarchical understanding of cities that takes into account ‘all peripheries’ and reflects the processualism, precariousness and potentiality of urban forms such as the peri-urban. While Khatua discusses homogenizing processes within the urban, the second chapter, by Banashree Banerjee, ‘Planning for the Urban Mosaic

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of a Mega-city: the Case of Urban Villages in Delhi’ draws them out at the urban–rural edge. It explores the socio-spatial form of urban villages (in Delhi) as an intricate juxtaposition of diverse urban experiences. The chapter explores ways in which this intricacy can be responded to through formal planning praxis. Banerjee points out how over the years, as Delhi grew, urban planning and governance initiatives tried to resolve the contestations emanating from the city gradually engulfing villages, and embedded practices through alternating reformist and practical agendas. The resulting overlap of regulatory systems allows these spaces to develop a quality of ‘suspended animation’ and a certain ‘immunity from urban governance’ which is leveraged in relation to capital and labour flows to develop a heterogenous intermix of livelihoods, lifestyles and spatial forms. The chapter problematizes the inadequacies of planning praxis in hybrid contexts such as these as one of ‘language’. Even as the state and its institutions recognize the heterogeneous nature of urban reality, their inability to respond adequately stems from the formally defined organizational and institutional frameworks—the homogenizing categories and tools—that, by design, do not allow for an acknowledgement of the diverse specificities on the ground. The third chapter, by Aashish Xaxa, ‘Reimagining Urban Development in a Tribal Region: Readings on a Fifth Schedule Area of India’, expands on the understanding of urban villages in the rapidly urbanizing yet a relatively small city of Ranchi. It evidences how urban governance and planning processes were a result of, and benefited from, the marginalization of the original tribal inhabitants and their habitats—the urban villages—engulfed by the city. Expanding on the homogenizing practices of the state, Xaxa shows how it functions not only through boundarymaking but also through the unmaking of protective boundaries. The state-led pursuit of industrial and urban development has systematically subverted protective legal provisions to dispossess the original tribal inhabitants of their land and livelihoods. By foregrounding the question of ‘development for whom?’, the chapter argues for an emulative planning praxis as an alternative to the current extractive model. To this end, the author foregrounds traditional knowledge systems and everyday practices of tribal populations that balance social needs with ecological imperatives as conduits towards envisioning alternate planning models. The final chapter in Part One, by Zhi Liu and Peiming Wang, ‘Urban-planning Practices in China: Struggling Between Politics and the Market’, analyses how planning praxis in Chinese cities is shaped

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by tensions between national-government imperatives, market pursuits and local interests. In contrast to Indian, Latin American and African examples—as well as the ‘Southeastern’ perspective from Israel seen in Chapter 7—the Chinese context is atypical in that it carries no direct imprints of colonial planning systems, yet typical in that the country’s indigenously developed planning systems are tangentially informed by Western models. The chapter adds a distinct caveat to the understanding of homogenizing practices by highlighting contestations within formal planning and governance practices in order to foreground the inconsistency within these practices. Functioning within highly centralized governance models, these tensions often render planning subsidiary to economic growth. By drawing on the materialities of missing public spaces, ‘copycat’ towns and urban villages, Liu and Wang argue pragmatically for addressing local requirements and social justice through a planning praxis that mediates between the imposition of state visions and the precedence of market-oriented private interests. 1.3.2

The Heterogeneous South: Conflicting Rationalities

The heterogeneous is anchored in the empirical and experiential space of urban production. This volume conceptualizes the heterogeneous South along two dimensions: first, heterogeneity as a result of the interaction between the homogenizing practices of the state and specific configurations of land, infrastructure, economy and cultural systems; second, the distinct knowledge systems, logics and modalities that characterize the emerging urban forms of Southern urbanism. While shared colonial histories and development narratives contribute a degree of homogeneity to the urban experience of the South, their intersections on different timelines and across distinct histories, ecological conditions and sociocultural systems render them heterogeneous. This heterogeneity manifests itself in the empirical or experiential space, which is marked by hybridity, multiplicity and complexity. The fact that this urban reality doesn’t conform to the homogeneous categories of the state is often positioned as the crux of the urban problem. State-led planning praxis, with its techno-managerial and modernist notions of ideal urban forms and modalities, approaches this non-conforming heterogeneity with a reformist agenda—seeking to either displace it or hide it from sight (Watson, 2009b). The paradox in this reformist agenda relates to the fact that these non-conforming forms and the inadequate materialities

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(poverty, inequality, informality) that they embody are, in fact, consequential to the homogenizing processes of the state. For instance, as a city grows to engulf surrounding agrarian settlements with their embedded or ‘traditional’ systems of land and livelihood configurations, a dense intermixing, hybridization and juxtaposition of urban and rural develops to create the socio-spatial form of urban villages. However, the binary categorizations of urban–rural, traditional–modern and formal–informal that are characteristic of formal planning and governance mechanisms are unable to adequately grasp—and, by extension, intervene within—these heterogenous urban forms (Kasarda & Crenshaw, 1991). This uncertainty notwithstanding, inhabitants within these locales—driven by survivalist and developmental imperatives—eke out spaces of opportunity and habitation in a temporal, incremental and rooted manner (Bhan, 2019). The multiple boundaries ‘drawn onto’ empirical space by institutional acts of integration, segregation, neglect and erasure are therefore subverted, reinterpreted and contested through everyday acts of citizen agency, which result in new boundaries that are ‘drawn by’ inhabitants. While these boundaries ‘drawn onto’ abstract space by the state are marked by the attachment of binary adjectives, the boundaries ‘drawn by’ inhabitants in the lived space are marked by the enactment of juxtaposition. Together, the iterative processes concomitantly create the heterogeneous realities of the urban South. These ‘drawn by’ boundaries are exemplified in the urban forms of slums, squatter settlements, urban villages, peri-urban edges and suburban settlements that exist embedded within, at the edges of and at the intersections of homogeneous categories of the state. Until recently, they were theorized as exceptional urban forms synonymous with the tensions of over-urbanization, megalopolization and the urban primacy of Southern urbanism. However, scholars highlight the need to look beyond the tropes of exceptionality (stark poverty or heroic survival) and position them as an alternate mode of production of space (Bhan, 2019; Roy, 2012, p. 3; Watson, 2014). This approach requires foregrounding the specific temporality and agency of these settlements, which engages transversally with official logics of law, property and labour (Caldeira, 2017). As opposed to the formal production of space—which operates on evidence-based policymaking, techno-rational reasoning and marketized forms of praxis—this grounded production of space embraces uncertainty; is driven by everyday concerns and pursuits; and anchors itself in

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spatial, historical and sociopolitical specificities. Representing the dominant mode of production of space in the Global South, scholars theorizing the urban consider these socio-spatial signifiers as tutelary personages (Watson, 2009a, p. 2263)—as a constellation of affordable, feasible and pragmatic responses that build on the exigencies of the socio-spatial inequalities and shortages of the contemporary Southern city. ‘Seeing from the South’ will therefore require privileging not only the localized knowledge, embedded wisdom and cultural specificities that characterize these heterogeneous modes of production of space but also the dominant forms of urban membership and politics that they engender. The five chapters in this Part II of the book, exemplifying the heterogeneity encountered in the Southern city, draw out the two interrelated dimensions explained above—the extrinsic creation of heterogeneity through interaction with homogenizing practices and its intrinsic creation leveraging embedded knowledge systems, logics and modalities. Its chapters analyse the empirical specificities of urban experiences, politics and space production across Latin America, Asia and Africa. The first chapter, by Edwar Calderón, ‘Invisible Territories: the Visibility of an Urban Crisis in Medellín’, considers the hypertrophy of settlements emerging in response to ‘forced urbanization’ and the attendant dichotomy of visibility–invisibility that is maintained as an exercise of power. With urban growth increasingly driven by internally displaced migrants, the new marginal territories that develop at the peripheries of cities confound the homogeneous categories of the state, denying them territorial and legal recognition. They are thereby assigned a quality of invisibility that manifests itself as a ‘politics of apparition’. The author evidences the ways in which not just state players but also inhabitants opportunistically wield this visibility–invisibility dynamic towards habitational, political and economic imperatives. He thereby qualifies the demand for visibility not as one of equality but as one of recognition, since ‘equality homogenizes but recognition diversifies’. This recognition, Calderón argues, can be facilitated through the tool of participatory mapping, which can potentially bridge between heterogeneous specificities and homogeneous categorizations. The second chapter by Oren Yiftachel and Nir Cohen, ‘Defensive Urban Citizenship: AView from Southeastern Tel Aviv’, considers the making of urban identities through ‘defensive urban citizenship’, expanding on the understanding of ‘invisible territories’ elucidated by Calderón. Tracing the neoliberal and xenophobic planning policies

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behind property-led urban regeneration, attracting creative residents and establishing flagship cultural institutions, Yiftachel and Cohen highlight the emergence of territories suspended in a ‘condition of displaceability’. By analysing one such neighbourhood and its three dominant communities, their chapter highlights how ‘defensive urban citizenship’ develops as inhabitants perceive, mobilize and react to threats. Diverse communities coalesce under a new identity that practices citizenship through mobilization against hegemonically defined spaces and policies. By evidencing the ways in which this mobilization is not just reactionary but accrues protective and contributive dimensions over time, the authors argue for using this new and persistent form of urban membership as a lens through which to understand the Southern city. The third chapter, by Xavier Méndez Abad, Hans Leinfelder and Kris Scheerlinck, ‘Everyday Practices and Public Space (Re-)appropriation in El Cisne Dos, Guayaquil’, draws on upgrading projects in informal or self-developed neighbourhoods in order to contrast, compare and analyse official mechanisms of space production alongside spatial self-production, everyday rhythms and local practical knowledge. Their chapter expands on the understanding of emergent and insurgent urban identities discussed by Yiftachel and Cohen in order to show the distinct forms of spatial production and appropriation that they engender. It shows how the recognition of rights, sociocultural specificities and diverse logics of spatial production in historically neglected areas has led to a new direction in policy, positioning in situ upgrading as an accepted model. By focusing on public-space renovation and provisioning within these projects, it argues that the continued reliance on standard spatial models that engage in a limited manner with everyday local dynamics results in physical determinism and the perpetuation of dominating socio-spatial structures. In contrast, it draws out the ‘ordinary’ re-appropriation of space through gradual, mundane and particular concern-based actions of inhabitants in pursuit of livelihoods, recreation, socialization and spatial personalization. By showing how this grounded spatial production subverts the institutionalized conception of space, the chapter highlights the need to move beyond approaches that aim at standardized aesthetics and spatial products towards perspectives anchored in everyday appropriations, meanings and practices. The fourth chapter, by Guillermo Delgado, Situated Modernities: Socio-Spatial Co-production in Namibia’, analyses the emerging modes

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of co-produced spatial production in Namibia to argue that these represent situated modernities. It builds on the other chapters in this section by positioning bottom-up spatial production as an alternative to the homogeneous models of the state. Namibia’s experimentation in the 1990s with a new form of bottom-up spatial production emerged through grassroots mobilization for land and housing. While initially showcasing welfarebased relations, over the years it consolidated into a dominant form of spatial production that presented new forms of stakeholder relations facilitated through financial allocations towards an urban transformation process. By comparing bottom-up and top-down spatial production along engagement modalities, temporality and costs, the chapter positions grounded spatial production as a situated modernity that obtains legitimacy through presence, orients itself on collective demands and leverages knowledge of urban development made accessible and transformable at lower levels. It further emphasizes the importance of acknowledging, integrating and adopting these situated modernities within mainstream planning processes. The final chapter in this section, by Taibat Lawanson, ‘Planning and Pentecostalism in the Spatial (Re-)configuration of Lagos’, considers spatial production by religious organizations in Lagos and their impact on the morphology and land-use configurations of the city. The author highlights the ways in which this spatial production is often in disregard, subversion and contestation of planning regulations. It expands on the understanding of bottom-up spatial production elucidated in the previous chapters to caution against a romantic conception of the muchtouted emancipatory effects of bottom-up practices. The author traces space production through religious activities in Lagos to show how these can transform into a homogenizing force. Amidst state failures, Lawanson highlights religion and religious institutions as propagators of alternate urban visions that wield significant impact on patterns of land appropriation, governance and management. Exploiting yet contradicting the state’s perception of religion as a benign presence, infrastructural and relational transformations such as new towns, religious gentrification and interim spaces enacted by religious institutions pass by undetected. By showing how space production by religious institutions has become as aggressive, dictatorial and benevolent as state-led practices, the chapter highlights the importance of visibilizing the agency and agendas underlying grounded modes of spatial production.

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1.4

Discussion

The arguments and provocations across this volume’s grounded explorations into the relational socio-spatial geographies of Asia, Africa and Latin American point to the anchoring within empirical specificities of the Global South as a pathway rather than a preclusion towards mutual learning. The implicit question contained within the individual chapters and the volume as a whole is how the diversity of space production within contexts, on the one hand, and the specificities and similarities in urban experiences across contexts, on the other, can be brought together in a mutual learning process that helps progress towards an integrated and grounded field of urban praxis and theorization. It is with this intent that the volume conceptualizes the South as a simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous place. This conceptualization allows the drawing out of (1) the uniqueness of the intrinsic imperatives, logics and modalities that mark these geographies; and (2) the similarities, simultaneity and interactions that bind them. The remainder of this discussion disqualifies the binary conceptualization of homogeneous and heterogeneous to unpack the interlinkages within and between these along dimensions of power, intention and modalities. 1.4.1

The Homogeneous South

Power: The chapter by Liu and Wang draws on the Chinese experience in order to qualify the power of the state’s homogenizing practices. They argue that the homogeneous realm of space production, far from operating as a cohesive force, is rife with contestations within itself. The translation of the boundaries that it draws onto empirical space is marked by multiple adaptations, contestations and subversions. Banerjee’s analysis of the urban villages of Delhi evidences this argument: mandated master-planning efforts over the years have resulted in an overlapping of urban regulatory guidelines with traditional systems of land ownership and tenure that creates a state of suspended animation in these sociospatial forms. Inhabitants in these villages leverage this ambiguous state in order to create a new identity for themselves. They develop mechanisms that tap into market opportunities through tools such as quasi-legal land transfers in order to contribute to spaces that provide cheap rental units, supply labour and support discrepant urban activities. The boundaries drawn onto space by the state are thereby subverted into boundaries

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drawn by the agency of the inhabitants in response to their social, political, cultural and economic imperatives. Xaxa correlates this agency to a realm of embedded knowledge systems anchored in the everyday practices of tribal communities. His chapter points to an intimate understanding of ecological orders that tribal communities embody and that can potentially be leveraged to respond to the emerging imperatives of sustainability and equitability. Modalities: The chapters highlight how the entrenched modalities of homogenizing practices limit their ability to intervene in heterogeneous realities. Often, while the state recognizes the empirical heterogeneity abounding its homogeneous categories, its continued reliance on tools and models embodying technocratic, binary and hierarchical categorizations precludes it from intervening in a meaningful, appropriate and effective manner. Banerjee shows how the Delhi masterplan—while recognizing the temporal, multi-use nature of urban villages—continues to employ instruments of static planning frameworks such as land-use zoning and development codes to implement change. Further, the plan continues to orient itself on a simplistic, reformist agenda with an assumption that the subsuming of these settlements into the formal order will implicitly trigger development. Such an approach negates the contribution of these grounded modes of space production in taking on state responsibilities of housing, services and employment provision arguably in more affordable and sustainable manners. The imperative, therefore, is to move beyond the language of ‘drawing onto’ and adopt and acknowledge the language of ‘drawing by’—i.e. the rationalities, modalities and processes critical to reshape planning praxis and regulatory models should be derived from grounded modes of spatial production. Intention: The chapters draw out the intention that these institutionalized praxes conceal as opposed to the rationality that they project. The orthodoxy of modernistic and technocratic planning and governance models has led to state action that is largely oriented towards reforming, upgrading and integrating un-tameable forms into controllable models and orders. Be it in the boundary-making processes of suburban towns in Kolkata (as highlighted by Khatua) or of the urban villages in Delhi and Ranchi (as highlighted by Banerjee and Xaxa), the state projects agendas of development or reformation in order to validate the categorization and control that it draws onto space. All three authors highlight the internal contradictions in these agendas. While purportedly framed as ‘developmental’, these agendas often mask the extractive, accumulative

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and political objectives of various state–society–market stakeholders. Critically, the binaries of urban–rural, traditional–modern, formal–informal and planned–unplanned underlying state action and agendas are, in effect, difficult to defend against an overwhelming body of evidence of the diverse on-the-ground materialities and modalities that occur as intricately juxtaposed in context. 1.4.2

The Heterogeneous South

The subsequent five chapters discuss the occurrence of heterogeneous urban realities despite, and because of, the homogenizing practices of the state as well as the specific logic, modalities and complexities that they embody. Power: The chapters foreground the power and agency embodied in grounded modes of spatial production, evidenced by their ability to remake not just physical but also social space. While Calderón terms this physical remaking a hypertrophy of settlements that develops in relation to processes of rapid urbanization, migration and neoliberalization, Yitachel and Cohen link it to transit neighbourhoods marked by conditions of displaceability, with xenophobic and gentrifying tendencies gaining prominence in state agendas. Both the chapters then highlight the remaking of urban relations and identities triggered within these new territories. Calderón points to a subversive modality of urban membership termed as ‘politics of apparition’, with dynamics of visibility and invisibility being opportunistically wielded by state and society alike while negotiating market processes, political visions and survivalist imperatives. Yiftachel and Cohen point to a reactionary modality of urban politics termed ‘defensive urban citizenship’, wherein diverse identities amidst conditions of displaceability mobilize against the perception of larger or common threats to develop new identities that derive from a rejection of hegemonies. While initially occupying a reactionary or contrarian position, the authors point to the flexible nature of these identities that allows them to contribute to processes of space production. Méndez Abad et al. highlight these contributions at the neighbourhood scale, where residents re-appropriate public space through everyday practices. Delgado highlights similar re-appropriation at the city scale while discussing grassroots movements around land and housing. In all five contexts—Medellín; Tel Aviv; El Cisne Dos, Guayaquil; Lagos; and cities across Namibia—the authors trace the subversion of the states’ hegemonic visions, relations and

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politics. The remaking of urban territories thus contributes incrementally to an alternative realm of urban visions, relations and politics. Modalities: The chapters highlight the unique modalities leveraged by these grounded modes of production of space to contrast and meet official mechanisms of standardized, static and control-based space production. For example, in considering public-space upgrading projects in the informal settlements of El Cisne Dos, Méndez Abad et al. draw out the ways in which the state’s aim of neighbourhood improvement reaches only limited fruition as it continues to rely on physically determinist and aestheticized models that engage minimally with local dynamics, practices and perception. In contrast, the authors examine the everyday re-appropriation of public space in order to highlight its alignment with community perceptions, priorities and relational dynamics. This grounded spatial production is the cumulative product of distributed, particular concern-based, incremental actions that flexibly adopt, reject and subvert institutionalized conceptions of space. Delgado scales up this analysis to the city level by contrasting grassroots land and housing movements with state-led planning praxis. He highlights how these grounded modes of spatial production often emanate from state incapacities in provisioning citizen and city needs. While initially located outside of legal domains, such space production gains legitimacy and success by orienting problem framing, attendant resource mobilization and interventions at the community level. Stakeholder relations between inhabitants, civil society, universities, private players and the state are configured such that knowledge of territorial transformation is acknowledged to reside at the level of lived experience and is made accessible and transformable from the ground up through tools like community-led data collection and participatory mapping. These grounded modes of spatial production represent a situated modernity that leverages contexts of unpredictability, complexity and disparity and draws on embedded knowledge and everyday experiences to produce socio-spatial outcomes that contrast with, and often mitigate, inadequacies in state-led planning praxis. Intention: Finally, the chapters caution against romantic conceptualizations of the intention of grounded spatial production. Emancipatory impacts are not a given in either bottom-up or top-down spatial production. Through an analysis of grounded spatial production by religious organizations in Lagos, Lawanson evidences new forms of parochial practice that are just as aggressive, dictatorial and benevolent as state-led

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praxis—especially when their incremental acquisition of power goes undetected by techno-rational models of the state. Arguably, bottom-up and top-down spatial production constitute complementary realms, showcasing interlinkages that can be potentially leveraged towards triggering co-production. To conclude on this discussion, the trajectories of theoretical enquiry from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous and vice versa intersect to create a narrative that draws out the interlinkages between the two. Homogenizing practices of the state position socio-spatial forms such as suburban towns (Khatua), urban villages (Banashree; Xaxa) and informal settlements (Calderón; Méndez Abad et al.) along different degrees of visibility corresponding to its binary and hierarchical categorizations. However, the power hierarchies reflected in this disjunctive positioning result in the development of dynamics of ‘suspended animation’ (Banerjee) or ‘conditions of displaceability’ (Yiftachel and Cohen). These dynamics are wielded by the agency of inhabitants to create new modalities of urban membership and politics. These can be (a) subversive, such as the ‘politics of apparition’ as referred to by Calderón while discussing Medellín; (b) reactionary, such as the ‘defensive urban citizenship’ framed by Yiftachel and Cohen; or (c) contributive, as evidenced by Méndez Abad et. al. through the re-appropriation of public space at the neighbourhood level and by Delgado at the city scale. On one hand, the progression of this grounded spatial production can morph into hegemonies—as Lawanson cautions through the case of religious organizations in Lagos. On the other, the progression of top-down spatial production can be marked by internal contestations, as Liu and Wang draw out in the case of Chinese planning praxis. Overall, the power of homogeneous modes of spatial production is not totalizing but neither is the power of heterogeneous modes of spatial production marginal. The rationality of homogeneous space production often masks sociopolitical intentions while the emancipatory intention of heterogeneous modes of spatial production is not a given. Complementary modalities underly both modes of production, with homogeneous modes of production embodying control, order and predictability and heterogeneous modes of production embodying incrementality, flexibility and uncertainty. It is within these interlinkages in power, intention and modalities that the volume positions a call for mutual learning towards grounded theorizing. It seeks to leverage this ‘in-betweenness’ of homogeneous and heterogeneous modes of space production for a recursive, aggregated and disaggregated process of mutual learning within and across contexts.

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Conclusion

The present volume aligns itself with the need for pragmatism and ambition in Southern urban theory. Its anchoring within the empirical specificities of Southern urbanisms is oriented towards an exercise of theory-building that presents both actions for context-specific implementation and abstractions for context-spanning derivations. It is to this end that the pathway of mutual learning between the similarities and specificities of Southern contexts mediates the long-perpetuated gap between theory and praxis. This mutual learning should operate at two levels: across and within contexts. Across contexts, the relationality of urban trajectories due to transnational processes of colonial rule, postcolonial development and marginalization of embedded socio-spatial orders should facilitate framing of their urban materialities, experiences and forms both as recurring homogeneities and heterogeneous specificities. The volume attempts such a framing when it draws out the socio-spatial specificities of the diverse geographies of Latin America, Asia and Africa and gathers them to speak amongst themselves. For instance, urban villages of India and China emerge as symptomatic manifestations of the institutionalized binaries between urban–rural and traditional–modern. Similarly, the defensive urban citizenship emerging in the transit neighbourhoods of Israel can be read as an evolution or variation of the politics of apparition emerging in the invisible territories of Medellín, Colombia. The shared histories of the diverse geographies of the Global South that intersect across different timelines and different socio-spatial configurations allow relatable yet varying urban experiences that can be leveraged for fluid comparisons, distilling, displacing and directing perspectives that can potentially trigger urban innovation. Within contexts, the potential for mutual learning is located at the interlinkage points between homogeneous and heterogeneous modes of space production. While both realms involve distinct logics, modalities and temporalities, it is at the interlinkages between them that the potential for approaching, unpacking and leveraging the complexity, hybridity and multiplicity of Southern urbanisms lie. Finally, the volume positions mutual learning between the homogeneous and heterogeneous modes of space production along three processes. First, through a process of recognition that foregrounds a nonhierarchical processual understanding of space production (Khatua).

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Evidence of multiple peripheries (Khatua) or overlapping mosaics (Banerjee) or hypertrophy of settlements (Calderón) negates the institutionalized conceptualization of the urban as a collection of discrete, static and controllable categories. The homogenizing practices of the state that aim to integrate, segregate, erase or neglect heterogeneous specificities interact with the agency of inhabitants acting in response to survivalist and developmental imperatives and adapting, rejecting or subverting boundaries ‘drawn onto’ space into boundaries ‘drawn by’. Acknowledgement of how urban identities, materialities and relationships are in fact a product of the overlapping, embeddedness and intersections between boundaries ‘drawn onto’ and boundaries ‘drawn by’ provides an opportunity to dismantle binaries and the hierarchical positioning of homogeneous and heterogenous modes of space production. Second, proceeding from such an acknowledgement requires a process of elicitation of grounded vocabularies. That the homogeneous models that continue to use modalities of ‘drawing onto’ cannot be relied upon is clear from Banerjee’s analysis of Delhi’s master-planning approach towards urban villages and Méndez Abad et al.’s analysis of in situ upgrading projects in El Cisne Dos. Instead, territorial transformation embedded in lived experience and everyday practices requires elicitation—as does its directionality towards institutionalized modes of spatial production. To the former situation, both Calderón and Lawanson emphasize the visibilizing rather than the subsuming of the agency, logics and modalities of grounded spatial production. To the latter, assistive tools such as participatory mapping and community-initiated household enumerations emerge as critical, as highlighted by both Calderón and Delgado. Third, the elicitation of these grounded vocabularies will have to be mobilized towards urban transformation through a recursive process of aggregation and disaggregation. The argument here is that responding to Southern urbanisms cannot be an either-or choice between homogeneous and heterogeneous spatial production. On one hand, there is a need for an aggregation of grounded vocabularies anchored in heterogeneous specificities towards informing institutionalized modes of spatial production. On the other, a disaggregation of institutionalized modes of spatial production in order to support, direct and scale heterogeneous modes of spatial production in alignment with the identified socio-ecological goals of communities is required. The need for such a recursive directionality is highlighted by Lawanson’s evidence on how it is the disjunction between the homogeneous and heterogeneous modes of production

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rather than their intrinsic qualities that results in negative impacts such as the entrenchment of socio-spatial inequalities. In responding to the enigma of the Global South as a project, provocation and place, this volume conceptualizes it as a relational and processual geography of simultaneous homogeneity and heterogeneity. This conceptualization is anchored in the volume’s understanding that the ‘singular script’ of the South is one written in contraries and simultaneity. Its answers, therefore, are contained in its ‘in-betweenness’, in the spaces between its similarities and specificities—i.e. its homogeneities and heterogeneities. While the chapters in Part I trace this in-betweenness from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous realms of space production, those in Part II trace it from the latter to former. In doing so, they interpret the call for theory ‘from the South’ as one that, while being placed within the empirical specificities of contexts, can be displaced towards generalizability across contexts. The chapters (Two–Ten), while not presenting totalizing theories or models, articulate clues and fragments that, while being assembled to answer the question of the Global South, are capable of reconstructing the question itself. In contrast, the conclusion (Chapter 11), as a way forward, puts forth arguments for a transformative urban development process that starts from within. The authors propose a grammarian alternative and an autopoietic communication model of space production that relies on an interaction between natural order and social order. They identify processes of insurgent citizenship, urban dialectics and generative designs, which could be used to shape this autopoietic process. Overall, the volume and its chapters are ‘works in progress’ towards theorizing urban development from the Global South. In doing so, they align, respond to and embody the contrarian, ephemeral and intricate nature of Southern urbanisms themselves. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the contribution of Sneha Maria Varghese in sifting through and collating the background literature while also being an eager ‘ear’ in formulating the arguments presented in this chapter.

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART I

The Homogeneous South: Emerging Planning Territories

CHAPTER 2

The Production of Suburban Space Through Metropolitan Governance in a Global South City Region Sarani Khatua

2.1

Introduction

World Urbanization Prospects published by the United NationsDepartment of Economic and Social Affairs over the last ten years, particularly in 2014 and 2018, have confirmed a concentration of urban population in the Global South (United Nations-Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, 2019). Though discourses on urbanisation long ago moved beyond demographic figures, reports that comprise aggregates of respective national data continue to serve as an important ‘entry point’ regarding many issues in urbanisation. Despite an increasing number of large cities situated within the Global South, there has also been a substantial increase in small- and mediumsized towns in the same territory—and the growth of some metropolises has slowed compared with the pace of urban spread on the planetary scale. But do these figures divert attention from metropolitan regions? Is there

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a need to look at agglomerations from a different perspective—and, if yes, what could that different perspective be? These questions might not be answerable in direct or simple language. Heterogeneity and complexity are inherent in cities irrespective of their position in the global capital circuit, time of formation, expansion or gradual decline. Viewing them through specific lenses like ‘global city’, ‘megacity’, ‘megalopolis’ or ‘third-world city’ runs the risk of generalisation on the one hand and overemphasis on specific spaces on the other, as proposed by Amin and Graham (1997, pp. 416–417) in discussing ‘ordinary city’ for the first time. The idea was further propagated by Robinson (2007), who critiqued division between Western and other cities and pressed for a non-hierarchical understanding of cities through the introduction of a new framework in urban studies that would view all cities as ‘ordinary’. There is also tension that ‘cities are part of seamless whole-all are ordinary’ (Mabin, 2014, p. 25). But the idea of ‘ordinary city’ paves the way for knowledge production beyond Global North. Sheppard (2014, p. 144) located the Global South in two distinct areas: one in the realm of regional geography, of the colonised (referred to as post-colony) and the other in the fractal —that is, with those who live precariously. The Global South is not necessarily a physical location but, as Schindler (2017) suggests, one needs to view its centres as settlements with a disconnect between capital and labour, with contested metabolic configurations and with co-constituted political economy and materiality. The Global South presents a plethora of urban processes that reflects precarity and potentiality, risk and stability (Simone, 2020, p. 617) for its communities. More than a region, it is a perspective (Bhan, 2019). In order to understand the Global South’s cities, it is not enough to see them as different or unique because within such perspective they continue to be treated as the other (Roy, 2009, p. 820). In this ongoing discussion, I would like to argue that when a postcolonial metropolis, largely shaped by neoliberal policies, constantly strives to showcase itself as globalising, it prompts a deep examination of such places. By looking only at their globalising spaces, there is a risk of oversimplifying our understanding of the metropolitan space. A metropolis primarily identified through its central/core city is a functional region with a wide scale of suburban, extended urban, peri-urban and rural constituents connected through diverse but intricately woven networks. Asdar Ali and Reiker (2008), in discussing the marginal urban spaces of the Global South, emphasise the importance of small and

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medium-sized cities at the margins of regional hierarchies. In an agglomeration, such cities lie very much within the metropolitan area and the ambit of metropolitan governance. This is not to say that cities at the margins are specific to metropolises only, but it has been observed that in discussing a megacity or large agglomeration the identities of smaller cities and towns at the margins become lost. These towns and cities, which are often not identified individually but as part of a larger agglomeration, themselves undergo several changes. Taking notice of these settlements is essential in understanding urbanisation in the Global South. In fact, it is precisely the area outside the city limits that has gained attention over the last few decades as the more dynamic site of expansion—as it is perceived that urbanisation in its present form is more about suburban development (Keil, 2017) irrespective of its location in either the Global North or South. Within this context I bring in Kolkata, which is often regarded as metropolitan with a declining core and periphery when compared with other metropolises in India (Sivaramakrishnan, 2015 p. 7). The problem is that while we are aware of the central city and some specific peripheries, we rarely tend to know about all the peripheries. The present study aims to explore the suburban as a key space, taking into account Kolkata as an urban region of the Global South. This status is not only owed to its geographical position in the region or it is having a history of being a colonised settlement, but also to its condition as a post-colony that is simultaneously experiencing various developmental projects and neoliberal policies and is shaped by a political economy specific to the region—a condition also reflected in Kolkata’s metropolitan governance. The choice of reading into ‘suburban space’ within a ‘city region’ in the context of the Global South is deliberate and conscious. As put forward by Harris, if suburbs need to contribute to urban theory one needs to understand how these places are developed, experienced and governed (Harris, 2010, p. 16). I would extend this argument, proposing that in order to understand city regions in the Global South one needs to look at the suburbs developed on the edge of those cities, and at the governance of such spaces. In recent decades, metropolitan governance has been far more rurally targeted than hitherto owing to linkages of the land to real-estate development and urban–global interdependency. As the concept of ‘rurban’ emerges (denoting areas sharing both rural and urban characteristics) as a new challenge in the Global South, it is beyond doubt that the question of resilience for the city and region remains overlooked in planning terms

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(Mohan, 2019). Whereas in some literature, ‘peri-urban’ is considered as an overlapping of the rural and the urban in the Global South, ‘suburban’ is more of a Global North category (Leaf, 2016), I would contest such north–south categorisation of these terms. While peri-urban reflects a mixed and muddled space of rural and urban, suburban is more urban. Suburban space, in my understanding, is more evolved in terms of urbanisation than either the rurban or the peri-urban. The ‘sub’ in suburban does not denote something less urban; rather, suburban connotes a ‘subordinate’ category and consequently refers to a hierarchy, because the inevitable question is: Subordinate to whom/what? A suburban area is outside the municipal limits of the larger city—adjacent and closely connected with the city, and at the same time secondary to it. It might have formed owing to overspill from a large city, as an industrial hub or as residential spaces for a commuter population. The suburban area in the present study is a statutory town with its own municipal jurisdiction outside the central city of the greater metropolitan area. Further, I argue that these suburban towns need to be treated as ordinary since they lie at the crossroads of globalising, colonial and developmental categories even though they are hierarchical. Being part of Kolkata’s agglomeration, they are hardly visible as individual entities globally, but at national and regional scales they are recorded as separate towns and are highly relevant to the state. Over the last few decades, globalising forces have predominantly shaped Kolkata’s eastern fringe (Chakravorty, 2000; Dasgupta, 2007) in a process initially triggered by the formation of Bidhannagar (‘Salt Lake city’) in the east and the relocation there of major administrative offices—subsequently, the development of IT-based industries. This eastward focus was further aggravated by the formation of New Town in the east and the increased focus of regional state government (i.e. the Government of West Bengal) on the IT-BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector, a reversal of earlier policy (Chatterji, 2017, p. 974). The ‘place making’ aspiration of the regional state government to attract international investment (Mitra, 2018, p. 80) involved substantive transformations of wetland-dominated peri-urban and rural spaces marred by conflicts and contestations (Dey et al., 2013). This kind of development is what Shen and Wu (2016) characterise, with respect to new towns in China, as suburban spaces shaped by market forces and state authority and involving substantive capital investments. However, the idea of the metropolis and its governance remains incomplete and insufficient when only the globalising periphery is considered.

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The metropolis has many peripheries, which are tied to the central city— and, like the globalising periphery, they also form spaces of extraction. But unlike the globalising periphery, they remain in the shadow zone: the ‘other’ periphery of the same metropolitan space. This phenomenon is even more visible in agglomerations, whose spaces are not coherent because the governance of the metropolis is also not seamless but fractured (Sivaramakrishnan, 2015). As a result, generalisations cannot be made even if the area concerned lies within a single metropolitan area or is governed through similar sets of formal institutions. I would like to argue that how a core perceives its periphery depends on an interplay of party politics—decisions of the higher tier of governance that is the regional state government. While land remains critical for the state’s neoliberal aspirations, the political economy shaped by the regional and local state is also crucial. The two suburban locales in the present study are part of the aforementioned ‘other’ periphery. With regard to the ongoing discussion, one crucial question needs to be raised: Where is the core? In discussions of the Global South, the context of ‘periphery’ assumes much relevance—but so too does ‘core’. In simple terms, the core of a metropolitan area is its central city: a specific geographical location. But metropolitan governance involves multiple institutions like planning authorities, different urban and rural local bodies, and so on. Hence, looking deeper into the context of planning and governance, the core is not so simple to locate—particularly in the Global South, where different forces of the market, the regional and local states, and political parties operate simultaneously though not coherently.

2.2

Research Methods

The present work was undertaken through comparative lenses, whereby two places from the same metropolis were taken up as case studies. It explores two suburban towns within the same metropolitan space, intricately woven into the core–periphery hegemonic relationship, and it does so through discussion of the origin and amalgamation of these places as an outcome of metropolitan governance. The study was carried out as part of a larger research project on governance of the periphery in contemporary

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Kolkata.1 The two towns discussed here are Pujali and erstwhile Bally, both of which form part of the greater metropolitan area of Kolkata. These towns have temporal disparities (i.e. they were built at different times), but are connected through the same metropolitan governance. Pujali is a separate municipal town within the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA). Field work was carried out between May and August 2018 and included ten interviews, two group discussions and three informant interviews. Bally is an erstwhile colonial suburban town in the KMA, which has been part of Howrah city, in the same metropolitan area, since 2015. Field work in Bally was undertaken as part of visits to additional areas of Howrah Municipal Corporation or Howrah city, the second largest urban unit in the KMA. This work was done between April and May, and then in November 2018; it comprised seven interviews, two informant interviews and two group discussions. Field notes from each visit along with data from secondary sources, like the Census of India and planning documents pertaining to the city, have been corroborated for the purpose of the study. In this chapter, I have specifically focused on the delineation and redelineation of municipal boundaries as an instrument of the state in order to discuss suburban-space production as part of metropolitan governance. In the Indian context, local self-government comes under the jurisdiction of the state government2 and the creation of municipal bodies depends on criteria set by the regional state. Within the metropolitan context, multiple institutions are responsible for metropolitan governance as a whole. The following section will elaborate on metropolitan governance and the production of suburban spaces in the Kolkata metropolis, followed by two separate sections on the case studies before contextualising governance in the suburban spaces of metropolitan urban areas in the Global South.

1 This larger research project was carried out from 2016 to 2019 with the aid of University Grants Commission—Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Postdoctoral Fellowship for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Centre for Urban Economic Studies, University of Calcutta. 2 The distribution of powers and responsibilities between the Union and State Government has been laid down in the Seventh Schedule (Article 246) of the Indian Constitution through Union, State and Concurrent list.

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2.3 Metropolitan Governance---Suburban Space in Kolkata The history of suburban development in Kolkata is as old as that of the city itself. Most of its towns were municipal entities established in the colonial period, and they formed part of the Hooghly industrial belt that spread on either side of the River Hooghly on the periphery of the colonial city of Calcutta. Post-independence, owing to a decline in industrial growth in the region, the same towns and cities also served as residential commuter suburbs for the city. The idea of forming a metropolis encompassing the city and rural and urban spaces from adjacent districts was initiated through the formation of the Calcutta Metropolitan District in the sixties with the preparation of the first perspective plan, the Basic Development Plan for the Calcutta Metropolitan District 1966–1986 (BDP), by the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organisation (CMPO). This initiative led to the first formal delineation of metropolitan area of the city in 1966, which eventually became the present-day Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA) though its boundary (Map 2.1) has expanded over the course of time. The aim was to provide support to the declining city by decongesting it through holistic planning of the central cities of Calcutta and Howrah and its suburban towns and rural spaces. Howrah was, in the process, regarded as the twin centre of Calcutta though it remained a suburb throughout. The CMPO was later discontinued, and the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) was established in 1970 and legalised under Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority Act 1972. Since then, the CMDA has been instrumental in planning for the Calcutta Metropolitan Area. With the renaming of the city in 2000 it is now the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA), responsible for the planning and development of the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA). Despite being the first document of its kind in the country, the BDP did very little to resuscitate the city’s declining space. A number of planning initiatives were also prepared and implemented by the CMDA. Despite having a well-defined suburban space, planning plunged into a process of exploiting the rural lands and increasing the limits of the metropolitan area. This pattern was typical of urbanisation processes in both the pre- and post-nineties period. In the long run, Kolkata had a stagnating growth. One of the main possible reasons for this unfortunate

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Map 2.1 The Kolkata Metropolitan Area, with New Town in the east (Adapted from KMA map from the KMDA available on public domain http://kmdaonline. org/ludcp/home)

outcome was that the initiatives taken were primarily disconnected from industrial revitalisation or employment generation. The MDA, however paved the way for some improvements of the situation in the area through the introduction of trans-municipal arrangements for water supply, sewerage and drainage, and the improvement of road networks—though basic services remained a major concern for the suburban towns beyond the central city. From the nineties onwards, there was a spurt in these activities consistent with the globalising aspirations

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of the regional state government. With the establishment of urban local government as a third tier of government (after national and regional) through the enactment of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act 1992, municipal governance revived. At present, there are multiple governance institutions that address development of the area—including the planning body (that is, the KMDA) and the constituent municipalities of the central city and suburban towns. The political scenario is equally pertinent in understanding the metropolitan governance of the city. With a political economy rooted in a strong party structure, metropolitan governance in Kolkata had largely been controlled by the regional state (i.e. West Bengal). This situation is still ongoing, despite the presence of well-defined municipal governance in the state. In the given scenario, the upcoming discussion of the two sites is expected to reveal how each unit of the metropolitan area needs to be considered and studied in order to understand the city regions of the Global South. It is essential to appreciate the various formal governance mechanisms simultaneously, which are as essential as informal processes in understanding the cities of the Global South.

2.4 From Rural Periphery to Suburban Town: The Case of Pujali Situated on the southwestern side of Kolkata city (Map 2.2), Pujali town owes its origin to the acute power shortages experienced in Kolkata in the eighties. Pujali became a municipality through the merging of one nonmunicipal town, one outgrowth and six villages. The non-municipal town and the outgrowth in the ‘backyard’ of another old town, Budge Budge (also a part of the Calcutta Metropolitan Area), served as an entry point to this agriculturally rich territory. More than 50% of the land belonging to the six villages was under cultivation. One of the villages, Achhipur, was historically known for being the first site where Chinese settlement grew in India before relocating to the inner parts of Kolkata city. The notification of the merger and transformation to urban governance came in the wake of the area being identified for land acquisition for the setting

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Map 2.2 Pujali Municipality in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (Adapted from KMA map from the KMDA available on public domain http://kmdaonline.org/ ludcp/home)

up of a thermal power plant by CESC Limited3 under the auspices of the state government. The process of land acquisition, started by the CMDA on behalf of the Left Front4 -run state government, ignited protests within the locality despite the alternative jobs and housing promised in compensation. There were several points of contention. The first concerned the acquisition of

3 The Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation Limited‚ now known as CESC Limited, was taken over by RPG Enterprise in 1988. 4 The Left Front is an alliance of several parties primarily led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). It was in power continuously in West Bengal for 34 years (1977–2011) and left an indelible mark on the regional state with respect to both its land-reform policies and land-acquisition issues.

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agricultural territory that also included homestead land and parts of a local school. Though resettlement was to be provided to the land’s owners, there was no clarity regarding others associated with cultivation—like sharecroppers or agricultural labourers. The area had marginal holdings, which were mainly for subsistence cultivation—so losing the land meant people losing their livelihoods. The second point of contention was regarding a lack of transparency about the exact amount of land to be acquired; a heritage area (a Chinese temple) within the project site was also included initially.5 The third point of contention was how a thermal plant could be planned directly on the river bank, and the possible environmental implications of establishing such a facility within the locality. As per environmental clearance guidelines for the setting up of such an installation (IL&FS Ecosmart Limited, 2010), a 500-kilometres distance had to be maintained from any floodplain in a riverine system, increasing to a distance of 10 kilometres (km) from a site of historical and heritage importance. In addition, such a facility should not be set up within 25 km of the outer peripheries of a metropolitan city, and should be avoided altogether on prime agricultural land. Finally, agricultural land should not be used for the associated fly-ash disposal. Despite these points of contention, a lack of transparency and protests by the locals, land acquisition took place and the project was implemented. The area was notified as a municipality in 1990 and the Municipal Board was formed in 1991, with the production of electricity commencing in 1997. The plant has its own fly-ash dump site within the municipal area only. Resistance, therefore, did not deter or stop this project—but it did help in exempting the heritage area and the adjacent site from acquisition.6 An alternative plot was given to the school whose land had been appropriated; similarly, resettlement was provided through the provision of homesteads and jobs to the displaced—primarily, the land’s owners. The fabric of the area has changed completely since then. A significant portion of the municipality’s tax revenue now comes from CESC Limited, the company responsible for power distribution in Kolkata, which operated through two generating units at the site. The third generating unit in the same area started in 2010. A hefty amount of investment in infrastructural development, through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), partly

5 Field notes, June 2018. 6 Ibid.

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compensates for the loss of land, changes in livelihood and the flouting of norms. The CESC-owned Budge Budge Thermal Power Station won accolades from various national and international organisations7 for its efficient, economic use of fly-ash. The fly-ash produced in the thermal power plant is mostly exported by river, and the rest is utilised in various construction and engineering industries in India. At present there is rising demand for fly-ash bricks instead of clay bricks for environmental reasons. A number of small-scale fly-ash brick units have sprung up in the area, and are fast replacing the existing clay-brick units locally. Though this has impacted on the marginal workers engaged in clay cutting, it has initiated a fresh livelihood source in the area. Though the plant was set up, the Left Front, as its political sponsor, failed to win the first municipal election held in the town. Three decades later, apathy regarding this particular political party—which remains associated with the forceful land acquisition—persists: As part of resettlement contractual jobs were provided to those who directly lost land. A few, close to the ruling party, received permanent jobs but not within this area. Rather the thermal power plant has helped to gain employment for outsiders. (Respondent, a daily labour [formerly agricultural labourer], July 2018)

The ‘outsiders’ referred to here are those commuting to the town from neighbouring districts to working in the power plant. The former villages, before the merger to form Pujali town, drew its major source of income from providing workers as agricultural labour, and as operatives in the jute mills and oil mill in Budge Budge municipality. Some even worked in brick kilns beside the river. Closure of some of the jute mills8 coupled with the loss of agricultural land owing to the thermal plant have produced sustained unemployment in the area. Though the census data for Pujali indicates that the proportion of total workers to total population increased from 23.1% in 2001 to 24.9% in 2011, the proportion of main 7 For example, CESC received three ‘green leaves’ (one of the best ratings when compared with other thermal power plants in India) as a mark of its efficient use of fly-ash from the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)—as cited in The State of our Power Plants, prepared by the CSE and available at https://cdn.cseindia.org/userfiles/ booklet.pdf. 8 The closure of the jute mills is not linked with the establishment of the thermal power plant.

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workers9 to total workers had decreased from 70.14% in 2001 to 68.5% in 2011.10 Over the same time span, the proportion of marginal workers11 increased from 29.9% to 31.5%, indicating a decrease in the availability of full year-round employment. Many respondents commented on recent improvements being taken up by the municipal authority in order to make the town a weekend destination or attraction as a day-picnic spot. However, being a town overshadowed by a large thermal power plant, Pujali has not yet developed as a real-estate ‘hotspot’. The second concern among the residents involved the location of the fly-ash dump site in the vicinity. Though most of this by-product is used economically, there were complaints about the effect of the dumping: Initially there [was the] provision of building a green belt in the area and land was acquired for the purpose. But the green belt was not built.12 (Respondent, a retired schoolteacher at a High school in Pujali, July 2018)

Despite contentions, the town is now showcased on the Pujali Municipality website as ‘safer cleaner and a nice town within green where citizens find their true representative in an effective and efficient municipality’. The same website further describes Pujali as ‘an urban municipality teeming with potential. Led by the establishment of a gigantic Thermal Power Station by CESC in 1993, Pujali has only been expanding its horizons further’—thus erasing the plant’s conflicted origin. Once a new town is delineated, it starts functioning accordingly as an urban entity. This area—which was peripheral to another suburban town, Budge Budge, in the metropolis—is now a suburban town of Kolkata. The industrial facility that led to the designation of Pujali as a municipal town is named ‘Budge Budge Thermal Power Plant’, a move that did not come about by chance: the locale for setting up the plant was the 9 ‘Main workers’, as per Census 2011, are those who have worked more than six months (180 days) in the reference period. 10 Data computed from ‘Primary Census Abstract Data’ table of West Bengal (South Twenty Four Parganas) for Census Year 2001 and 2011, Government of India—Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner. 11 ‘Marginal Workers’, as per Census of India 2011 are those who have worked less than six months in the reference period. 12 The interviews and conversations took place in Bangla and were noted in writing, which was later translated by the author. This is applicable to all the conversations discussed in this chapter.

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periphery of Budge Budge town. After almost three decades, Pujali has evolved into a Class III town13 —the smallest in the KMA, in fact. Owing to its connection with Kolkata through the power supply, it is now a suburban town of the central city. It remains subservient to the latter— but now that it is a municipality through statute, it is governed as one. The trajectory from being on the rural/rurban periphery to being a statutory town with its own urban local body responsible for its governance is an outcome of the way in which the state has conceived of peripheral spaces. In this case, the state created a suburban town for the purpose of generating resources for the city. Now that the town has formed, it is governed as a separate statutory entity. If, in future, the regional state wanted to merge it with other towns, the course of the suburban space would be changed accordingly—though its connection with the central city will remain through core–periphery hegemonic interaction. In the conventional sense, the municipalisation of a place is associated with the need for better amenities and infrastructure in an area; in the Global South metropolis, however, it is often about state discretion.

2.5

Municipal Re-Delineation---Merged Towns: The Case of Bally

Situated on the west bank of the River Hooghly (Map 2.3), the origin of erstwhile Bally town dates back to the colonial period. Bally was a suburban town of colonial origin adjacent to Howrah city. Howrah was considered a twin city to Calcutta in the initial Basic Development Plan of the sixties, but it always remained secondary to its twin. Howrah’s municipal history dates back to 1862: once considered the ‘Sheffield of India’ on account of its metal foundries (Chatterjee & Mukhopadhyay, 2015), its importance as an industrial city rapidly declined post-independence. Bally was part of Howrah city until 1883, after which it became a separate municipality. Towards the end of the sixties there was an attempt to bring Bally within the Howrah municipal area, and notification was given

13 ‘Class III’ is part of the classification of urban areas based on population provided by the Census of India. Towns with a population range of 29,000–49,900 fall within this class. In this format there are six classes (Class I to Class VI), defined by the Census of India 2011.

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Map 2.3 Howrah–Bally in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (Adapted from KMA map from the KMDA available on public domain http://kmdaonline.org/ ludcp/home)

by the state government only to be revoked following a petition filed from Bally’s side.14 In 2015, the Government of West Bengal decided to merge the governance of Bally with Howrah Municipal Corporation (HMC). Despite subsequent objections were submitted on behalf of some residents of Bally after notice served, the state government overruled them to go ahead with the merger. When it was decided on the part of the state to merge Bally into the HMC, it was one of the municipalities in West Bengal in which the Left Front still retained power. In 2015, when elections were held for the newly added wards of Howrah city that formerly constituted Bally town, the Left Front could not regain power and was replaced by the Trinamool Congress (TMC). As per the ruling state government, now led by the TMC, the merger was initiated to bring the town within the

14 Bhanu Dutta and Others v. The State and Others, 30 July 1969. Calcutta High Court.

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ambit of the larger HMC and to facilitate better funding and service improvement. There had been similar expansions in the past for Howrah as well as for other cities. Whether or not they have contributed to development remains a topic of debate. The issue of whether greater size, in itself, is important in accessing better services and infrastructure is also questionable. For instance, Howrah in the eighties, through the enactment of the Howrah Municipal Corporation Act 1980, went through another redefinition of boundaries and an increase in its municipal area. The added areas,15 as they are commonly referred to, were included by bringing adjacent rural districts within the municipal administration. This expansion did very little to improve basic services and amenities. For instance, as per the Census 2011 record on household data,16 the added areas accommodated 32.6% of total population of Howrah city. But around 37.78% of households residing in the area did not have a tap-water supply (either treated or untreated) for drinking and 19.56% did not have their wastewater connected to any form of drainage system, closed or open. Though these areas were incorporated in the eighties, municipal taxes were not introduced at that time. Census 2011 data on household amenities and assets for Bally17 shows that 5.8% of households did not have a tap-water supply for drinking and 5% did not have their wastewater connected to any drainage system. These figures are, in general, better than those for Howrah city as a whole. The question is how inclusion within a larger city is envisaged as a way of betterment for a comparatively smaller town. Was the boundary redefined with the objective of improvement of the area? Over the years, the added areas became more densely populated because of lower rents, resulting in low prices for housing. At the same time, these parts of the city are conspicuous for their lack of basic services and infrastructure. In many parts of the older added areas of Howrah city, there had been no proper tax system running until mid-2015. The deplorable conditions of

15 The added areas of Howrah Municipal Corporation in the eighties constituted areas from Wards 41–50. 16 From Table HH-14 (‘Percentage of Households to Total Households by Amenities and Assets’) in ‘House Listing and Housing Census 2011’, West Bengal (Haora), Government of India—Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner. 17 Ibid.

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civic amenities, particularly in these areas, have often been explained as a consequence of the lack of proper municipal taxes—or vice versa. Municipal tax is paid for availing better amenities. Despite several initiatives in last few decades to ensue municipal taxation, it was not introduced in the area. Whatever development happens in the area, it happens with the initiative of the area MLA18 and not the local councillors. Then the question is if improvement of services are not there why pay municipal tax. (Respondent, a resident of Ward 4519 in Howrah Municipal Corporation, May 2018)

In the light of ongoing discussion, it becomes all the more debatable how the incorporation of Bally would have entailed betterment for the town or would have benefited its citizens. The trade license is higher, since we are in [the] Municipal Corporation now. Also one has to travel longer for any work with administration. Previously the municipal office was nearer. Otherwise I do not find any difference. (Respondent, a Toto driver, Bally, Howrah Municipal Corporation, November 2018)

As already stated, there were subsequent failed attempts from Bally’s side opposing the merger; these were often described as a case of opposition being silenced. If Bally had not been under the Left Front government from 2010, would it have been chosen for merger with a larger corporation? The converse question is: Would the Left Front have survived even if Bally had retained separate, local self-government? However, Bally is not the only town that has been merged with Howrah Municipal Corporation; there are instances of mergers happening in the wider metropolis, and there are several other plans to do the same. In many cases, though access to higher funding has been put forward as a reason, a tendency to centralise is observed. If the previous case study showed how a suburban town could be delineated, this one represents how an old suburban town can cease to exist altogether—again, at the behest of the regional state. Coalition with a

18 Member of Legislative Assembly: elected regional-state representative. 19 Ward 45 is part of the area added to Howrah city in the eighties.

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larger municipal body was rationalised with the promise of better services and amenities from the state; in reality, however, it was more of a political decision. This is another trait in Global South urban areas, where reasons behind the formation of new towns and the redrawing of municipal boundaries are often connected to the local political context rather than being guided by administrative and governance reasons. Municipalities in the Global South are more about transforming urban space than improving populations (Schindler, 2014, pp. 7, 18).

2.6 Suburban Space---Metropolitan Governance and the Regional State The state has used peri-urban landscapes for its neoliberal aspirations, and representation at the global level. These spaces have been shaped by land speculation, real-estate development, resistance to acquisitions and the transformation of agrarian lands. The older suburban space, which is susceptible to the same neoliberal interventions, does not always assume the representative face of the metropolis. Instead these spaces remain in the shadows, becoming instruments of governance for the state in the metropolis. Metropolitan as well as local self-governance in both rural and urban areas is largely shaped by the interplay of regional state, its global aspirations and regional political influences. Over the last two decades, a number of jute mills, steel mills and foundries, from both the private and the public sectors, have been either ailing or shut down completely. Attempts by the state to free the land locked within these industries have often been marred by land speculation. Following the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act 1992, the town and cities within and outside the Kolkata metropolis found a way to struggle, survive and sustain themselves as individual entities. Efforts were made to build and improve the capacities of municipalities as individual, local self-governance units.20 New municipality formation or changing the existing boundaries of municipalities is

20 Kolkata Urban Services to the Poor (KUSP) with funding from DFID (the UK Government’s erstwhile Department for International Development [abolished in 2020]), for the first time implemented services in municipalities outside the core city, in the greater metropolitan area. Based on its success, the project was later extended to municipalities outside the KMA in West Bengal. Though aimed at the urban poor in various towns and cities outside Kolkata, KUSP could be considered a milestone in enabling municipalities to handle their own planning and governance to a large extent.

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not guided by the need for better infrastructure and services—this is true for municipalities outside the metropolitan area. In the process, the political aspirations of the regional state government have long hindered the individuality of towns. This is besides the fact that the minimum threshold for forming municipalities and municipal corporations is quite high in West Bengal.21 In many cases, as in the merging of Bally with adjacent Howrah city, a political tool was placed at the disposal of the regional state. In Pujali, though, a municipal town came into existence through the loss of agricultural land but this did very little to replace farm labour with wage labour within the area. The connection of capital with labour happened not in the area but outside it. This study tries to demonstrate how politics—more particularly, partylevel politics—is integral in understanding urbanisation in the Global South. In the case of Pujali, though an anti-land-acquisition drive could not actually halt the establishment of a thermal power plant, it stopped the then-ruling Left Front from gaining seats in the newly established town, which formed under their auspices. In fact, the Left Front could not even make gains in the subsequent municipal elections and is still remembered in the area as a land-grabbing party. In the case of Bally, it is rather the other way round. A Class II town22 merged with a Class I city23 and ceased to exist independently. If a large city is better equipped with basic services, a relatively smaller municipality is expected to be closer to its citizens. As a separate municipality, Bally had 35 wards catering to the needs of its citizens. At present, the same area constitutes the 16 wards of the HMC—meaning larger areas and larger populations per ward. In Bally’s case, the change was mostly uneventful except for a few stray internal protests as it did not involve loss of land or resources as such. But the point of contention concerned not only the provision and accessibility of municipal services. As a separate old town, Bally had enjoyed a cultural identity of its own very different from the adjacent big city of Howrah; losing its separate town status meant losing that identity as well. This is a kind of identity that Pujali is developing gradually but that Bally has lost. It is at this point that the context of 21 In West Bengal, the criteria for forming a municipality are a minimum population of 30,000, and 50% of the population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits. For a municipal corporation, a minimum population around the 50,000 mark is essential. 22 A town having population of 50,000–99,999 (Census of India 2011). 23 A city having a population of 100,000 and above (Census of India 2011).

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‘ordinary city’ becomes all the more relevant. The narratives from these towns are not about large hyper-global activities. They gain prominence owing not to the need for the holistic governance of metropolitan spaces but to the political aspirations of the regional state that enhances fragmentation. Being suburban, they remain susceptible to changes at the discretion of the urban core—be it the state government or the political party running the state or central city. Though these suburban towns have conflicted origins or demises, the communities residing in them ultimately tend to adjust and adapt. In an interesting coincidence, when asked about what kind of difference had been experienced in recent years, in both the towns I received responses in a similar tone—though the context was different in each case: How does it matter? I have been pursuing around the municipal offices for assessment and consequent mutation24 of my property, when the town was a municipality. I am doing the same thing still, that the town has merged with Howrah city. The only difference I notice is some increase in street lights after this town became part of a bigger city. Maybe in future, things will improve. (Respondent, an elderly citizen of erstwhile Bally; during this conversation he was visiting the local administration office for the very purpose that he stated, November 2018) How does it matter? Now that the land is gone and associated livelihood is gone, it does not matter, whether I am in a municipality or not. The only difference is that the roads have become pukka.25 (Respondent, a resident of Pujali who used to work in the fields before the land acquisition took place, July 2018)

‘How does it matter?’—however disconnected this response may sound— possibly connotes a form of continuity that is experienced in Global South cities, where despite precarity and vulnerability there is also an idea of ‘no change despite change’. This is possibly not straightforward indifference because with each change imposed on these people there have been accompanying contentions and resistances, followed by an adjustment to the same until next change is initiated.

24 Mutation of property is the process of change of the title of property ownership in the records of local municipal body. 25 Pukka: good quality—in this case, a metalled road.

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Since early 2021, the state government had been contemplating separating Bally out again as an independent town and the decision was implemented mid-February through fresh notification. The municipal delineation and re-delineation as a political tool wielded by the state came to a full circle. The decision was taken at a time when the municipal and state legislative elections are a few months away. This type of manipulation of municipal boundaries—subsuming one municipality into another, or making new municipalities—is likely to continue, not because there is a need for better services for the population but because municipalities are instruments of political governance rather than a governmental category themselves. This is not limited to the metropolis nor is it restricted to suburban towns—it can happen anywhere, and is in fact happening irrespective of location within or outside the metropolis. Even the planning authority entrusted with the planning and development of a metropolis has very little scope to intervene. This is because these kinds of planning bodies are state entities, and it is easy for the state to use them in realising its global and political aspirations. This brings us to a discussion of the role of the particular metropolitan planning organisation, the KMDA. Though from the nineties onwards the municipal government has been entitled to provide basic services and governance for its towns and cities, many urban local bodies lack enough resources to govern and rely substantially on grants from central and state government. The KMDA provides support through its trans-municipal services, the provision of physical infrastructure and planning for the metropolitan area as a whole. Over the years, the KMDA has been instrumental in changing the metropolitan boundaries and bringing rural peripheries within its ambit, an operation often executed without much transparency. Being a staterun authority, the KMDA has been instrumental in land acquisition—as happened in Pujali. As it is true that planning and development in the Global South is guided through market and state logic, which is disconnected from the communities involved (Satgé & Watson, 2018), the KMDA’s vision of the metropolis is more a reflection of political and global visions of the state, ignoring the consequences that it can have on different communities. In such circumstances, the gradual subsuming of the powers and functions of municipal governance within the state authorities from 2010 onwards had major implications for the KMDA— particularly for its suburban towns, which were already ailing as discussed earlier. This is one reason that even though the establishment of Pujali’s

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thermal power plant was contested by the locals, at present the town’s municipal administration cannot ignore the tax revenue gathered from the facility. In recent years, the state has been building capital through services, such as IT industries located on the eastern margins of the city. The state, through the KMDA, has further focused on developing physical infrastructure—for example, initiating road networks that would enable commuting from the suburban towns and rural hinterlands to Kolkata or, more significantly, to the city’s eastern margins. Within the span of six decades, the perspective trajectory was oriented eastward; in the process, suburban spaces on the city’s other margins remained neglected. The state’s recent drive to make Kolkata part of a global capital circuit has led to the loss of agricultural (namely, land and employment) and natural resources. Over the last few decades, these changes have been accompanied by protests and resistance, few of which have been visible and most of which have gone unnoticed. The spaces involved lag behind in terms of services and amenities despite being part of the metropolitan governance and despite having a municipal presence. For instance, in case of the recent super-cyclone on 8 May 2020, which hit coastal Bengal severely, there were instances of abrupt power failures that continued days after the disaster. While CESC faced serious pressure to restore the power supply in Kolkata city, the situation was much grimmer in Pujali: there, power was not restored for weeks. This is not only an irony but an inevitable reality that the hinterland, which had formed a town at the expense of its agricultural land for the establishment of a power plant to serve the city core, itself reeled under power failure for a much longer period than the city centre. The situation in merged Bally– Howrah was not much different either, owing to the high incidence of cases of infection in the recent COVID-19 health pandemic as well as destruction from the cyclone. Being part of the greater metropolitan area helped very little in ameliorating this precarious situation: the periphery remained on the periphery. These peripheries will again resume visibility when the state needs them. Until any significant change occurs, these suburban towns will struggle as well as sustaining themselves.

2.7

Conclusion

In discussing the production of suburban space in the Global South metropolis, two suburban towns were taken into consideration. These towns are representative of other peripheries that a metropolitan space

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not only constitutes but sustains through conscious governance. But these places are not exclusive; there are other places that constitute their different spaces. An examination of place-specific cases is inherent in analysing cities of the Global South. This is because each place conveys a specific story but all are connected through rationalities guided not only by globalising forces but also by local political economy—the workings of the regional state. These forces, through diverse governance instruments, create varied spaces in and around a metropolis. Suburban space is one of these, produced through differential governance logic at different times. Each and every suburban town of the greater metropolitan area has a story to convey through its formation, redefinition, associated displacements and its sustenance as an individual entity as well as its suburban spaces in a metropolitan context. Not all suburbs tend to represent emerging global centres. Not all municipalisations happen in order to develop a world city, but they do contribute ‘from backstage’ to the city core as well as to the new peripheries that assume centrality in the global platform. These suburban towns and cities have their own histories of resistance and rationalities behind their formation and reformation. These rationalities may be specific to each region but they are not exceptional because—be they state-centric, party-centric, marketcentric or a combination of all three—they are what makes suburban spaces in the Global South. They cannot be rationalised through Western, non-Western categories alone. Once these spaces are produced, either through municipal delineation or re-delineation, they operate as towns— be the new towns or merged towns. They are ‘ordinary suburban’ in the incoherent world of metropolitan space. They may be towns of different classes, may be peripheral or declining, but they are urban. Though this ‘ordinary-ness’ thwarts a hierarchy between Western and non-Western categories, they themselves are not seamless. Likewise spaces of the Global South cannot be perceived as homogenous. The peripheries in the Global South stretch within cities, beyond cities, across metropolises and beyond metropolises. Similarly, the core moves along varying hierarchies of state—from regional to local to central. The present chapter has provided an insight into the production of suburban space in a metropolitan area in a specific political and regional context. This is only a piecemeal representation of how metropolitan governance operates through the state and produces varied suburban space. But again, being piecemeal is the essence of the Global South.

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References Amin, A., & Graham, S. (1997). The ordinary city. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 22, 411–429. Asdar Ali, K., & Rieker, M. (2008). Introduction: Urban margins. Social Text, 26(2 [95]), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2007-026. Bhan, G. (2019). Notes on a Southern urban practice. Environment and Urbanization, 31(2), 639–654. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247818815792. Chakravorty, S. (2000). From colonial city to globalizing city? The far-from from complete spatial transformation of Calcutta. In P. Marcuse & R. van Kempen (Eds.), Globalizing cities: A new spatial order? (pp. 56–77). Blackwell. Chatterjee, M., & Mukhopadhyay, A. (Eds.). (2015). Urban development in Howrah. Primus Books. Chatterji, T. (2017). Modes of governance and local economic development: An integrated framework for comparative analysis of the globalizing cities of India. Urban Affairs Review, 53(6), 955–989. Dasgupta, K. (2007). A city divided? Planning and urban sprawl in the eastern fringes of Calcutta. In A. Shaw (Ed.), Indian cities in transition (pp. 314– 340). Orient Longman Private Limited. Dey, I., Samaddar, R., & Sen, S. (2013). Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of urban imagination. Routledge. Harris, R. (2010). Meaningful types in a world of suburbs. In M. Clapson & R. Hutchison (Eds.), Suburbanization in global society: Research in urban Sociology (Vol. 10, pp. 15–47). Emerald Group. https://doi.org/10.1108/ S1047-0042(2010)0000010004. IL&FS Ecosmart Limited. (2010). Technical EIA guidance manual for Thermal power plants. Prepared for Ministry of Environment and Forest, Government of India, Hyderabad. http://environmentclearance.nic.in/writereaddata/ form-1a/homelinks/TGM_Thermal%20Power%20Plants_010910_NK.pdf. Accessed 25 March 2021. Keil, R. (2017). Extended urbanization, disjunct fragments and global suburbanisms. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(3), 494–511. Leaf, M. (2016). The politics of periurbanization in Asia. Cities, 53, 130–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.01.008. Mabin, A. (2014). Grounding southern city theory in time and place. In S. Parnell & S. Oldfield (Eds.), The Routledge handbook on cities of the global south (pp. 25–36). Routledge. Mitra, S. (2018). A ‘peripheries’ view of planning failures in Kolkata and Hyderabad in India. In G. Bhan, S. Srinivas, & V. Watson (Eds.), The Routledge companion to planning in the global south (pp. 78–90). Routledge. Mohan, A. K. (2019). Planning for city-regions: Emerging Geographies, missing hierarchies. In R. Aijaz & F. Knopf (Eds.), Regional planning for sustainable land use in India (pp. 122–132). ORF and Global Policy Journal.

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Robinson, J. (2007). Ordinary cities between modernity and development. Routledge. Roy, A. (2009). The 21st-century metropolis: New Geographies of theory. Regional Studies, 43(6), 819–830. https://doi.org/10.1080/003434007018 09665. Satgé, R., & Watson, V. (2018). Conflicting rationalities and southern planning theory. In R. Satgé & V. Watson (Eds.), Urban planning in the global south: Conflicting rationalities in contested urban space (pp. 11–34). Palgrave Macmillan. Schindler, S. (2014). Governing the twenty-first century metropolis and transforming territory. Territory, Politics, Governance, 3(1), 7–26. https://doi. org/10.1080/21622671.2014.937453. Schindler, S. (2017). Towards a paradigm of southern urbanism. City, 2(1), 47– 64. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1263494. Shen, J. & Wu, F. (2016). The suburb as a Space of capital accumulation: The development of new towns in Shanghai, China. Antipode. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/anti.12302. Sheppard, E. (2014). Globalizing capitalism and southern urbanization. In S. Parnell & S. Oldfield (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of cities of the global south (pp. 143–154). Routledge. Simone, A. (2020). Cities of the global south. Annual Review of Sociology, 46(603–622), 2021. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919054602. Accessed 25 March. Sivaramakrishnan, K. C. (2015). Governance of megacities, fractured thinking. Oxford University Press. United Nations-Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. (2019). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420). United Nations.

CHAPTER 3

Planning for the Urban Mosaic of a Megacity: The Case of Urban Villages in Delhi Banashree Banerjee

3.1

Introduction

The development and expansion of cities in many parts of Asia follow a characteristic pattern of engulfing traditional farming and fishing villages. Urban–rural distinctions are particularly challenging to make or to defend in such situations, and the dichotomous approach of the urban vs. rural classification breaks down. Fast-growing cities in countries like China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan are home to what are known as ‘urban villages’.1 This self-contradictory term perhaps captures their positioning and the nature of the transformations that they go through when villages become part of an urban area. Once villages are within a city, traditional village life intermixes and assimilates with both formal and informal development in a variety of ways, into what can be labelled as ‘home-grown modernity’. They are influenced by the city and tied to it, but they remain distinct and different from the surrounding urban area—not only because they retain the original village morphology despite the superimposition of

B. Banerjee (B) Urban Management Consultant, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_3

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urban uses and building styles but also because they are cordoned off from the mainstream regulatory and development frameworks of city planning. The concept of ‘urban village’ opens up a vast theoretical and practical arena for the reconsideration of the urban reality in Asia. The contention of this chapter is that while cities have always been places of diversity and heterogeneity, the Asian megacity in particular is increasingly becoming a vast conglomeration of disparate and heterogeneous socio-territorial mosaics, which are part of both its history and its rapid processes of development. The urban village is part of those mosaics: it is a creature created by the processes of city planning and development and has, over time, become a place to accommodate a discrepant multiplicity of urban challenges—from housing the poor, providing them with jobs, fostering social capital and thriving on exploitative labour relations to accommodating environmentally precarious industries. As cities grow, they will continue to engulf villages within themselves. Managing the intersection of traditional sociocultural orders and notions of modern urbanised lifestyles is emerging as one of the major challenges facing Asian urban planning and management. It is in these contexts that a study of urban villages as a phenomenon becomes particularly interesting. This chapter presents the case of the urban villages of Delhi, the capital city of India, and draws on a number of resources such as the author’s fieldwork during 2014–2016 in 15 of the 135 urban villages in the city, archival research, study of official documents available in the public domain, stakeholder interviews, media reports and published material.2 The focus is on the origin and transformation of urban villages in order to see how urban and rural are bound together and how the modern and the traditional can be simultaneously present in cities. It then examines how villages have been treated in formal urban-planning processes, and uses this understanding to argue for the alternative/multiple lived experiences of urban development, as they are happening in cities, to be built into planning. This would imply looking beyond the Western canon of city planning, which currently guides planners in countries of the Global South and often results in exclusionary cities—implicitly or explicitly dividing them into the planned and the unplanned. It is worth mentioning that urban villages have been studied extensively by a number of scholars, particularly in the context of China’s rapid urban growth (Gransow, 2010; Guo, 2006; Liu et al., 2012; and others). However, these studies tend to focus on housing, living conditions and socioeconomic issues rather than a city-wide spatial approach to the analysis of

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urban villages (Wong et al., 2018). This chapter uses a spatial-planning lens to focus on the dynamics of the transformation of urban villages on the cusp between the government’s top-down planning approach and the accommodative governance of the everyday city. In that sense, it contributes to the emerging literature on re-casting urban planning and governance in the South as instruments for sociocultural and spatial inclusion. The various sections of the chapter trace the evolution of urban villages in the context of Delhi’s growth and proposals for its planned development; they examine parallel administrative, political and societal processes that allow these villages to thrive; and finally, they discuss the divergence and meeting points between planning for the future in Indian cities and the immediate needs of the everyday city, represented here by the urban village. The case of Delhi is by no means an isolated phenomenon, and the findings from India’s capital can find resonance in other Asian cities, and the next section sets the context by elaborating on the concept of the urban village, its uniqueness to urbanisation trends witnessed in Asia and its relationship with formal planning processes.

3.2

Villages and Planning in Asian Cities

Urban villages form a significant part of the landscape of Asian cities. Literature on urban villages shows that they can originate in three distinct and different ways. First, villages legally become urban when city or municipal limits are extended (Adusmilli & Swamy, 2004; Naik, 2019, pp. 8–9)—a practice widely followed throughout Asia. Second, expanding cities interface with rural areas in a peri-urban mosaic of urban and agriculture uses as what McGee terms ‘desakotta’ (rural–urban) regions (McGee, 1991); typically in South and South-East Asian megacities such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Colombo, Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur. Third, rural land is expropriated or purchased for urban use, but the village habitation is not taken over and it becomes engulfed by the city. A fair amount of recent literature on rapidly developing Chinese megacities such as Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou focuses on this third kind of urban village (Gransow, 2010; Guo, 2006). A similar pattern can be found in several Indian cities where the state has assumed a dominant role by expropriating large areas of agricultural land for planned city development—for example, in Delhi and Navi Mumbai (Adusmilli

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& Swamy, 2004; Banerjee, 2014; Choudhary, 2014; Jacquemin, 2000; Mehra, 2005). This chapter is primarily concerned with the last-named typology of the urban village and the city of Delhi, where villages have been progressively included in the city as specially demarcated zones with their surrounding lands being expropriated for the implementation of successive master plans. Once they are within the city, traditional village life intermixes with both formal and informal urban development in a variety of ways, but for several reasons the villages themselves remain as distinct territorial enclaves. Within their boundaries they continue to operate under non-urban governance systems and enjoy a certain degree of immunity from urban planning and regulatory frameworks. Their most distinctive feature is that people do not have individual property rights in the village habitation area although they enjoy traditional occupancy and development rights, setting them apart from the rest of the city. This situation is comparable with that of cities in several Asian countries—for example, China and Indonesia. In Chinese cities chengzhongcun, or villages in the city, are very much a phenomenon of socio-spatial segregation rooted in deeply institutionalised urban–rural administrative dualism (Wong et al., 2018). Formal planning under urban master plans takes place on land owned by the state; village land is collectively owned by villagers, and is not within the scope of formal planning. The rapid pace of urban expansion since the turn of the millennium has led to large-scale state expropriation of rural land for urban development, but the villages were allowed to remain and were simply encircled by the expanding city without integration into formal urban planning (Guo, 2006; Wong et al., 2018). Villagers have turned to property development in a massive way, supplying informally built shops, workshops and rental space to migrant workers. Although this process results in unsafe structures, overcrowding and mixed use, local governments have been tolerant towards it because of its role in supplying cheap housing for migrants (Liu et al., 2012) and also because of the limited success of the many cases of village redevelopment using a uniform template. The example of Shenzhen shows a different path, with local government calling for specific redevelopment strategies for different types of villages in order to fulfil the goal of village redevelopment proposed in the comprehensive plan for Shenzen 2020 (Song & Zenuo, 2012, pp. 497–498). On the other hand, the ‘Dispersing,

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Regulating, and Upgrading Action Plan’ issued by the Beijing municipal government in 2017 proposes the city-wide ‘restructuring’ of urban villages, which is leading to their replacement with modern housing and the discontinuing of their economic activities (Wong et al., 2018). Similarly, Indonesian cities have a dualistic land regime. While the kampungs, or villages, in Indonesian cities display a wide array of adat, or customary land rights, most of which can be inherited but not legally transferred, the rest of the city has well-defined property rights (Harari & Wong, 2019). Kampungs came under the spotlight when they became the places to accommodate poor rural migrants who had flocked to Jakarta after Indonesian independence in 1945. Overcrowding and unhygienic conditions prompted the 1960 Master Plan to prioritise the provision of basic services in kampungs, but the 1985–2005 Master Plan, in a marked departure from the previous document, proposed the redevelopment and resettlement of kampungs as part of its vision to modernise the city. However, this plan was not implemented and, since 1969, kampungs in Jakarta and all other cities have continued to benefit from a series of international and national upgrading programmes (Harari & Wong, 2019). While kampungs provide affordable housing options for about 25 per cent of urban low-income households, this situation is changing under market pressure—especially because of the central location and upgraded services of many kampungs (Harari & Wong, 2019). Perhaps Navi Mumbai, the new ‘twin’ of Mumbai in India, is the only city that has built in a conscious policy for the betterment of gauthans, or urban villages, since its inception. The planning of the city in 1971 included elaborate proposals for the economic rehabilitation of the original village population and the physical integration of the villages into the developing area (Adusmilli & Swamy, 2004; Jacquemin, 2000). However, delays in implementation, glaring differences between the villages and the surrounding new city and questions about the low compensation paid for acquired farmlands escalated into violent protests. Negotiations led to an arrangement in 1986 for farmers to get back an eighth of their acquired lands as developed plots. In the meantime, the population of the gauthans has grown to 45 per cent of the city’s total, with villages providing affordable rental housing and space for economic activities under conditions of overcrowding and poor services. The latest government initiative is to redevelop urban villages as high-density settlements in partnership with private developers (Banerjee, 2014).

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It is interesting that urban villages in Asian cities have many similarities, even in their being subjected to vacillations in city planning—neglect, integration, upgrading, redevelopment, erasure. Here, the discussion focuses on villages that have stayed in the city and not been erased by land expropriation, with or without relocation. Whatever the policy, urban villages have continued to thrive and develop as intense mixed-use areas with the persistent demand for rental housing for migrant workers and informal shops and workshops, which the formal city does not fulfil. Attempts at redevelopment and relocation have not met with success in the past mainly because multifunctional villages have, with no consideration of their economic and cultural values, been replaced by housing—but government attempts continue in that direction, and with higher stakes than before.

3.3 Delhi: Framing the Village in the City and Its Planning About 1.11 million people, or 6.8 per cent of urban Delhi’s population of 16.35 million (Census of India 2011), live in 135 urban villages scattered throughout the city. There are another 227 peri-urban villages, which are still considered rural even though many of them show urban characteristics (Government of India, 2007, p. 17). It is useful to review the historical context of the city’s development and planning, not only to position urban villages but also to understand the increasing heterogeneity of contemporary urban developmentand the disjuncture between urban planningand the on-the-ground realities of the city. 3.3.1

The Planning of the Colonial Capital

The history of urban villages in Delhi goes back to the early part of the twentieth century when land was acquired to build the colonial capital of British India at New Delhi. A total of 42.7 square kilometres of agricultural land was initially acquired under the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which allowed the state to expropriate land for ‘public purpose’. Five of the villages in this area were relocated to the urban fringes, while other village habitations were demarcated with a red line (Lal Dora) on the land-revenue map3 and allowed to remain in the city. There were 25 such villages in 1932, but there were no plans to integrate them into the city or to consider alternative livelihoods for

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farmers who had lost their lands (Chattopadhay et al., 2014). There were also no plans to accommodate the large influx of construction workers and service providers who came over the 20 years of new city-building. When the colonial capital finally moved from Calcutta to New Delhi in 1931, this population was already crowded into cramped rentals in the existing walled city, which then spilled out into extensions beyond its walls. Even though improvement of the extension had been proposed, it was not implemented for lack of funds (Mitra, 1990). The foundations were laid for a divided city of planned and unplanned spaces. 3.3.2

The Post-Independence Population Rush

After independence in 1947, inherited colonial legacies continued to operate in planning concepts and practices—and in legislative frameworks and institutions, including the policy of not acquiring Lal Dora land. The population of the city almost doubled between 1941 and 1951, with maximum growth during the years following independence. Additional land was expropriated for building the capital of independent India and for housing the vast number of displaced persons who had arrived after the partition of the country. But government efforts were not sufficient to house the huge influx of refugees and migrants. Private developers stepped up the supply of plots in government-approved layouts but the high and speculative prices were not affordable to the vast majority, who turned to cheaper informal options (Ahmad & Choi, 2011; Mitra, 1990). By 1961, more than 25 per cent of Delhi’s population lived in informal, under-served areas represented by squatter settlements, unauthorised colonies,4 villages and the old historic city and its extensions (Delhi Development Authority, 1962, p. 5). In 1951, there were 47 urban villages (Chattopadhya et al., 2014, p. 82). It was during this period that villagers began to play an active part in the housing market of the city by supplying cheap rental housing for refugees and migrants. Steady income from renting property became a good subsistence mechanism for farmers who had lost their land and had no skills for urban employment.

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3.3.3

Master Planning

Delhi has had three master plans,5 spanning a period from 1961 to 2021. Each of them has mentioned the unique character of urban villages and the importance of integrating them with the rest of the city, but they continue to remain outside mainstream planning. The government recognised that planned development in the past had been hampered by institutional incapacity and land shortage and speculation. Consequently, Delhi Development Authority (DDA) was set up in 1957 to plan and implement the development of Delhi; and the policy of ‘Large-Scale Acquisition, Development and Disposal of Land’ was adopted to create large government land reserves for implementing the master plan and achieve optimal social uses of land (Government of India, 1961, p. 7). To begin with, about 142 square kilometres of land were notified for acquisition in 1959 (Delhi Development Authority, 1962, p. 8). Again, the village habitation areas, or Lal Dora areas, were exempted and became progressively engulfed within the growing city. The compensation package for land expropriation initially consisted of a financial award, a residential plot and the offer of government employment to one family member but this later dwindled to only the financial compensation. Those who did not own land but depended on agriculture for their livelihood received no compensation (Government of India, 2007, p. 26). The first Master Plan6 encompassed the ambitious project of creating a modern capital city, and it took five years to prepare. It was approved in 1962 with an area of 448 square kilometres and a horizon year of 1981, later extended to 1990. The Plan proposed a multi-nucleated city structure and placed a strong emphasis on the city’s regional context and land-use zoning, attributed to the influence of the American planners who had been brought in to lead its preparation as part of a Ford Foundation aid package. A detailed Development Code was prepared for application throughout the city, and new developments were to take place according to Zonal Development Plans. The emphasis was clearly on the development of new areas, though the Plan did propose redevelopment of existing areas by relocating non-conforming uses; improving water and sanitation; and providing facilities for health, education and recreation to the same standards as the new city, even in congested areas. The DDA played a major role in making land available for industry and commerce, and built a significant amount of public housing, but

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the development and supply of land fell far short of demand. The city continued to be built by people outside the provisions for planned development, largely in areas that were in various stages of acquisition or litigation and in urban villages and old city areas. Unauthorised colonies and squatter settlements mushroomed. Policymakers condemned such illegal acts but proceeded to regularise unauthorised colonies and, at the same time, forcibly evict7 and resettle 800,000 squatters to sites and services in the city’s periphery. Regarding urban villages, the Master Plan mentioned that village abadis 8 ‘overtaken by urban development’ should not be left as such and should be redeveloped and integrated into the neighbourhood to prevent the city from being ‘pock-marked with slums’ (Delhi Development Authority, 1962, Master Plan for Delhi, section on Zonal Development Plans for New Areas). By 1981, towards the end of the plan period, the number of villages had grown to 106 with a total population of 247,800 (Delhi Development Authority, 1986, p. 22). The second Master Plan was effective from 1990 to 2001 and expanded the urban area to 688 square kilometres. In principle, this plan did not deviate from the overall proposals of the previous one. However, it did show some sensitivity towards the urban fabric of Delhi. The old city and its extension areas were declared Special Areas, for which different norms and standards were specified in the Development Code. Different from the first Master Plan’s regime of segregated use zones, this plan recognised the importance of mixed-use areas for a city such as Delhi and codified ‘mixed-use’ as a category. This period is also important for a change from a public-sector-led to a multi-sector landdevelopment process, in line with the liberalisation of the economy in the 1990s. Already-acquired public land was leased to cooperatives and private developers to develop in accordance with the Development Code. The Plan acknowledged that more urban villages would be added to the existing 106 as the city expanded. It called for sensitive treatment of these historical settlements as they merged into the urban area, with the provision of modern services while maintaining traditional cultural styles. It mentioned that the development of urban villages should be an integral part of development schemes for an area, and specific proposals for conservation should be drawn up for villages of heritage value. The Plan recognised that villages may not have space for education, health and recreation facilities or work centres, and proposed that these should be

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developed outside but within easy access of the village population (Delhi Development Authority, 1990, p. 15). This stimulated the reservation of space for facilities adjacent to several villages. During this Plan period, 29 more urban villages were added—bringing the number to 135 and their population to about 770,000. A review of plan performance by the DDA in 2001 showed, among other details, that only 37.8 per cent of urban dwellers lived in planned areas, while the majority lived in areas that were not part of the planning process (Table 3.1). The third and current Master Plan, effective until 2021 with an area of 987 square kilometres, explicitly divides the city into three categories: Planned Areas; Special Areas, consisting of the old city and its extensions and other heritage precincts; and Unplanned Areas, consisting of slum and JJ Clusters, JJ resettlement colonies, unauthorised colonies and urban villages (Delhi Development Authority, 2011, Chapter 3, pp. 11– 13). Thus, the politics of categorisation was finally articulated in the Plan in the form of Planned and Unplanned Areas, highlighting the dynamics of inclusion–exclusion inherent to planning. It is proposed to redevelop all three categories, with the objectives of the densification of low-density areas according to their carrying capacity, Table 3.1 Distribution of population in different housing typologies in Delhi, 2001 Typology

Unplanned

Planned

Total

Estimated Population

Squatter settlements (JJ Clusters)9 JJ resettlement colonies10 Unauthorised colonies11 Regularised unauthorised colonies Rural villages Urban villages Sub-total Unplanned Individual housing Multi-family housing Government employees’ housing Sub-total Planned

million

%

2.07 1.45 2.27 0.72 1.20 0.77 8.48 2.28 2.35 0.59 5.22 13.70

15.0 10.5 16.5 5.2 8.6 6.4 62.2 16.5 17.0 4.3 37.8 100

Source based on Master Plan for Delhi 2001–2021—Shelter, present scenario

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the conservation of heritage areas and the provision of services in underserved areas. The importance given to redevelopment is the main difference between this and the previous plans. The redevelopment strategy is to be implemented through area-specific Redevelopment Schemes, which can be prepared by local government or groups of landowners in accordance with the detailed guidelines given in the Master Plan for particular typologies—e.g. JJ clusters and unauthorised colonies—rather than in response to the variety and ground-level reality that exists. Regarding urban villages, the Plan reiterates the need to provide services within the villages, integrate them with surrounding planned development, and provide facilities and circulation space in their peripheries. For the first time, this plan acknowledges that villages have developed into low to medium-rise, high-density areas with narrow circulation spaces, which accommodate a mix of residential, commercial and industrial uses and play an active economic role in the city. The plan proposes the continuance of mixed uses, but in conformity with Mixed-Use Regulations proposed in its Development Code. There is also a proposal to reduce space standards for facilities like clinics and community halls within the village area. Unlike earlier plans, this one assigns an institutional responsibility for implementation to the municipal corporations (Delhi Development Authority 2007, Chapter 4, p. 5). Meanwhile, the population of the 135 urban villages had grown to 1.11 million by 2011. While successive master plans have recognised the nature of the urban environment in Delhi and the need to incorporate responsive approaches, their modifications and concessions have continued the top-down mode of regulatory planning without compromising its instruments of land-use zoning and development codes. Further, by labelling areas as ‘unplanned’ the last plan legitimises the divide between planned and self-built areas, in which a majority of the city population lives.

3.4

Selectively Undoing Unplanned 3.4.1

Managing the Everyday City

Master planning focuses on physical planning, located in utopian visions justified on the basis of normative arguments that have been set up by planners and the legislature. In contrast, municipalities are pressured to respond to what already exists on the ground. Their actions lie mostly in the realm of the administrative—pushed by councillors responding

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to their political constituencies and exerting pressure (Benjamin, 2005, p. 245). In both cases, interventions are set within an interpretation of law and administrative guidelines but the canvases on which they operate are different. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) has legal provisions, mandates and concerns for urban villages and other unplanned settlements. Some of these flow from the master plans while others are related to its generic responsibility of providing services to citizens; yet other actions and priorities are determined by what is brought in as citizens’ demands to the municipal council by councillors representing different constituencies. The MCD is selective about what it implements, where and how far it goes—except when it is bound to follow guidelines that accompany grants from state or central government for specific schemes. Another method is the establishment of expert committees to advise local and national government on urban villages. A number of these have been set up since the 1970s, the most notable being the Expert Committee for Lal Dora and Extended Lal Dora in Delhi established in 2007 by the national government (Government of India, 2007, p. 9). This committee prepared a well-informed report and recommended a strategy that included livelihood options, encouraging the self-financing and selective redevelopment of decaying and dilapidated buildings and areas by villagers themselves, and the better utilisation of village land by landowners entering into partnership with the private sector for redevelopment. This report was followed by a policy in 2013 to give incentives to private developers to take up land pooling in partnership with villagers. However, the unclear land-tenure issue was a deterrent for private developers. 3.4.2

The Urbanisation of Villages

It is the responsibility of the MCD to initiate the process of declaring a village as urban. According to the provisions of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) Act of 1957, all villages within the Master Plan area are to be declared ‘urban villages’ by notification from the state government. Currently, there are 135 notified urban villages and 15 more are expected to be added to the list. After notification, a village is urbanised through a four-step process. First, the Lal Dora ceases to exist and the village becomes part of the municipal ward12 in which

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it is located. Second, the regulatory framework of urban planning— consisting of zoning regulations, area-development norms and building by-laws—comes into force. Third, a village development plan is prepared for ‘rationalising land use’ and providing services and amenities. Finally, individual plots are regularised according to the Plan (Delhi Development Authority, 1986; Government of India, 2007, p. 20). In practice, no urban village in Delhi has gone through the entire urbanisation process even though notification started in the 1970s. Villages continue to be circumscribed by the Lal Dora, without any signs of integration with the city. The recognition of the unique character of urban villages and the importance of integrating them with the rest of the city, stated in the master plans (Delhi Development Authority, 1962, p. 27), resulted in the preparation of 20 village development plans by the DDA. However, no action was taken as no institution was given the responsibility of implementing them (Government of India, 2007, p. 26). The Delhi Urban Arts Commission13 prepared renewal plans for three urban villages that are significant from the heritage point of view, but these are yet to be implemented (Delhi Urban Art Commission, 2014). 3.4.3

The Provision of Services

Not having gone through the urbanisation process is no disqualification for public investment in services. The upgrading of urban villages with basic minimum municipal services, schools and health centres began in the 1950s on ‘humanitarian grounds’. In the 1970s, some of the villages were declared slums on the recommendation of the local municipal councillor and became eligible for grants for basic services under the national government’s Scheme for Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums. In 1980, the central government approved a scheme for the improvement of services in 96 urban villages with a grant of Rs (rupees) 1.8 billion from central government supplemented by Rs 25 million from the ‘village cess’ on residential plots leased by the DDA14 (Delhi Development Authority, 1986, p. 4). A Mini Master Plan was formulated as part of this scheme in 1985 (Delhi Development Authority, 1985) for the physical and financial planning of essential services. Up to 2009, about Rs 3.66 billion worth of subsidies had been transferred by the central government to the DDA, the MCD and utility companies for infrastructure provision, coordinated by the MCD. The resulting upgrading activity consisted of underground

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sewerage provision, paved streets, street lights and water supply. Individual connections for water and electricity—and power connections for commercial and small-scale, non-polluting industry—can be obtained by property owners based on request, payment of charges and submission of a residence certificate15 from the land-revenue department of the state government. The DDA has provided recreation areas and other facilities adjacent to villages wherever land was available. These services have brought about significant improvements, even though they are not at par with services in the city and have not in any way altered the village morphology of narrow, winding streets. 3.4.4

Building Construction

Public investment in services has boosted building activity, turning villages into high-density mixed-use zones responding to market demand for housing, industry, workshops and shops at relatively lower costs in prime locations. Some of these activities would not be allowed to develop or would not thrive in the planned city. According to the MCD Act, no buildings except residential ones of up to 15 m in height can be constructed without permission in urban villages, and all new buildings have to be built at least 2.5 m away from the centre line of the street (4.5 m along motorable roads). In reality, no permission is sought for any kind of building and all construction activity takes place without authorisation. More significant is the fact the even if someone were to apply for building permission, it would not be granted without documentary proof of property ownership. All land within the Lal Dora is held only by way of possession with no record of ownership by name in the cadastre, which records only the collective area of the village (Government of India, 2007, p. 15). It is possible to register individual properties but this is an expensive, complicated and time-consuming process, which is considered unnecessary because building can take place even without it and services are guaranteed with a simple residence certificate. In addition the convenient but erroneous perception that urban villages do not require building permission stimulates unauthorised building activity. The immunity of large numbers also comes into play, backed by retrospective policies, vote-bank politics and administrative orders to regularise structures. In fact, administrative orders have become the main instrument by which the state keeps unplanned settlements in a state of ‘suspended animation’, never fully recognising but at the same time

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enabling services to be delivered to them. Starting with the order issued by the national Ministry of Urban Development in 1977 to regularise unauthorised colonies, there have been a spate of such orders with advancing cut-off dates for eligibility. Commercial establishments and non-polluting industries up to a certain size existing in Lal Dora areas before the cut-off date are also regularised. It is no coincidence that most of these orders come just before elections, with different political parties and levels of government taking credit for them.

3.5

The Thriving Urban Village

Empirical evidence from urban villages16 points to a unique system of investment in and income from land, which generates and perpetuates an incremental process of land development. This process responds to the demands of the growing city, within the confines of a rural-village morphology of narrow streets and large plots. The need to maximise incomes with the least possible investment has led to three distinct but interrelated development streams. One is the construction of cheap rental housing for the vast numbers of migrants flowing into the city; the second concerns the renting or leasing of plots for informal commercial and industrial activities; and the third, transferring land to developers through a quasi-legal process. Depending on the market, land can be ‘recycled’ variously for renting to low-income migrants or young educated workers, for shops and workshops, for small local businesses and for examinationcoaching centres. At the bottom of this kind of development is the availability of basic urban infrastructure as well as the possibility for the temporal multi-use of space to respond to market demand. Cheap rental housing in urban villages falls far below prescribed norms and standards of health and structural safety, but is affordable and conveniently located for poor migrants. It provides a measure of security as it allows clustering of caste and kinship groups, creating the social capital essential for survival in a big city. The villages also foster close work–home relationships, with many of the renters providing cheap labour in the informal economy of warehouses, factories, workshops, shops and markets that develop within the urban village (Bentinck & Chikara, 2001). In time, private service providers come in with dispensaries, schools and daycare centres to serve migrants who have yet to obtain entitlements to government facilities.

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This is not to say that the urban village is a totally self-contained entity. Rental housing in well-located villages provides migrants the opportunity as well as the mobility and flexibility to function as construction workers and provide all sorts of informal services in the city. For the new generation of landowners, the village is a launching pad for fulfilling aspirations to higher education, jobs, consumer goods and housing in city neighbourhoods. Sections of the village that adjoin main roads and metro stations cater to populations outside the village with shopping areas, showrooms and middle-class housing, while the inner areas with their narrow streets remain the precincts of the poor and of informal trade and industry. Activities such as e-waste recycling, garment factories, and metal-working and auto-parts industries found in the urban villages of Delhi are the hidden elements of global value chains, which thrive because of the low costs associated with low wages, female and child labour, and a lack of enforcement of workplace and environmental laws (Toxics Link, 2013) yet in a secure environment of legal property rights. However, the urban village economy of seemingly unending cycles of low incremental investment in, and increasing income from, property results in the inevitable consequences of overcrowded, high-density, unsafe and unhealthy environments. The increase in population and diversification of use soon renders infrastructure services inadequate and increasingly difficult to upgrade. Studies in some of Delhi’s urban villages show that unregulated industries result in very high levels of air and noise pollution, the discharge of toxic chemicals into drains and closed workspaces with very poor ambient indoor air quality (Toxics Link, 2014). Health-related studies show the disease burden of such environments (Balan et al., 2012).

3.6 3.6.1

Conclusion

Back to City Planning and the Urban Village

Development forces for urban villages in Delhi come from the top-down, normative and futuristic proposals of master planning; the practical need to govern and provide municipal services to the population; and the opportunistic and entrepreneurial dynamics within the villages themselves. The unique intersections of these initiatives produce the idiosyncratic and indeterminate nature of village transformation in Delhi and other Asian cities (Marton, 2008), leading to intense physical change but continuing

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legal uncertainty whereby the planned and the unplanned intertwine in all instances of settlement transition. Ashis Nandy, well-known social theorist, defines the unintended city as, ‘…the city that was never part of the formal “master plan” but always implicit in it’ (Nandy, 1998, p. 2). That neatly explains the status of urban villages and also why cities have dual policies towards them and other unplanned areas. On the one hand is the reformist zeal of taking planning to them for a better future, and on the other hand are the here-and-now, practical, everyday issues of providing water, sanitation, schools, paved streets, electricity. The practical is possible and recognised by all stakeholders—residents, local government, state and national governments, businesses and property dealers—but reform through planning remains variously on paper, highly contested, challenged, forced or simply irrelevant. 3.6.2

About Modernity and Temporality

Villages have grown with the city. They were once traditional habitations, of which only the pattern of streets and plots remains. They have morphed into what can be called an incremental and home-grown modernity based on contemporary market demand and generational changes in outlook. This is true for the uses to which plots are put as well as for building designs. These are not traditional uses or simply something to eke out a living when farming is no longer possible, as they are invariably made out to be. Once in the city, residents want a better quality of life and better incomes. Over generations, village residents become active players in the economy of the city and grow intensely aspirational. Investments in infrastructure pave the way for transformation and readiness to respond to the variegated, fluid and changing requirements of housing, industry, commerce and education. This temporal multi-use of space is diametrically opposed to the predetermined and static framework of formal planning. That is the dilemma of master planning, which casts both land and its use in a static framework of regulations that can be amended only with difficulty. The other, and recognised, view of modernity is that of city planning. In all countries of the Global South, governments have undertaken urban planning in some form or other with the desire for modernity. This is also aspirational, with aspirations spelt out in the form of altruistic

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visions of the future, articulated for citizens by their political representatives/rulers and translated by city planners into master plans, perspective plans17 and structure plans. This modernity, in contrast with that of the urban villages, is an imported modernity based on planning thought and legislation formulated in the Global North, where cities do not experience such accelerated socio-economic change and rapid population growth as they do in Asia (Ansari, 2009). There is nothing wrong in learning from elsewhere as a starting point, but the persistent ignoring of historicity and reality as the cost of a particular way of planning can certainly be questioned—especially when it is not effective in doing what it aims to do. 3.6.3

It’s About Language

This is, of course, not the first time that these kinds of issues have been raised. There is a whole body of thought and literature that talks about the gap between city planning and its transgressions in the form of informal and unplanned spaces. Many of the contributors to empirical observations and theory building are planners themselves (Ansari, 2009; Kumar et al., 2020), not to forget that city planning is based on first studying the city for what it is. Why then is planning blind to all this? The contention here is that the blindness comes from the language of planning. City planning is about a vision for the future of a city, which is then realised through land-use planning. Land-use planning is translated into zoning regulations and development standards specified in a development code. In a private land-market regime, the land-use plan is implemented partly through expropriation or negotiated purchase of land for public use, but largely through applying regulations and incentives based on the development code. While successive master plans have recognised the nature of the urban reality in Delhi and the need to incorporate responsive approaches, their modifications and concessions have continued the top-down mode of regulatory planning without compromising its instruments of land-use zoning and development codes. For instance, the Special Area status of the old city of Delhi justifies different rules and regulations, but these are cast in the same mould as the general regulations. The populist demand for recognising mixed use and its widespread occurrence has led to it

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being added to the list of use zones in the master plan, but its enforcement mechanisms do not build in the temporal element of change that drives urban development in Asian cities. So, it is not that planning is blind but rather that whatever it wants to change gets interpreted into the conventional language of planning— zoning, standards and regulations—resulting in another set of static rules and laws, which are impossible to observe in many parts of the incrementally growing city. By contrast, the language of incrementality and fluidity of land use and land rights in urban villages is based on seizing market opportunities and seeking a better quality of life as an ongoing pursuit. Here, access to infrastructure and location in the city—rather than masterplan proposals—have emerged as key determinants of change within the bounds of traditional settlement patterns. Through their process of development, urban villages actually achieve many of the critical aims of master planning: close work–home relationships, affordable housing, local and global market linkages—but the only way in which the plan can accommodate them is by labelling them as ‘unplanned’, as they do not fit in with how planning ‘should be’ implemented. This applies to all self-built areas, which together house a majority of Delhi’s population. There is a case for letting the incremental land-development process flourish, as its flexibility, entrepreneurial spirit and local flavour can never be captured by the homogenised process of ‘modern’ city planning and development. No policy talks about supporting this strong and vibrant urban village-based informal economy, which is founded on using land as a resource to generate prosperity for villagers, provide migrants with a foothold in the urban economy and nurture the production of goods and services. Can urban villages continue to hold onto this function, without its downsides? Can the city-planning and development process accommodate such incremental development and also ensure that thresholds of health, safety and pollution are not crossed? These are wider questions facing places like Delhi, where the unplanned city has marginalised planning by virtue of its sheer volume. But the unplanned part of the city constitutes a vast area that is growing without proper schools and playgrounds for children, unsafe and overcrowded housing and workplaces, and major public-health concerns. The argument here is that neglected by city planners thus far, the unplanned is the new frontier of urban planningin Asian megacities. The

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language of planning deserves an overhaul to allow it to include all the diverse and discrepant pieces of the mosaic, which are interlocked into a relationship of co-dependence, and to deliver the commons to all citizens: public goods and services, safety and security, the opportunity to grow and prosper. In this context, not including urban villages in the realm of planning is perhaps the biggest lapse of planning as they existed long before planning started but became part of the city because of urban planning.

Notes 1. The term ‘urban village’ is used quite differently in Asia than in Europe and North America, where urban villages are designed enclaves in cities. These Western examples are typically walkable, bicycle-friendly, mixed-use urban neighbourhoods that can provide both housing and jobs (see, for instance, https://www.greenbelt.org/blog/what-is-an-urban-village). 2. Study of urban villages in Delhi and Navi Mumbai supported by the Asian Development Bank as part of its initiative on understanding Urban–Rural Poverty Linkages in Asia. 3. The habitation (abadi) and agricultural lands were demarcated in the land settlement of 1908–9 and the abadi sites were circumscribed in the village maps in red ink, or lal dora in Hindi. The land falling within the Lal Dora is not assessed for land revenue, unlike agricultural lands. Land within the Lal Dora is held by way of possession and not registered in land records (Government of India, 2007, p. 15). 4. Illegal subdivisions. 5. The statutory process of master-plan formulation in India was inspired by the comprehensive planning system envisaged under the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947 of the United Kingdom. Urban planning being a state subject under the Indian Constitution, urban and regional planning in each state is guided by its own law. About 2000 of the 7935 towns and cities in the country have master plans. 6. The first Master Plan of Delhi has served as a model for other cities, especially in terms of land-use zoning, defining a development code and establishing a regional context. 7. This took place during the state of national emergency in 1975–1977, when protests could not take place. 8. Local term for habitations. 9. ‘JJ Cluster’ stands for Jhuggi Jhompri cluster or squatter settlements. 10. Squatter settlements that have been resettled in planned resettlement areas in the city peripheries from time to time. 11. Illegal subdivisions.

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12. A district or subdivision of a city with an elected councillor acting as its representative in local government. 13. An organisation set up to advise government on ‘preserving, developing and maintaining the aesthetic quality of urban and environmental design within Delhi’. https://www.duac.org. 14. Various kinds of charges were tagged on to the lease rate for public land allotted/auctioned by the DDA. The village cess was meant to create a corpus for improving services in urban and rural villages. Similarly, there was a horticulture cess and a sanitation cess. 15. Popularly known as a Lal Dora certificate. 16. This section is drawn from the author’s ongoing research on land development in urban villages in Delhi, initially supported by the Asian Development Bank. 17. A perspective plan is a long-term (20–25 years) written document supported by necessary maps and diagrams providing the goals, policies, strategies and general programmes of the urban local authority regarding the spatio-economic development of the settlement under its governance.

References Adusmilli, U., & Swamy, N. S. (2004). Urban villages in India, the challenges in Navi Mumbai new town. Open House International, 29(4), 8–17. Ahmad, S., & Choi, M. J. (2011). The context of uncontrolled urban settlements in Delhi. Research Note, ASIEN, 118, 75–90. Ansari, J. (2009). Revisiting urban planning in South Asia, background study for global report on human settlements. https://mirror.unhabitat.org/downlo ads/docs/GRHS2009RegionalSouthAsia.pdf. Accessed 13 April 2021. Balan, B., Elazan, S., Morillas, M., & Sandberg, A. (2012). Disease load in Aliganj, an urban village in New Delhi, India: A search for directions in risk reduction through urban planning. UNICEF knowledge community for children in India, in collaboration with department of community medicine Vardhman Mahavir Medical College, New Delhi. Banerjee, B. (2014, September 2–4). Diversity, informality and opportunities for the poor in villages in Asian megacities: Examples from Delhi and Mumbai. Paper presented to Asian Development bank (ADB) International Policy Workshop on Rural-Urban Poverty Linkages, Hanzhou, Zheijiang, China. Benjamin, S. (2005). Touts, pirates and ghosts. In M. Narula, S. Sengupta, J. Bagchi, G. Lovink, & L. Liang (Eds.), Sarai reader 2005 (pp. 242–254). Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Bentinck, J., & Chikara, S. (2001, May 23-26). Illegal factories in Delhi: The controversy, the causes, and the expected future. Paper presented to N-AERUS

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and ESF international workshop on ‘Coping with informality and illegality in human settlements in developing cities’, 23–26 May, Leuven and Brussels, Belgium. Chattopadhay, S., Dey, P., & Michael, J. (2014). Dynamics and growth dichotomy of urban villages: Case study Delhi. International Journal for Housing Science, 38(2), 81–94. Choudhary, A. (2014, February 1). The anatomy of an urban village in an India on the move. Governance Now. Delhi Development Authority. (1962). Delhi Master Plan 1961–1981. Delhi Development Authority. Delhi Development Authority. (1985). Mini master plan: Integrated development of urban and rural villages in Delhi. Delhi Administration. Delhi Development Authority. (1986). Development of urban villages in Delhi (1986–2001). Report of the city planning wing. Delhi Development Authority. Delhi Development Authority. (1990). Delhi master plan 1990–2001. Delhi Development Authority. Delhi Development Authority. (2007). Delhi master plan 2021. Rupa and Co. Delhi Development Authority. (2011, January 17). The building regulation for special area, unauthorised regularised colonies and village Abadis. Notification in Gazette of India Extraordinary 87. Delhi Urban Art Commission. (2014). Mohammadpur urban village and adjoining slums, RK Puram Ward no. 167, City Level Project. http://e. duac.org/images/pdf/6%20Mohammadpur.pdf. Accessed 13 April 2021. Government of India. (1961). Paper on urban land policy. Ministry of Health. Government of India. (2007). Report of the expert committee on Lal Dora and Extended Lal Dora in Delhi. Ministry of urban development, Government of India. Gransow, B. (2010). Slum formation or urban innovation?—Migrant communities and social change in Chinese Megacities. Paper for ‘Rural-Urban Migrations in Mega Cities and Mega-Slums’, Our Common Future, 5 November, Essen, Germany. Guo, F. (2006). Transforming urban villages: Social stratification in migrant communities in China. Paper presented at the Acesa annual conference 2006—Emerging China: Internal challenges and global implications, 13–14 July, Melbourne, Australia. Harari, M. & Wong, M. (2019). Slum upgrading and Long-run urban development: Evidence from Indonesia. Paper for University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. http://real-faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/harari/wp-content/ uploads/~harari/HarariWong_Oct2019.pdf. Accessed 13 April 2021. Jacquemin, A. (2000). The politics of urban development in New Bombay. In Graham P. Chapman, Ashok K. Du’it, & Robert W. Bradnock (Eds.), Urban

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growth and development in Asia, Volume I: Making the cities (pp. 231–257). Ashgate. Kumar, A., Vidyathi, S., & Prakash, P. (2020). City planning in India—1917– 2017 . Routledge. Liu, R., Wong, T. C., & Liu, S. (2012). Peasants’ counterplots against the state monopoly of the rural urbanization process: Urban villages and ‘small property housing’ in Beijing, China. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44, 1219–1240. Marton, A. (2008). Local geographies of globalisation: Rural agglomeration in the Chinese countryside. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 43(1), 23–42. McGee, T. G. (1991). The emergence of ‘Desakota’ regions in Asia: Expanding a hypothesis. In N. Ginsberg (Ed.), The extended metropolis: Settlement transition in Asia (pp. 3–26). University of Hawaii Press. Mehra, A. K. (2005). Urban villages of Delhi. In E. Hust & M. Mann (Eds.), Urbanization and governance in India (pp. 279–310). Manohar. Mitra, B. (1990). Land supply for low income housing in Delhi. In P. Baross & J. van der Linden (Eds.), The transformation of land supply systems in third world cities (pp. 193–224). Avebury. Naik, M. (2019). Negotiation, mediation and subjectivities: How migrant renters experience informal rentals in Gurgaon’s urban villages. RHJ: Radical Housing Journal, 1(2), 45–62. Nandy, A. (1998). Introduction: Indian popular cinema as the slum’s eye view of politics. In A. Nandy (Ed.), The secret politics of our desires: Innocence, culpability and Indian popular cinema (pp. 1–18). Zed Books. Song, Y., & Zenou, Y. (2012). Urban villages and housing values in China. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 42, 495–505. Toxics Link. (2013). Environment and livelihood: Hand in hand (Informal sector integration in e-waste recycling). http://toxicslink.org/Publication/enviro nment-and-livelihoodhand-in-hand. Accessed 13 April 2021. Toxics Link. (2014). On the edge: Potential hot spots in Delhi. http://toxicslink. org/docs/Report-On-the-Edge.pdf. Accessed 13 April 2021. Wong, C., Qiao, M., & Zheng, W. (2018). ‘Dispersing, regulating and upgrading’ urban villages in suburban Beijing. Town Planning Review, 89(6), 597–621.

CHAPTER 4

Reimagining Urban Development in a Tribal Region: Readings on a Fifth Schedule Area of India Aashish Xaxa

4.1 The Context of Tribes and Indigenous People in India The term ‘tribe’ has been taken over, in Béteille’s words, by the ‘anthropologist from the ordinary usage generally meaning people who were considered primitive’ (Béteille, 1977, p. 7). Béteille adds: They lived in remote and backward areas and did not know the use of writing. Sometimes it [tribe] was used synonymously with the term race. In [the] course of time anthropologists have refined this concept.

Anthropologists had defined tribes as societies which are a self-contained unit having their own territory, language, culture, economic and political system. In more recent years, tribes have been identified as Indigenous

A. Xaxa (B) School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_4

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people. Whereas there is an overlap between the use of these two terms, there is a finer distinction. ‘Indigenous people’ is used to refer to tribal people who lived in a given geographical area or territory prior to the onset of colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, it tends to assume the form of a historical category, which is not necessarily the case with the term ‘tribe’. In India, tribal communities claim to be the country’s Indigenous people (Xaxa, 1999, p. 3589). This is reflected in the use of the word Adivasi to distinguish them from others; the term means ‘original people’.1 India is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous people (2007), but it denies its tribal population such status because its position is that everyone in India is Indigenous. However, a major intervention came in the form of the Supreme Court’s judgement in the landmark case, ‘Kailas & Ors v State of Maharashtra’ (2011).2 The jury stated, “92 per cent of the population of India consists of descendants of immigrants. Among the most disadvantaged groups, the most marginalised are the Adivasis who are the descendants of the original inhabitants of India, but now constitute only about 8 per cent of our total population, and as a group are one of the most marginalised and vulnerable communities in India.”

This judgement endorses the claims of the tribes to be the Indigenous people of India. In this chapter, I use both ‘tribal’ and ‘Indigenous’ as being coterminous.

1 The First Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission, also known as the Dhebar Commission (1960–1)—appointed by the then-President of India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, on 28 April 1960, pursuant to Article 339 of the Constitution of India—in its report of 14 October 1961 stated that ‘as these groups are presumed to form the oldest ethnological sector of the Indian population, the term Adivasi (‘Adi’ = Original and ‘Vasi’ = Inhabitant) has become current among the tribal population.’ See also ‘First Citizens’ (Radhakrishna, 2016) and ‘Status of Austro-Asiatic groups in the peopling of India: An exploratory study based on the available prehistoric, linguistic and biological evidences’ (Kumar, 2003, pp. 507–522) for a broader theoretical discussion of the same. 2 For further details see https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1632114.

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Tribes and Land

Tribes/Indigenous people in India, as elsewhere in the world, have been conceptualised to a high degree via their physical, social and cultural proximity to nature. They are perceived as communities who are primarily dependent on nature for their survival and livelihoods, and who have a symbiotic relationship with nature. Burman (1993, p. 180) writes that even deserts where pastoral tribes live, are seen as cul-de-sacs, ensuring thereby the physical and cultural survival of their communities, which have traditionally balanced their social needs with ecological imperatives. A large tract of forests in territories inhabited by tribes reflects this. Fernandes (1993, p. 48) has called this a constructive dependence on forests and other natural resources. Xaxa (2008, p. 102) illustrates that the relationship of tribes with nature can be explored in two ways. The first concerns how nature and the environment are represented and articulated in different tribal oral traditions such as riddles, stories, myths, legends, feasts and festivals. The focus here is on how the environment is articulated and represented in the cultural domain. The second is by examining how tribes relate to nature and the environment in their dayto-day existence. The natural world has an important place in the religious beliefs and cultural practices of tribes. They believe in the world of spirits, some of whom inhabit a specific part of the land such as hills, dense trees/vegetation, rivers or tanks. Further, they order their rites, rituals, festivals, music, dance, etc. on nature’s ‘signal’—such as the blossoming of plants and trees, the position of the moon and the cycle of seasons. In this way, nature occupies a central place in rituals, customs and festivals of tribes (Xaxa, 1998, p. 128). Rapid economic advancement has been made at the cost of natural resources: the greater the scale of development, the greater the destruction of the natural resources. However, an increasing realisation of the danger of unchecked ecological and environmental damage has prompted a renewed interest in the conservation of the environment and even its regeneration. At the present time, the major thrust of the development agenda is the preservation of the natural environment—hence, techniques based on traditional knowledge systems are being sought. This goes some way towards explaining renewed interest in the study of tribes: the interest lies not so much in their societies or what they constitute as people, but in what they can contribute to the maintenance of the natural order. However, there has also been a recent growing awareness among

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academicians and activists of the importance of preserving tribal modes of life. It is in this context that I would like to critique urban development in tribal areas, by illustrating the township development of Greater Ranchi.

4.3 Greater Ranchi: From a Symbol of the New India to a Contested Capital City Ranchi, the capital city of the state of Jharkhand (carved out of the southern portion of the state of Bihar in 2000), is situated in the central part of the Chota Nagpur Plateau.3 The plateau has an average height of about 600 metres above sea level but exceeds 760 metres in some areas. Roy (1912, p. 360) says that Chota Nagpur was the name by which the region was known in the nineteenth century. Up to the last decade of the nineteenth century, the region was divided into the following districts: Hazaribagh, Singhbhum, Manbhum and Lohardaga. In January 1891, the district of Lohardaga was divided into two—the districts of Ranchi and Palamu; the name of the district was changed in 1899 from Lohardaga to Ranchi. Subsequently, Ranchi was organised into four administrative subdivisions—namely: Sadar, Gumla (1902), Khunti (1905) and Simdega (1915) (Kumar, 1970, p. 4). The township of Ranchi was established in 1833, first, as the headquarter of the South-West Frontier Agency, by Captain Thomas Wilkinson, who was the Military Captain and Agent of the East India Company, and then, established as a municipality in 1869 with around 1617 municipal holdings. It was a mofussil (rural) township surrounded by tribal villages. At that time, it covered an area of a little over 10 square kilometres but grew to approximately 32 square kilometres, with 11,000 municipal holdings, by the 1960s. According to Lakra (1999, p. 19), a tribal sociologist, ‘the township of Ranchi itself has grown out of several tribal villages.’ Vidyarthi (1969, p. 1) states that three major factors have influenced the growth of urban concentration in Ranchi. In the first place, Ranchi owes much of its growth to the fact that it became the administrative headquarters of the Ranchi district (1843) and Chhotanagpur division (1856) and then of Bihar state (Summer capital 3 The Chota Nagpur Plateau located in eastern India, covers much of Jharkhand state as well as adjacent parts of Odisha, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh; it measures approximately 65,000 square kilometres in area.

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from 1912). Secondly, during World War II, Ranchi was a big military centre, the then headquarters of Eastern Command. During these periods around Ranchi, commercial activities had greatly developed. Thirdly, the factors of transport and communication appear to be equally important in the development of the city.

Urban development is contingent on the acquisition of land, which in the case of areas under the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution is generally constrained so as not to violate the protective laws in favour of tribes. To overcome this, the state invariably takes recourse to the clause of eminent domain,4 its power to take property from an individual with the payment of compensation. In the post-independence era, the township of Ranchi received a significant boost due to the setting up of the Heavy Engineering Corporation Limited (HECL). A Soviet-era-inspired industrial complex, the HECL was envisioned as the ‘ mother of industries’ for producing heavy machinery; equipment; and components for supplying the steel, cement, aluminium, mining, mineral processing and power industries of the rest of India. This corporation was entrusted with the establishment of ‘a Heavy Machine-Building Plant, a Foundry Forge Plant and a Heavy Machine Tools Plant at Hatia’ (Kumar, 1970, p. 230) in what was supposed to be the face of the ‘development of a new India’ (Vidyarthi, 1970, p. 30). With regard to the heavy machine building plant, an agreement was made with the USSR for technical and financial help. A similar understanding was reached with Czechoslovakia to open a foundry forge project and heavy machine-tool plant. These plants were to be the foundation for the development of basic industries in the country, and the first step in this direction was the acquisition of land. To this end, the erstwhile Bihar Government acquired land by dispossessing 25 tribal villages, which covered around 7370 hectares affecting 12,900 families. The HECL took over possession of this land in different phases. In an interview5 with two senior architects of the Ranchi Building Construction Department, it was stated that the corporation was Nehru’s dream base for an industrial India—the ‘mother industry’ to every other industrial unit in the country. It was supposed to be a well-planned city, boasting schools; hospitals; markets; and a planned, sector-wise layout with open spaces, greenery and 4 This is discussed in detail later in the chapter. 5 Interview conducted on 7 February 2019 in Ranchi.

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water supply from the nearby Dhurwa Dam. It would also have a wellconnected road network with resource-rich Rourkela, another industrial town, located 168 kilometres from Ranchi. The HECL took off with a great promise but did not perform as expected. It began running steadily at a loss and, correspondingly, acquired huge debt and loss accumulated over many decades.6 The debt went on accruing, and the corporation was eventually declared ‘sick’ in 1993. Now, all it has are factory plants, residential properties and land holdings. In a revival attempt, the HECL has been trying to raise money by selling its buildings and residential complexes as well as unused land. Accordingly, it gave away 17 non-residential buildings on 34 hectares of land and 1148 residential quarters on 9.8 hectares to the Jharkhand Government in 2009. A large portion of the land at its disposal was not under its effective control and use at the time of the HECL’s declaration as ‘sick’—and, conversely, not all of the land under its effective control was in use. In short, it had a vast area that was not in productive use and hence there has been a demand for its return to the government. The land under the HECL’s control has been envisaged as the site of the new capital township, as territory from other areas has not been easily forthcoming due to legal safeguards in the form of the Chhotanagpur Tenancy (CNT) Act, 1908 and resistance by the local tribal people to land acquisition. The genesis of the CNT Act in Jharkhand can be traced back to the spirit and ethos brought about after a series of historic eighteenthand nineteenth-century revolts by tribes against the encroachment of the British upon their land. The British realised that the tribes would be vulnerable to the non-tribal exploitation and usurpation of land, which led them to frame the Act (Fig. 4.1).

6 For further details see https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/indl-goods/ svs/engineering/heavy-engineering-corporation-ranchis-biggest-landlord-owns-5000acres-but-is-still-a-sick-unit/articleshow/46970625.cms?from=mdr.

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Fig. 4.1 Plot Map of the Greater Ranchi Area (Adapted from map available on Greater Ranchi Development Agency [GRDA] public domain)

4.4 The Development of Greater Ranchi: Politics of the Master Plan The Draft Master Plan for Greater Ranchi7 (Thakur et al., 2005, p. 362) states, 7 This Draft Master Plan of Greater Ranchi, ‘was prepared by Syed Mobin Ahmed, Town Planner, Ranchi Improvement Trust. The consulting associates were R. L. Bawa (Chief Town Planner, Bihar) and A. K. Srivastava (Assistant Town Planner, Bihar). Interestingly enough, this draft plan did not fix any target range of time, whether it is for 20

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Ranchi, the Headquarters of the Chhotanagpur Division is fast growing into the most industrialised town in the eastern region. The most important phase of development of Ranchi, in the post-independence era, started with the decision to locate such important undertakings as the Heavy Engineering Corporation Limited (HECL), Headquarters of the Hindustan Steel Limited (HCL) and the National Coal Development Corporation (NCDC) [there]. The rapid growth of the city is apparent from the multifarious and sporadic activities going [on] in and around the town. The activities in the colonies of the Heavy Engineering Corporation and Hindustan Steel etc. are well planned but the private building activities, outside these complexes, present a chaotic state of affairs. Some ancillary industries are coming up without much regard [for] well-recognised zoning regulations. It is obvious, therefore, that a Master Plan for Ranchi should be drawn up to channelise the growth of the town in accordance with the best-known planning principles.

The new capital township constitutes just a small part of the development of Greater Ranchi, with urban development also taking place beyond its confines. This entails a study of the master plan and what such development has in store for the local tribes in terms of ongoing activities. It is important to understand its implication for the tribes residing there as land to be brought under the plan, besides being agricultural land, falls within the Fifth Schedule provisions of the Indian Constitution. This constitutional provision deals with the administration of scheduled areas in which tribal communities form a majority, where the governor has the power to make rules and regulations for good governance—especially concerning the protection of tribal-community land. According to sociologist Quinn (1955, p. 73) a city master plan is designed to address three aspects, all of which represent ‘a major historical emphasis in city planning: (1) City beautification as emphasised by architects, (2) Transportation and safety as emphasised by engineers and (3) Land use patterns as emphasised by economists, geographers and human ecologists.’

or 25 years, nor does it have its date of publication. Normally these two are planning prerequisites of a Master Plan or Draft Master Plan’ (Thakur et al., 2005).

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The contemporary master plan has its roots in medieval European master plans and early twentieth-century American cities in which the entire urban-land administration was governed by the municipality. In India too, in the postcolonial period, this method of urban governance was adopted through the Twelfth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which exhorts the states to allow Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) to frame city master plans. This was seen as an important step in the empowerment of the ULBs. All municipal acts in India provide for functions, powers and responsibilities to be carried out by the municipal government. This standard model of urban master plans has certain limitations in scheduled areas in India because of constitutional and legal safeguards for tribal communities in respect of their land. Urban governance in Ranchi is run by the Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC). Under the 74th Constitutional Amendment, Ranchi’s first municipal election was held in 2008, the second in 2013 and the third in 2018. Accordingly, the First Master Plan of Ranchi was drawn up in 2008, and it addressed the civic amenities within the city. It was subsequently observed by the city authorities after the master plan was announced, that there was a demand from citizens for more educational institutions. The Second Master Plan of Ranchi (2015–37) intends to address this matter by founding several schools and colleges. This will entail going beyond the existing boundary of the city into the new capital township of Greater Ranchi. What is reflected here is how, despite constitutional provisions framed to safeguard tribal lands, the urban-development process still operated. The functioning of municipalities in urban tribal regions calls for an examination of this phenomenon through the lens of legal plurality.

4.5

Legal Plurality

Despite the presence of the state, there also exist traditional customs and regulations that govern life in certain areas and communities such as the regions of my field site. This feature is termed ‘legal pluralism’. Jackson (2005, p. 158) notes that the notion of legal plurality emerged around the 1930s as a topic of serious scholarly discussion. In the ensuing years, a plethora of ‘sociologists, anthropologists and professional lawyers generated a multiplicity of attitudes towards and definitions of legal pluralism’ (Jackson, 2005, p. 158). However, a major intervention came with the work of anthropologist John Griffiths (1986, p. 5) who introduced an apparent binary distinction

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between what he termed ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ legal pluralism. As per Griffiths, the notion of ‘strong’ (i.e., new, sociological) legal pluralism referred to and resulted from the fact that the law is never administered by a single set of state-sponsored institutions. Contrarily, he saw the notion of ‘weak’ (i.e., classic, juristic) legal pluralism as encompassing situations in which a state or sovereign power recognised, validated and backed different bodies of law for different groups in society. Griffiths’ work is seminal because he sought to break the hegemonic influence of professional lawyers and legal scholars who propelled the notion that law in the proper sense is state law and that it is only in the sense (and to the extent) that the state recognises alternative systems or repositories of law that any legal pluralism exists. Jackson (2005, p. 159) notes that the prototypical example of this ‘juridical’ or ‘classic’ legal pluralism was the result of the hybrid orders of recognition granted by European countries to the tribal, customary or indigenous laws in the territories that they had colonised. In the case of India, Galanter (1989, p. 3) critically observes that while the genesis of modern Indian law is foreign, nationwide generalisations of law are of ‘little consequence’ as India is a vast and heterogeneous country. There is scant attention paid to the understanding of ‘local conditions’, which ‘inevitably leads to misleading generalisations’. For instance, in the case of Jharkhand, the Provisions of Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (P-PESA)8 has yet to be worked out and implemented in sync with the traditional customs and regulations of the Adivasis . Such an arrangement of legal pluralism is also reflected in the state’s system of land ownership.

4.6 Legal Intricacies in the Case of Greater Ranchi The land on which the HECL came to be located belonged to tribes for whom the Indian Constitution provides certain protective measures in the form of Fifth Schedule provisions. One of these provisions pertains to the transfer of land from tribes to non-tribes. As per Part B, Article 5(2) of the schedule, the governor of the state, has the power to make

8 A finer distinction needs to be made between PESA and P-PESA. The Act of 1996 was the extension of the provisions of the panchayat and not an extension of the existing panchayat. Hence, P-PESA is a better acronym for the Act.

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regulations for the peace and the general good. To this end, he or she can (a) prohibit or restrict the transfer of land by or among members of the scheduled tribes; (b) regulate the allotment of land to members of the scheduled tribes; and (c) regulate the carrying on of money lending business by persons who lend to members of the Scheduled Tribes. In the case of violations, there is also provision for the restoration of land in the form the Scheduled Areas Regulation Act 1969. In the light of these safeguards, the acquisition of land for the HECL by the Bihar Government in 1958 points to a violation of the spirit of the constitution and, more specifically, the CNT Act. Yet the 1908 legislation was overlooked and the land was procured under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 by invoking the doctrine of eminent domain, which states that the ‘sovereign’ can do anything if the act of the sovereign involves public interest. The doctrine empowers the sovereign to acquire private land for public use, provided the public nature of that usage can be demonstrated beyond doubt.9 The doctrine is based on the following two Latin maxims: (1) Salus Populi Suprema Lex (Welfare of the People Is the Paramount Law); and (2) Necessitas Publica Major est Quam (Public Necessity Is Greater Than Private Necessity). However, in India eminent domain is often misused by the state to acquire land by dispossession. Following its accumulated loss and debt, the HECL has embarked on the sale of its land as part of raising resources 9 The Constitution of India originally provided for the right to property (which includes land) under Articles 19 and 31. Article 19 guaranteed that all citizens had the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property; Article 31 stated that ‘no person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law.’ It also indicated that compensation would be paid to a person whose property had been taken for public purposes (often subject to wide range of meaning). The Forty-Fourth Amendment of 1978 deleted the right to property from the list of fundamental rights with the introduction of a new provision, Article 300-A, which provided that ‘no person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law’ (44th Amendment of the Constitution, with effect from 10 June 1979). The amendment ensured that the right to property is no longer a fundamental right but rather a constitutional/legal right as a statutory right and in the event of breach, the remedy available to an aggrieved person is through the High Court under Article 226 of the Indian Constitution and not the Supreme Court under Article 32 of the Constitution. The state must pay compensation at the market value for the land, building or structure acquired—provision inserted by the Constitution (Seventeenth Amendment) Act 1964.

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to pay its debts on the one hand and an attempt to revive the industry on the other. After all, as noted earlier, the corporation has far more land at its disposal than was required for its industrial enterprise. The excess land should, as per Section 48 of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, have been returned to its original owners but this was never done. Now, a new law relating to land acquisition has been enacted in the form of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (2013). Though the HECL land was acquired in 1958, this new Act is also applicable to the corporation. The legislation contains various clauses that are relevant in the case of the HECL because it has an excess of land as compared with what is needed, and this land is being sold or leased and the people occupying it are being removed in order to facilitate the building of the new capital township. In Chapter 4 of the 2013 Act, in reference to the land-acquisition process under the former Act of 1894, it mentions the lapse of the latter and, in Clause 24(2) Subsection (1) states the following: in case of land acquisition proceeding initiated under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, where an award under section 11 has been made 5 years or more before the commencement of this act but the physical possession of the land has not been taken or compensation has not been paid, the said proceedings shall be deemed to have lapsed and the appropriate government, if it chooses, shall initiate the process in accordance with the present act.

Further, in Chapter XIII (Miscellaneous), under Clause 101, the Act states that if any land acquired under it remains unutilised for a period of five years from the date of taking over possession, the same shall be returned to the original owner or owners—or their legal heirs, as the case may be—or to a land bank.10 The provision ensured in the 2013 Act has made the disposal by the HECL to the Jharkhand Government of land other than that in its clear possession problematic, and has posed a serious obstacle to the agenda of building a new capital township. The protests and demonstrations against eviction on the one hand and the return of the land to its original owner with the necessary documents on the other are ongoing. This aspect of protest and resistance will be taken up a little later; however, what is important is that even now there 10 This is the most important and critical clause of the 1894 Act.

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has been a violation of the law as the new township is being constructed without any compliance with provisions ensured in the 2013 Act. Several lawsuits have been filed in the court, and are yet to be resolved.

4.7

Resistance and Protest

The new High Court was the first building that was begun to be built in the Greater Ranchi area. It was constructed on agricultural land within the premises of the HECL, but was occupied by the Adivasi people. It is intended to build the new Secretariat on the remaining land, which has already been acquired from the corporation, and the process is ongoing for de facto possession of the land under the encroachers within the HECL (see below) and the people displaced in the 1960s–70s. A senior lawyer reveals that in Greater Ranchi, the High Court is being built, on an area of 63 hectares and the Vidhan Sabha (Legislative Assembly) on an area of 46 hectares. In addition to this, a new ‘smart city’, is being built on an area of 93 hectares.11 This smart city will also be known as the ‘core capital area’, meaning that it will be the seed of further expansion of the township into other tribal areas. All this is being done by the government at the cost of tribal lives. Given the displacement and the violation of the provisions inherent in the Land Acquisitions Act (2013), the displaced and the would-be displaced have been protesting against the move of the government at different levels. They have formed themselves into various groups keeping in mind their distinct legal and social contexts. Two such groups are the displaced tribal people and the encroachers/illegal occupants. Besides raising and articulating their issues at an individual group level, they have also formed a larger joint front. They are fighting for their cause on two levels—the legal and the political. The latter has taken the form of representations; meeting with concerned people, officials and politicians; demonstrations; and even rallies. They have additionally allied with a larger organisation that has also been raising and articulating their issues at different levels and on diverse platforms. This organisation is known as the Greater Ranchi Visthapit Samiti (Greater Ranchi Displaced Organisation).

11 For further details see http://environmentclearance.nic.in/writereaddata/FormB/ TOR/PFR/18_Jun_2019_172204013Z6Z15MNYFrom1ACP.pdf and https://www.dna india.com/business/report-cabinet-approves-monetisation-of-hec-land-in-ranchi-2377142.

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In this context, it is worth listening to the voices of the descendants of the displaced. In an interview12 with me, they say: the corporation was built over tribal land. The state used middlemen to negotiate with our fathers, who were mostly illiterate and inarticulate. The middlemen showed them a nearby area within the bounded area of the HECL, which was uninhabited and covered with forest bushes, where they could continue with their agricultural practices and assured them of free holding of that land. However, the state dispossessed them after three years, from that area as well, without any provision of their rehabilitation and resettlement. As per the descendants, their families were merely given a paltry compensation which they used to rehabilitate themselves in different places around Ranchi. However, they were then without any sustained source of livelihood, as they did not possess any skill other than agriculture. To make both […] ends meet, they were forced to take menial jobs that they had never done before. They were simple people and did not have the legal means to fight and had to reconcile with themselves.

The biggest tragedy of the story is that the tribal people who gave their land for nation-building got nothing in return. Today, most of the people who were displaced in the earliest phase have passed away and cannot testify to the state’s fraudulence against them then or in the current context of the transfer of land from the HECL to the government. In addition, some people came from outside the region and settled on the land thus acquired with or without the connivance of the HECL. The corporation required considerable labour to support its establishment in a location that was non-commercialised and had limited access to any routine daily requirements and service providers. At this point, the corporation allowed a large number of people from outside to settle in its premises as they rendered blue-collar services such as labour, masonry and sanitation. Most of them were not provided with official quarters by the HECL but were given oral confirmation that they could reside on its land. As providers of labour, services and other necessities, their number and settlement grew and their livelihoods/services and businesses expanded. They were now catering not only to the needs of the HECL employees but also to the those of the outer cities. This led to the unauthorised construction of illegal premises alongside the employees’ quarters. Such unlawful constructions started as minor encroachments but eventually 12 Interview conducted on 23 March 2019 in Ranchi.

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became full-blown businesses until the HECL stalled. The new Secretariat is going to be built on this land, the bulk of which was under the possession of either these encroachers or the displaced tribal people of the 1960–70s who were still holding onto the land to which they had been relocated and were still engaged in agriculture. In the words of one of the most active and senior activists from Ranchi, the construction of Greater Ranchi is the biggest state violation of the CNT Act in Jharkhand because the scale of the land acquired for this project was bigger than that of any other urban-cum-industrial project in the state. To summarise, what emerges clearly in the case of Greater Ranchi is the sheer violation not only of the Fifth Schedule but also of the CNT Act and the new Land Acquisition Act, at the hands of the very state that should be enforcing this legislation. This is a case of multi-layered violence against the Indigenous people of the region. Farmer et al. (2006, p. 1686) argue that such ‘social arrangements put individuals and populations in harm’s way’, adding, ‘the arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organisation of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people’. Hence, there is an urgent need to reimagine urban development from the perspective of the Indigenous people.

4.8 Towards a More Sustainable Urban Development from an Indigenous Perspective Development has been one of the key concerns of the state agenda in post-independence India. This has been even more pronounced in case of Jharkhand’s tribal population, but the development pursued has not benefited them. Hence, there is resistance to the kind of development taking place in the state. Its tribes have lost much more than they have gained from the existing process of development despite legal and constitutional provisions in their favour. This discourse finds echoes in the specific urban context of Ranchi. There has been opposition to the current Master Plan as it envisages procuring large tracts of agricultural land falling within the districts of Ranchi and Khunti. In other words, the Master Plan has not even taken account of the status of the local scheduled area and prevailing legal protections; rather, the state has, in general, viewed such legal safeguards as a hindrance to development. The existing perspective of urban development has also fallen short of sustainability. People on the margins are regularly being dispossessed

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from their land and resources without any alternative source of livelihood. Urban development is taking place with no consideration of ecology and the environment, thereby increasing carbon footprints. Sustainable urban development demands a better quality of life for all, in all spheres of urban life, and this is possible only when urban development addresses the problem of inequity. To achieve sustainability, there is a need to understand that the current attitude of ‘rational’ mastery over nature is misplaced. Hence, there is a need for an alternative vision. Such an alternative can be drawn from the world view of tribal/Indigenous people. For tribes, the natural world is intertwined into the very fabric of social order. The two realms are not separate, discrete and autonomous; rather, they are integral to each other and form a single moral order (Xaxa, 1998, p. 128). There is an obligation not just to fellow human beings but also to nature. While indigenous communities’ dependence on nature is overwhelming, however, it is far from being passive. These communities do act on nature and transform it into forms that are of use to them, but without disturbing the harmony between themselves and nature. There is a deeper realisation that harming nature leads to resource depletion, environmental degradation and desertification—risking resource scarcity and climate disorders (Ekka, 2007, p. 276). The tribal philosophy and way of life is not one of conquering and dominating nature but of living side by side with it and acting in a manner that constitutes more of a (truly) rational adaptation. This is the hallmark of the tribal world view that needs to be incorporated into the planning process rather than replicating the existing way of planning, which is primarily a top-down approach that doesn’t adequately consider local resources, environment, ecology or people.

4.9 A Policy Framework for Urban Development in the Tribal Areas of India Tribes have been a subject of special concern with respect to development in the context of the Indian Constitution. This concern has been backed up by laws and policies. A wide range of policies and programmes has been worked out bearing in mind tribal people—and such schemes have been in place since the introduction of the Indian Government’s First Five Year Plans (1951–6). Its policies, programmes and schemes have been reviewed regularly and over time; some have been dropped,

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others modified to make it more effective and new ones have been introduced keeping in mind the changing situations and needs of the times. Yet all these have been done keeping in mind the tribal population in the rural and forest context. Tribal people in the urban context have remained almost completely outside the purview and attention of policies and programmes—both of the central and state governments. The Fifth Schedule of the Constitution mandates laws separate from the Panchayati Raj Act and the Nagarpalika Act to administer villages and towns in tribal-dominated areas. Parliament enacted the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (P-PESA) Act in 1996 for rural tribal areas. But a similar legislation for urban tribal areas—the Municipalities Extension to Scheduled Areas (MESA), 2001, Bill—was not enacted. This Bill had aimed to protect the land rights of tribals and provides for a standing committee on tribal affairs in each municipality. It was introduced in the Parliament on 30 July 2001. Later, it was referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Urban and Rural Development, which recommended its adoption in November 2003. Up until the monsoon session of Parliament in 2010, the Bill was enlisted for discussion in every session. Since then, there has been no further deliberation on it. Thus, there exists an anomaly in the urban governance of Fifth Schedule Areas such as Ranchi that has not yet been addressed in the post-independence era. It is high time that suitable initiatives were introduced for such tribes as they are increasingly becoming an important segment of the country’s urban populations. Hence, policies, schemes and programmes need to be devised keeping in mind their specific situations as well as the spirit of the constitutions and laws meant for them. In this context, it is important to draw attention to a critical fact that many of the schemes and programmes that have been drawn up for tribes are an extension of those falling under the purview of the Ministry of Rural Development. They have been automatically extended to tribal regions with some modifications, keeping in mind the nature of their geographical areas and demographic structure, rather than being formulated on the basis of their distinct economic, social, cultural, geographical and ecological considerations. The distinction between tribes and nontribes in terms of language, culture, tradition, values and governance has also been overlooked in such cases. This, too, needs to be addressed not only in the context of a rural setting but also in the urban realm. In the case of tribes in an urban setting, especially in scheduled areas,

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neither policies nor programmes have been drawn up for their protection and development so far. Thus, a large, marginalised and vulnerable section of the tribal population who have been uprooted from their land due to development projects, including urban development, have become invisible from the point of view of the state and its agenda making. Hence, when reference is made to ‘the tribals’ a distinction must be drawn between the rural and urban settings and care taken that suitable initiatives are worked out keeping in mind the specific social, cultural, constitutional and legal contexts of the region in which they are located. State laws are conflicting in the sense that some of them favour the protection of Indigenous people’s land while others work against tribal interests; there is a need to harmonise these divergent aspects of the state laws which work against the interest of tribes with those state laws and customary laws which protect their interests. There is also the presence of customary laws that govern the everyday social, cultural and natural resource management of tribes. The rupture that exists between them and state law needs to be addressed through a new policy framework. Acknowledgements This chapter is drawn from my Ph.D. work. I thank my field respondents for their insights. I thank my supervisor, Professor Ritambhara Hebbar, and my Doctoral Advisory Committee members, Professor Bipin Jojo and Professor Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, for their comments on the text upon which it is based. I thank Dr. Anjali Karol Mohan and Professor Sony Pellissery from the National Law School University of India, Bengaluru, the editors of this book and also Ian, the copy-editor, for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of the chapter, which vastly improved it. This research was made possible by the Doctoral Scholarship of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). Any error in it is mine.

References Béteille, A. (1977). The definition of Tribe. In R. Thapar (Ed.), Tribe, Caste and Religion in India (pp. 7–14). Macmillan India Limited. Burman, B. K. R. (1993). Tribal population: Interface of historical ecology and political economy. In M. Miri (Ed.), Continuity and change in Tribal society (pp. 175–216). Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Ekka, A. (2007). Indigenous people and development in India. In J. M. Kujur & S. Minz (Eds.), Indigenous peoples of India: Problems and prospects (pp. 262– 284). Indian Social Institute.

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Farmer, P. E., Nizeye, B., Stulac, S., & Keshavjee, S. (2006). Structural violence and clinical medicine. PLoS Med, 3(10), 1686–1691. https://doi.org/10. 1371/journal.pmed.0030449. Accessed 15 April 2021. Fernandes, W. (1993). Forests and Tribals: Informal economy, dependence and management traditions. In M. Miri (Ed.), Continuity and change in Tribal society (pp. 48–69). Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Galanter, M. (1989). Law and society in modern India (Edited and with an Introduction by Rajeev Dhavan). Oxford University Press. Griffiths, J. (1986). What is legal pluralism? Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 32(24), 1–55. Jackson, S. A. (2005). Legal pluralism between Islam and the Nation-State: Romantic medievalism or pragmatic modernity? Fordham International Law Journal, 30(1), 158–176. Kumar, N. (1970). Ranchi District Gazette. State Editor, Gazetteers Branch, Revenue Department, Government of Bihar. Kumar, V., & Reddy, B. Mohan. (2003). Status of Austro-Asiatic groups in the peopling of India: An exploratory study based on the available prehistoric, linguistic and biological evidences. Journal of Biosciences, 28, 507–522. Lakra, C. (1999). The new home of Tribals. Om Publications. Quinn, J. A. (1955). Urban sociology. American Book Company. Radhakrishna, M. (Ed.). (2016). First citizens. Oxford University Press. Roy, S. C. (1912). The Mundas and their country. The Kuntaline Press. Thakur, B., Sharma, H. S., Misra, S., Chattopadhyay, S., & Singh, S. (Eds.). (2005). Urban and regional development in India, Vol. 1. 5 vols. Concept Publishing Company. Vidyarthi, L. P. (1969). Cultural configuration of Ranchi: Survey of an emerging industrial city of Tribal India (1960–62). Research Programmes Committee, Planning Commission, Government of India. Vidyarthi, L. P. (1970). Socio-cultural implications of industrialisation in India: A case study of Tribal Bihar. Research Programmes Committee, Planning Commission, Government of India. Xaxa, V. (1998). Cultural dimension of ecology: A case study of the Oraons. In B. Saraswati (Ed.), The cultural dimension of ecology (pp. 125–128). Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Xaxa, V. (1999). Tribes as indigenous people of India. Economic and Political Weekly, 34(51), 3589–3595. Xaxa, V. (2008). State, society and Tribes: Issues in post-colonial India. Pearson.

CHAPTER 5

Urban Planning Practices in China: Struggling Between Politics and the Market Zhi Liu and Peiming Wang

5.1

Introduction

China is one of the Global South countries that have experienced the fastest urbanization over the last four decades. Between 1980 and 2020, China’s total population grew from 981 million to 1.4 billion, and its share of urban population (or rate of urbanization) increased from 19.4 to 60.6%. According to the World Bank Development Indicators data,1 between 1980 and 2019 China registered the highest annual growth in urbanization among the countries with a total population over 50 million.

1 Available from the website: https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-develo pment-indicators.

Z. Liu (B) Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy, Beijing, China e-mail: [email protected] P. Wang School of Architecture and Planning, Yunnan University, Kunming, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_5

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Its urban population is currently over 848 million and is expected to exceed 1.13 billion, or 75% of the country’s total population, by 2050. The physical growth and transformation of China’s cities have been dramatic: most have expanded several folds during the last four decades in terms of population, built-up area, and building heights—and their older districts have mostly been redeveloped and modernized. Despite the fast pace of physical transformation, most Chinese cities grow in a rather orderly fashion if seen from their physical outset—and this would be unconceivable without the working of urban planning. China has a fully functioning urban-planning system in a sense that every bit of urban physical development and redevelopment (such as urban expansion and housing construction) must be permitted by the system.2 To guide urban development and redevelopment, the system produces urban master plans, detailed plans, and planning and construction permits. It is governed by a Planning Act and served by a profession of well-trained and certified planners. We argue that the orderly land-use patterns commonly seen in many parts of Chinese cities and the absence of large-scale slums and shantytowns can be attributed, among other factors, to the application of urban-planning principles that are heavily influenced by the Athens Charter and the Euro-American zoning approach.3 But the system also results in, or fails to prevent, a number of undesirable consequences. On closer examination of land-use patterns, one would find copycat towns (Sui et al., 2017) or “simulacrascapes” (Yin & Qian, 2020), segregated urban enclaves including urban villages and gated communities (He, 2013; Wu, 2005), and an absence of public spaces and playgrounds, to name just a few such features. Perhaps the most striking is a new and dull cityscape known as “same face for a thousand of cities,” which contains a thick, concrete forest of high-rise buildings; wide boulevards; magnificent squares; many automobiles; and few pedestrians in places that used to be showcases of vibrant, local, city lifestyles, and historical heritage. Informal structures are cleared out for redevelopment; local street stores are gradually replaced by distant 2 See Wu (2015, Chapter 3) for a detailed description of China’s statutory urbanplanning system. 3 The Athens Charter is a document on urban planning principles summarizing the Fourth Congress of the International Congress of Modern Architects (CIAM) that took place in 1932. The influence of the Charter is obvious in Chinese textbooks on urbanplanning principles. See Curien (2014) for an English reference.

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shopping malls, as well as by e-commerce. Many residents, especially those in low-income groups, are struggling to adapt to this new lifestyle. The urban ecological system, social fabric, local culture, and traditional architecture and townscape have all suffered from damage and even destruction in the process. China’s urban-planning experience is unique among Global South nations: it has never been colonized by Western powers and therefore inherited no urban-planning system from any of the Western countries.4 Its current system was created from scratch for the purpose of promoting industrialization in the 1950s. However, it has been extensively influenced by the planning theories and practices of the West, as well as of the former Soviet Union (in the 1950s). Despite this Western influence, China’s urban planning does not function as a political process; by institutional design, it functions as a technical process that is embedded in an authoritarian political system. Therefore, it is subordinated to the broader political process and is used as a tool to help achieve the country’s political, economic, and social objectives. Tensions thus grow between planning and politics when priorities set by the political process are not the same as those from planning perspectives. When China moved from a planned economy to the socialist market economy, the urban-planning system also adapted to the market environment. Tensions also arise between planning and the market when the market process, combined with politics, strengthens business interests and weakens the role of planning in safeguarding the public interest. How does planning survive to play a positive role in urban spatial development? What is the use of international planning knowledge for addressing domestic planning issues? How unique is the Chinese urbanplanning experience among the Global South countries? This chapter attempts to answer these questions. Section 5.2 discusses the evolution of China’s urban-planning system and profession; Section 5.3 highlights the broader political and bureaucratic environment in which the planning system operates, and discusses the limits on planners resolving conflicting

4 The Western powers took a number of port-city concessions in China (such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Tsingtao) during the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, and created spheres of influence that included, in terms of architecture and urban design, some enclaved urban neighborhoods in distinctive foreign architecture styles.

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public interests; Section 5.4 uses three examples—missing public spaces, copycat towns, and urban-village redevelopment—to illustrate how urban planners struggle to balance interests between government, developers, and communities in the socialist market economy. Section 5.5 summarizes the key messages from the chapter.

5.2 5.2.1

Urban Planning as a Technical Process The Evolution of China’s Urban-Planning System

China has a long history of indigenous urban-planning practices going back to ancient times. Archeological discoveries and ancient written records demonstrate that many of its cities and human settlements were planned to some extent. These practices were mainly influenced by the Chinese tradition of cosmology and geomancy (Wu, 2015, pp. 1–2). Ancient planners emphasized the need to harmonize city siting with the surrounding nature, symmetry of land use around a central axis, and the careful spatial arrangement of buildings around greenery and water bodies. Today, this tradition continues mainly in the field of urban design and landscape architecture. With the recent movement of “sponge city” development and urban ecological repairs, urban designers and planners are attempting to rediscover and apply the ancient wisdom of harnessing nature for improving amenities, flood protection, and water-resource management.5 It is hoped that the ancient wisdom can be applied at a broader city-planning scale in order to better address local and regional environmental issues. Modern city planning was introduced into China by foreign architects and Chinese architects trained in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. The Capital City Plan of Nanjing, organized by the Nationalist Party Government in 1928, was one of the earliest modern city plans in China.6 The plan’s chief planning adviser was a Yale-trained American architect, Henry K. Murphy, who was assisted by a Cornell-trained Chinese architect, Lü Yenchi. The

5 “Sponge city” development is a pilot initiative adopted by the Chinese Government in 2015 to encourage cities to invest in green infrastructure in order to prevent urban flooding. 6 The other notable example was the Greater Shanghai Plan, prepared in 1927. See Wu (2015, pp. 8–9).

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broad guiding principles set by the government were to combine the Euro-American scientific approach with the Chinese aesthetic tradition, and to adopt the Euro-American modern city structure at the macro level and the Chinese architecture style at the micro level.7 Except for the plans of Shanghai and Nanjing, however, there were few chances for urbanplanning practice as China was in a state of frequent warfare and unrest until the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. In the 1950s, the new socialist state entered a period of planned industrialization and economic development. Planning experts from the Soviet Union and Poland came to China to assist its urban and regional planning practices, especially for a number of new industrial cities. Under the socialist planned economy, urban and regional planners were mainly concerned with the optimal allocation of resources across space. Planning practices focused on the selection of geographical locations for industrial and urban development at the regional level, the functional division of urban space at the city level, and the self-sufficiency of public-service provision at the district/neighborhood level (also known as the micro district). It was essentially a deterministic, technical process starting from national economic-development objectives and extending down to the spatial layouts of buildings and public facilities in cities. Such planning work did not last long, however, as it was completely interrupted by the Cultural Revolution during 1966–1976. When China commenced economic reform and opening-up in 1978, urban-planning practices were back on track. In the 1980s, economic reform took place mainly in the rural sector and the coastal cities. As most cities still functioned as part of the centrally planned economy, urban planning was essentially an extension or continuation of economic planning into urban space. By the end of the 1980s, almost all cities (if not all) had completed a round of urban master planning, which was expected to shape urban spatial development for the next 20 years. In 1989, the country’s first Urban Planning Act was enacted—thanks to the efforts of urban-planning technocrats who wanted to ensure the

7 These principles reflected a general attitude held by generations of Chinese elites and scholars toward Western science and technology since the Italian Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, first introduced them to China in the late sixteenth century. The elites and scholars wanted to make use of the Western science and technology to serve China, but many of them also wanted to “fence off” the influence of Western cultures and ideologies.

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city plans legally enforceable.8 The Act defined the statutory urbanplanning process, which comprised two stages—namely, urban master planning and detailed planning. Urban master plans required the approval of a designated higher-level tier of government. With the approved plans in effect, the urban-planning authorities were able to issue planning permits and construction permits to the applicants for urban land use, a critical step that links the spatial plans to their implementation. According to Clause 6 of the Act, the formulation of urban planning shall be based on national economic and social development plans, as well as the local natural environment, resource conditions, historical conditions, and current characteristics. This clause essentially defined urban planning as a technical process subordinated to the national economic and social development plans. In the 1990s, several major policy reforms brought about significant changes in urban development. In his famous tour to southern China in 1992, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping advocated bolder economic reform and opening-up actions, triggering a sustained period of rapid growth in gross domestic product (GDP) across the country. The pursuit of GDP growth became a top national priority: cities actively developed industrial parks to attract foreign direct investment and manufacturing plants. Moreover, the commercialization of urban utilities starting in 1993 helped free up the fiscal space for municipal governments to finance urban infrastructure. A taxation system reform in 1994 established the taxsharing system between the central and local governments and provided more incentives for municipal governments to raise local tax revenues. An industrial policy announced in the same year promoted automobile manufacturing as a national “pillar industry,” which triggered a sustained, rapid growth of private-car ownership in China’s cities. A housing-policy reform in 1998 moved the delivery of urban housing from a public provision to the market, and triggered a real-estate boom and urban spatial expansion over the subsequent decade. To accommodate the rapid urban and industrial development, which would have been unthinkable in the 1980s, cities rushed to modify their master plans or even formulate new ones. Again, statutory urban planning served as a required technical process to help cities achieve their rapid economic-growth objectives. 8 Before 1989, urban planning was governed by the central-government directives such as the “Interim Measures for the Formulation and Approval of Urban Planning” issued by the State Construction Commission in December 1980.

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In 2008, the Urban Planning Act of 1989 was replaced by the Urban and Rural Planning Act. In addition to the new scope of rural planning, the 2008 Act emphasized (in Clause 4) intensive land use; resource saving; pollution control; ecological protection; and the preservation of cultural heritage, local characteristics, ethnic diversity, and traditional styles—an emphasis apparently influenced by the Charter of Machu Picchu.9 The Act also introduced the detailed development-control plan and the detailed construction plan into the detailed planning stage of the process. Detailed development-control planning can be considered an application of the Western zoning approach. For a particular parcel of land for urban development, the detailed development-control plan would specify a number of key planning parameters, including the land-use type, floor-area ratio, building density, building height limit, municipal utilities, and other public services. The main purpose is to control the intensity of land use so that it does not exceed environmental carrying capacity and public-infrastructure capacity. This is similar to the Western use of statutory land-use zoning maps with the provisions for the use, protection, and design of an area and its physical surroundings. At the more detailed level, the detailed construction plan works out the physical layouts of buildings and facilities in compliance with the planning parameters set by the detailed development-control plan. Today, China has a total of 663 municipalities in three administrative ranks. Four municipalities are at the rank of provincial level (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing), 293 are at the prefecture level, and 366 are at the county level. In addition, there are 1464 county towns that serve as the administrative seat of a county, and about 20,000 administratively designated townships, mostly market towns serving the country’s rural areas. All municipal governments at the county level and above have an urban-planning authority. All cities, towns, and rural townships have their urban or town plans that guide physical development and improvement. In the administrative sense, a municipality in China is not exactly a city. It is an administrative area comprising both urban and rural areas. There is no government body that is set up specifically just for an urbanized

9 The Charter of Machu Picchu is a document on the principles of urban planning and design, prepared by a group of architects, educators, and planners convened by the National University of Federico Villareal, Lima, Peru in December, 1977.

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area. Usually, the geographical area of a municipality contains a centralcity built-up area and surrounding rural districts or rural counties. A large municipality may contain a central city (which is divided into several urban districts), one or two county-level cities, and several rural counties. This spatial arrangement allows sufficient geographical space (i.e., rural land) for the municipality to expand its urbanized area. It also enables municipal governments to finance urban infrastructure with revenues from the lease of public land (expropriated from the rural area) for urban real-estate development. Within such an administrative area, urban planning is not the only planning system that guides the physical development of the area. For many years, China had several separate planning systems governed by different line ministries: urban and rural planning under the Ministry of Housing and Urban and Rural Development, five-year economic and social development planning and primary functional area planning under the National Development and Reform Commission, and land-use planning under the Ministry of Land and Resources.10 Until recently, these planning systems were related but not integrated. The five-year plan was an economic and social development plan without a spatial dimension, and was complemented to some extent by the primary functional area plan that determined the primary sectoral functions of an area based on its comparative advantages, national development priorities, and natural-resource constraints. The land-use plan served the main purpose of farmland preservation; it divided the territories into agricultural land, construction land, and protected areas—and determined the amount of developable land allowed for urban expansion. A major institutional reform has been underway over the last two years to unify the urban-planning, land-use planning, and primary functional area planning systems into a spatial planning system under the purview of the new Ministry of Natural Resources. It remains to be seen how this new system will work over the next few years.

10 In 2018, the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) was replaced by the newly established Ministry of Natural Resources that took over the portfolio of MLR and some related functions from other ministries.

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The Evolution of China’s Urban-Planning Profession

The knowledge and expertise of professional urban planners are crucial for the working of an urban-planning system—in a similar way to the relationship between computer software and hardware. Chinese planners are mostly trained in schools of architecture and planning or schools of geography and planning, and many of them have graduate degrees in urban planning from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and other countries. They are well exposed to, and generally appreciate, Western urban-planning theories and practices—especially the ideas of the discipline’s pioneers, thinkers, and critics.11 They are also exposed to the critics of the urban plans in the Global South formulated with Western planning approaches, such as Brasília, Chandigarh, and Ciudad Guayana. Moreover, the entire profession is well organized for international idea exchange. Planners are eager to learn and accept those foreign urbanplanning approaches that are grounded on a scientific basis and proven to be useful for addressing certain planning issues.12 Emerging planning practices—such as eco-cities, low-carbon cities, transit-oriented development, and New Urbanism approaches—are introduced into China quickly by both foreign and Chinese planning experts and practitioners. It is fair to say that the country’s urban-planning practices are heavily influenced by international ones. Examples of foreign approaches that Chinese planners have adopted or adapted include Euro-American zoning, Clarence Perry’s (1929) neighborhood unit, integrated spatial planning (from Poland), urban system planning (from the Soviet Union), and the New Urbanism. These approaches are technical rather than political. The political theories of urban planning developed from the democratic societies, such as Paul Davidoff’s advocacy planning and Susan Feinstein’s “just city,” receive much less attention in China.

11 The most notable works studied include Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of ToMorrow, Patrick Geddes’ concept of “conurbation,” Le Corbusier’s Radiant City and Athens Charter, Patrick Abercrombie’s Great London Plan, Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis, the Charter of Machu Picchu, the Charter of the New Urbanism, and Smart Growth America. 12 This point is also articulated in the writing of a former vice minister of Housing and Urban and Rural Development, that to understand the development history of Western urban-planning theories and practices is to learn the successful experiences of developed Western countries, and it is a shortcut to preventing mistakes (Qiu, 2011, p. 73).

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Despite the great interest in, and familiarity with, Western planning ideas and approaches, Chinese planners are cautious when applying them to addressing Chinese issues. The planning education system emphasizes the uniqueness of China and requires students to understand the particular context in which Western planning thoughts and practices are developed. The country’s uniqueness arises from a combination of a highly centralized political system, top-down governance structure, and public ownership of land. As will be discussed in the next section, China’s urban planners work in a system that serves not only local interests but also national interests such as national economic growth and coordinated urbanization. This is a major distinction from the very local role of urban planning in many Western and Global South countries. Out of pragmatism, therefore, China’s urban planners tend to make use of Western planning knowledge selectively for addressing China’s planning issues.

5.3

Urban Planning and Politics

China’s urban-planning system operates within an authoritarian political and bureaucratic system, and is expected to serve the overall objectives of the government. As in other countries, a key task of urban planning is to set priorities and make trade-offs between, for example, economic growth and social justice, urban sprawl and farmland preservation, and meeting the needs of both high- and low-income groups. Win–win solutions exist sometimes, but not always. Being part of the state apparatus, urban planners often have to first yield to the priorities selected by the government—especially the higher-level government. China has five levels of government—namely: central, provincial, prefecture, district/county, and village/township. The government body at each level is an all-purpose government, responsible not only for public services but also economic development and social affairs within its administrative area. For the last four decades, the central government has accorded a top priority to economic growth. When it sets an annual GDP growth target, the local governments make a great effort to achieve or surpass the target accordingly. As economic growth is associated with industrialization and urbanization, the urban-planning system has been under significant pressure to meet the spatial needs for industrial and urban expansion. Therefore, China’s urban planning is not only a government instrument to achieve local objectives but also one to help

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achieve national objectives. Compromise over the sacrificing of local interests often has to be reached when national and local interests are in conflict. To illustrate such a compromise, we use a case of siting a highspeed rail (HSR) station—and start with a brief explanation of the related land-based finance in Chinese cities. Investing in public infrastructure is one of the key actions undertaken by municipal governments to promote urban economic growth. They mainly rely on land-based finance for urban infrastructure development (Liu, 2019). Land-based finance consists of revenues from public-land leasing and local-government borrowing using land as collateral. According to the constitution, urban land is owned by the state and rural land by the village collectives. Before a 2019 amendment, the Land Administration Law stipulated that only the state possessed the power to convert rural land for urban development. This legal arrangement gave rise to the system of land-based finance that depends on the land-value appreciation driven by urbanization and infrastructure investment. As cities grow, municipal governments will expropriate rural land, service it with infrastructure, and lease it for a number of years to realestate developers for commercial and residential development through a competitive bidding process. In good times, demand for land is high and municipal governments are able to collect huge land-leasing fees that are significantly higher than the sum of land-expropriation and infrastructureinvestment costs. The net revenues provide a major source of finance for municipal capital-investment projects such as expressways and mass rail transit. For many years over the last two decades, local-government revenues from land-leasing fees amounted to a level equivalent to over 50% of local-government tax revenues. With the expected flows of landleasing revenues, moreover, municipal governments are able to use land as collateral to borrow from the domestic financial market through local government finance vehicles to finance more infrastructure projects. Over the last ten years, China has built an extensive HSR network connecting all its major cities. Most of the HSR stations are located not in city centers but in undeveloped, outlying areas far from the city’s core. Obviously, these are not the most convenient station locations for intercity passengers to reach their final destinations. If urban planners had the power to make siting decisions, the HSR stations would have been located in the city centers—similarly to the practice commonly seen in the European cities with such services. But municipal leaders want the

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HSR stations to be anchor investments to boost the value of undeveloped land around them, and expect to collect higher level of land-leasing revenues from the real-estate development there. To achieve this financial outcome, planners are directed to choose undeveloped sites for the HSR stations and to plan their surroundings as new development areas, served by a host of public services such as schools, hospitals, mass rail transit, and so on. This siting approach is also favored by the China Railway Corporation, the state-owned rail enterprise that is mandated to develop the HSR network quickly and cheaply. Compared with a city-center location, a suburban station would allow more flexibility for the selection of horizontal alignment that meets the HSR’s speed requirements; it also incurs lower costs and shorter time for land acquisition and resettlement. Today, one can see many suburban HSR stations surrounded by clusters of highrise office and residential buildings, many of which are built ahead of demand. As this example demonstrates, the role of urban planners is limited when it comes to resolving the conflicts between national and local interests and between local finance interest and public-service interest. In this highly centralized political environment, the urban-planning system by design is weak on the bottom-up channel. Even though the Urban and Rural Planning Act requires public consultation, the implementation of this aspect of the legislation is largely inadequate. When municipal governments promote real-estate development and infrastructure investment as drivers of local economic growth, urban planners find themselves unable to effectively safeguard the environment, ecological system, local culture, or community interests. They have the international and domestic knowledge to warn the government about the negative social and environmental consequences of its single-minded pursuit of GDP growth, but they are not able to stop the bulldozer on the pathway to growth until the negative consequences emerge years later. Still, planning scholars are able to discuss urban-planning problems on academic and policy-debate platforms. They often write about the problems long before consensus is reached at the political level to address them. Thanks to the persistent efforts of socially conscious planners and scholars, the Chinese central and municipal governments have been learning—albeit slowly—how to better safeguard public interests and protect the environment. The recently amended Land Administration Law, for example, removes the monopoly power of municipal governments to supply land for urban development, and reduces the incentive

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to boost land value at the cost of public interests. The tide has turned, moreover, when the central government started in 2017 to promote a development paradigm shift from rapid economic growth to high-quality development that emphasizes ecological protection and social justice. Of course, it remains to be seen how this paradigm shift will eventually transform the urban-planning system to a more socially and ecologically oriented one—or give the system more political power to help it safeguard public interests.

5.4 Urban Planning in the Socialist Market Economy China has been in transition since 1978 from a planned economy to the so-called socialist market economy, which differs from the Western market economies in the sense that public ownership of land and state-owned enterprises continue to play a very important role in resource allocation and production. Under this economic reform, Chinese cities quickly became a booming marketplace. This is especially significant in the realestate market, in which public land is leased for property development. To serve the transition, urban planning has also transformed from a topdown, deterministic, physical planning practice to one that is more elastic and more market-oriented. After a major housing-policy reform in 1998 transformed urban housing from public welfare to market commodities, the residential realestate market became a dominant force in China’s urban development. Between 1998 and 2019, the country’s total urban population doubled from 416 to 848 million but the total amount of urban built-up areas has expanded almost three times, from 21,380 to 60,312 square kilometers, and per capita urban housing floor area has more than doubled, from 18.7 to 40 square meters—a level comparable with that in many high-income countries. Even the country’s planning services have been significantly marketized. During the period of the planned economy, the services were solely provided by the government planning authorities or government-run planning and design institutes, who were sometimes assisted by planning experts from the universities. In the early 1990s, China reformed its public-service sector and established a market for the government procurement of consultant services, including urban planning and design. While responsibility for the planning, construction, and management of

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a city ultimately remains with the municipal government, the actual planning and design work (such as formulating the master plan and drafting the detailed plan) can be procured from professional planning and design firms, and service deliveries are subjected to government review and approval. The market for planning-consultant services is open for privatesector participation, and government-run planning and design institutes are also allowed to compete for contracts. Some large real-estate firms have established their own in-house planning and design teams. As the market becomes a primary force in shaping the cityscape, urban planners grapple with balancing the interests of the government and the market, as well as the community. They also struggle between professionalism and commercialism. The planning profession has expanded considerably under marketization, but the role of planners in safeguarding the public interest has weakened to a certain extent. In the following subsections, we use three cases—missing public spaces, the rise of copycat towns, and urban-village regeneration—to illustrate the dilemmas faced by planners in China. 5.4.1

The Missing Public Spaces

Wikipedia defines public space as a social space that is generally open and accessible to people. Chinese urban planners generally understand the importance of public spaces for quality of life from the work of planning scholars such as Jan Gehl (2011). It is also known from empirical studies that viable public spaces generate additional value for nearby real-estate properties (Anderson & West, 2006; Luttik, 2000). The technical scope of China’s urban master plans and detailed development-control plans includes public spaces, which are generally referred to as parks, greenery, public squares, open spaces, and public landscape. A certain per capita area (in square meters) of greenery and parks is among the city-planning targets set by the government. However, in reality it is hard to find public spaces that are easily accessible, on foot or by wheelchair, by residents of all ages including the elderly, children, and those with disabilities. Miao (2011, p. 179) observes that public spaces used by the average urban resident have not been improved proportionally and, in some cases, have even deteriorated since the 1980s. Why are public spaces missing in Chinese cities? The situation is even more puzzling as both municipal governments and real-estate developers have great interest in boosting property values.

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As discussed earlier, municipal leaders have a strong incentive to maximize land value through the supply of land for urban development. Real-estate developers are profit-maximizing and always do their best to raise property value. They favor larger parcels of land for residential development, which entails economies of scale and opens up more design possibilities for amenities. They also favor gated communities because their exclusive internal amenities can be designed to higher standards than those in the surrounding environment, thus resulting in better property value and higher sales prices for the booming property market. Therefore, they tend to bid a higher price for a larger land parcel that is more suitable for gated community development. As shown in the typical design of a gated community in Fig. 5.1, the amenities are provided as “club goods” exclusively to the community residents, who belong to the high-income groups in society.

Fig. 5.1 Typical gated community design in China (Source Downloaded from a Chinese website: http://www.lushifu.cc/other/136324.html, accessed May 10, 2021)

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Scholars have voiced concerns about the adverse social impacts that gated communities may cause—especially that of residential segregation (Deng, 2017). It has been found that superblocks and gated communities have a negative impact on a city’s street network and vehicular movement, and are a cause of traffic congestion (Kan et al., 2017); in particular, they are an inefficient urban form that limits access to public transit and jobs and affects social inclusiveness (World Bank, 2019). Moreover, the social stratification arising from gated communities causes social tension between the rich and the poor. However, when mayors work with real-estate developers they often ignore the advice of urban planners in safeguarding the public interest and social value. Superblocks and gated communities have become the norm in China’s new urban development, or part of “the same face for a thousand of cities.” The provision of public spaces involves public expenditure without cost recovery, and thus is considered money-losing by municipal leaders in the absence of a land-value-capture mechanism such as an annual ad valorem property tax. Consequently, gated communities turn public spaces into “club goods.” Public space-planning targets are met by adding parks and roadside greenbelts, which do not necessarily serve the daily social space functions needed by the general residents. Ironically, their neglect of public spaces must have caused a significant waste of opportunities for developers to realize potential property value increases. 5.4.2

Copycat Towns

Another dilemma is represented by the emergence of xenophilic “copycat” towns that can be found in some affluent parts of China (Fig. 5.2). These are new towns whose design replicates those found in Europe and North America (Sui et al., 2017). The phenomenon of copycat towns is a marketing strategy, formulated by real-estate developers and endorsed by municipal governments, for selling residential properties to high-income households. In a large city or a megacity, one can find a critical mass of better-off households who favor and enjoy such a physical distinction from their urban surroundings. Sui et al. (2017) find, however, that copycat towns cost a lot more to build and develop than conventional urban-development models; and as they also tend to serve the relatively wealthy and powerful cohort of the population, they inadvertently widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

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Fig. 5.2 A copycat town in the city of Hangzhou (Source Sui et al., 2017)

The development of copycat towns is particularly disliked by most planners as it completely ignores local traditions and cultures. However, the role of urban planners is weakened by developers’ pursuit of profits, which well serves the interest of the municipal government in maximizing land-leasing revenues. To pave the way for such developments, some developers even hire planning-and-design firms or use their in-house planning and design teams to work out the detailed construction plan and the architectural design. This is considered an embarrassment for the urban-planning profession. Unfortunately, the urban-planning system does not possess sufficient power or mechanisms to prevent the copycat town development—until the central government decides to step in and call it off. 5.4.3

Urban-Village Redevelopment

Over the last ten years, urban regeneration—especially urban-village redevelopment—has been gaining momentum in China’s major cities (particularly in the more dynamic megacities in the south of the country). Urban villages are those former rural settlements located outside of the

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Fig. 5.3 An urban village being demolished for redevelopment in Guangzhou, 2019 (Source Lan Song)

cities’ built-up areas.13 When a city expands, the government typically takes the farmland for urban development as this involves compensating farmers only for the agricultural production value of that land. Taking villages would be much more expensive and time-consuming due to resettlement of households and compensation for the existing housing properties. Therefore, many rural settlements continue to exist while their surrounding farmland is taken for urban development (Fig. 5.3). After losing their farmland in this way, the farmers build multistory houses on their homestead land and rent them out to migrant workers and their families. Due to the rural land-use pattern, poorer public services, and overcrowded building densities, such rental spaces in urban villages become affordable to these migrant workers. Municipal leaders consider these urban villages an eye-sore or a form of informality, and often want to redevelop them into modern neighborhoods with a cityscape more consistent with the new development of the

13 See Liu et al. (2010) and Pu et al. (2012) for more discussion on China’s urban villages.

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city. But they ignore the fact that urban villages provide accommodation for a large number of migrants who would otherwise find no affordable housing from the market and are ineligible to access any affordablehousing program provided by the municipal government. However, as a city expands, the locations of its urban villages become more central and more valuable—and their redevelopment therefore potentially becomes more profitable. This enables municipal leaders to introduce a business model of cooperation between real-estate developers and village collectives for the financing and implementation of urban-village redevelopment. Under the model the redevelopment is divided into three parts: housing units reserved as compensation to the villagers, commodityhousing units for sale, and public facilities (such as streets, utilities, public spaces, kindergarten, etc.) required by the government. It will “stack up” commercially if the sale revenues from the commodity-housing units are sufficient to cover the entire redevelopment cost. A typical urban village would have a few hundred villager households. They possess the homestead land parcels allocated by the village collective, and own the multistory houses built on those parcels. In the booming megacities of southern China, the number of tenants in such an urban village would be numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands. Under the business model of urban-village redevelopment, the municipal government would introduce a large real-estate developer with access to capital to finance the redevelopment project. The developer would negotiate with the villagers over their compensation, which is typically an exchange of one square meter of floor area of the old house for one square meter of a newly constructed apartment. As the market price for a square meter of floor area in the new apartment will be many times higher than that of the old house, the villagers agree to the deal. They then discontinue the rental contracts with their tenants, take the compensation from the real-estate developer, and become a member of the “new rich.” The real-estate developer will make a profit by selling the commercial part of the project, with sales revenues sufficient to cover the entire redevelopment cost (including, among other things, the cost of public facilities and housing units reserved as compensation to the villagers). The municipal government obtain the public facilities with no public expenditure. So in the eyes of the municipal leaders, this is a win–win–win project—for the government, the developer, and the villagers. However, the losers are the migrant workers who used to live in the village. After the rental contracts are discontinued they have to move

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to other, remaining urban villages, which are the only places that they may find affordable rental housing. As a result, they move further away from the city center, they might have to commute a longer distance to their jobs or change jobs, and their children might have to spend more time getting to and from school. Moreover, they might have to pay more for their accommodation as rents in the remaining urban villages would rise with the influx of tenants looking for spaces. These social costs are very much hidden as the migrant workers have no voice in the city’s decision-making processes. Planners understand the problems and have made some effort to voice their concerns. But the impact has been weak until recently, when the city of Shenzhen accepted the suggestion from planning critics of maintaining and improving the urban villages so that they could continue to function as a major provider of affordable housing to migrant workers and their families. The above cases illustrate the challenges that Chinese planners face in balancing the interests of government, developers, and communities. In safeguarding the public interest, they have to resist political and commercial pressure. Prominent planning critics have already asked the key question: “Planning as a government function has to follow government leaders, but how to tell the truth to power and at the same time correct the wrong decisions made by power?” (Zhang, 2002, p. 72). In search of an answer, Chinese planners actually learn a great deal from Western planning thoughts and approaches. This is reflected eloquently in the following quotation: In the West, the rationality of urban planning stems from the negative effects and limitations of the free market economy. The main responsibility of an urban planner is to speak for public interests and to maintain social justice. The pioneers of Western urban planning practices were mainly a group of social reformists. Although they were concerned about spatial and environmental issues at the time, their core thinking was justice in the market economy. The development process of Western urban planning theories is the process of exploring how urban planning can define public interests more scientifically and fairly. (Zhou & He, 2001, p. 17)

5.5

Conclusions

This chapter has provided a brief overview of China’s urban-planning system and how it works in a broader political and bureaucratic system and in the socialist market economy. This system is largely self-made,

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but also benefits significantly from international knowledge. Its performance is highly mixed: on one hand, it has been remarkably successful in serving the needs of rapid economic growth, urbanization, and rising living standards; on the other hand, it has not been successful, or fastmoving enough, in safeguarding the environment and the interests of people—especially the disadvantaged. As the example of HSR stations demonstrates, the role of urban planning in shaping urban land use according to planning principles is limited under the centralized political system that accords the national interests and objectives as its top priorities. The role of planning is also weakened by strong market forces, as the cases of missing public spaces, copycat towns, and urban-village redevelopment demonstrate. We argue that these dilemmas are due to the fact that China’s urban-planning system is designed to serve a technical function, and is embedded in a broad, authoritarian political and bureaucratic system. China’s urban-planning principles are strongly influenced by the Athens Charter and Euro-American planning approaches. Chinese planners generally appreciate Western planning approaches, especially those that safeguard public interests and promote social justice. It is the limitations of urban planning as a technical process in the country’s political and commercial power structure that constrain the ability of its urban planners to take care of local and public interests effectively. Perhaps the key planning challenge for China is that of educating its politicians to respect urban planning, and of holding them accountable for planning decisions. For the time being, the country relies on the development paradigm shift initiated by the central government to improve the effectiveness of urban planning (or spatial planning) for public interests and social justice. But this kind of shift often comes years after the damage has been done. Looking forward, the important factors for success will be more open-mindedness for continuing learning, problem-oriented approaches, and greater advocacy from urban planners for public interests and social justice. Finally, it is worth noting that the Global South is highly diverse. While China is unique in its political system and economic-reform experience, it is similar to other Global South countries in many other aspects. It is a developing country. It is a country with two worlds—the affluent, eastern coastal region and the backward, western interior region; urban areas and rural areas; modernized parts of the city and urban villages; and

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formal and informal urban land-use patterns. Similarly to Western planning knowledge, much can be learned by Chinese urban planners from the planning experiences of the Global South countries. While Chinese urban land use is planned in an orderly pattern, informal uses such as urban villages and unofficial markets still exist and play important social functions for urban residents—especially the low-income groups. Instead of clearing the informalities out at the cost of these poorer groups, Chinese municipal leaders and urban planners should learn how to tolerate and manage urban informalities in the interests of more-inclusive social outcomes.

References Anderson, S. T., & West, S. E. (2006). Open space, residential property values, and spatial context. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 36(6), 773–789. Curien, R. (2014). Chinese urban planning: Environmentalising a hyperfunctionalist machine? China Perspectives, 3, 23–31. Deng, F. (2017). Gated community and residential segregation in urban China. GeoJournal, 82, 231–246. Gehl, J. (2011). Life between buildings: Using public space (6th ed.). Island Press. He, S. (2013). Evolving enclave urbanism in China and its sociospatial implications: The case of Guangzhou. Social & Cultural Geography, 14(3), 243–275. Kan, H. Y., Forsyth, A., & Rowe, P. (2017). Redesigning China’s superblock neighbourhoods: Policies, opportunities and challenges. Journal of Urban Design, 22(6), 757–777. Liu, Y., He, S., Wu, F., & Webster, C. (2010). Urban villages under China’s rapid urbanization: Unregulated assets and transitional neighbourhoods. Habitat International, 34(2), 135–144. Liu, Z. (2019). Land-based finance and property tax in China. Area Development and Policy, 4(4), 367–381. Luttik, J. (2000). The value of trees, water and open space as reflected by house prices in the Netherlands. Landscape and Urban Planning, 48(3–4), 161–167. Miao, P. (2011). Brave new city: Three problems in Chinese urban public space since the 1980s. Journal of Urban Design, 16(2), 179–207. Perry, C. A. (1929). The neighborhood unit: A scheme of arrangement for familylife community. Volume VII of The regional plan of New York and its environs. Monograph. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Pu, H., Geertman, S., Hooimeijer, P., & Sliuzas, R. (2012). Spatial analyses of the urban village development process in Shenzhen, China. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (6), 2177–2197.

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Qiu, B. (2011). Urban planning reform in China’s urbanization process. China Architecture & Building Press. Sui, D., Zhao, B., & Kong, H. (2017). The development of copycat towns in China: An analysis of their economic, social, and environmental implications (Working Paper WP17DS1). Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. World Bank. (2019). Chongqing 2035: Spatial transformation strategy: Increasing efficiency and livability by promoting compact and human-centered development. Supporting Report 1. World Bank. Wu, F. (2005). Rediscovering the “Gate” under market transition: From workunit compounds to commodity housing enclaves. Housing Studies, 20(2), 235–254. Wu, F. (2015). Planning for growth: Urban and regional planning in China. Routledge. Yin, C., & Qian, X. (2020). The spatial production of simulacrascape in urban China: Economic function, local identity and cultural authenticity. Cities, 104, on-line version. Zhang, T. (2002). Challenges facing Chinese planners in transitional China. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 22(1), 64–76. Zhou, L., & He, L. (2001). The regrets and misunderstandings of China’s planners. Planners (in Chinese), 17 (3), 16–18.

PART II

The Heterogeneous South: Conflicting Rationalities

CHAPTER 6

Invisible Territories: The Visibility of an Urban Crisis in Medellín Edwar A. Calderón

6.1

Introduction

Displacement is the “humanitarian challenge of the twenty-first century” (Serrano, 2005, p. 3). Every two seconds, someone in the world is displaced from their home: figures from mid-2019 indicate that 70.8 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced and, of these, about 41.3 million were internally displaced people (IDPs) (UNHCR, 2020). Colombia is the nation with the largest number of IDPs in the world, reported to total 8,320,355 in January 2020 (Unidad para la Víctimas, 2020). This condition is widespread throughout the country, affecting more than 900 of its municipalities (DNP and SNU, 2005). In a more local context, the city of Medellín now has the second-largest concentration of displaced people of all of Colombia’s cities, with approximately 460,356 (as of 1 December 2019), which represents 1.12% of all IDPs worldwide. This means that, of the total population of Medellín (2,376,337 million inhabitants, DANE, 2018), approximately 19.3% have

E. A. Calderón (B) Universidad EAFIT, Medellín, Colombia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_6

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been displaced. In other words, roughly one in five people in Medellín is a displaced person. Moreover, “new spatial consciousness is entering into public debates on such key issues as human rights, social inclusion–exclusion” (Soja, 2010, p. 15). The accelerated rates of forced displacement (worldwide) have also, forcibly exacerbated the urban growth of marginal settlements in the periphery of the cities of the Global South. This has been creating “mutant territories” (CNMH, 2015) that municipalities do not have the infrastructure or capacity to respond to, due to the unpredictable nature and complex understanding of these socio-environmental-political conflicts. In this chapter, I want to reflect on the global challenge of sociospatial justice within geographies of conflict, especially with respect to the massive concentration of rural diaspora in cities. One consequence of this process is the long-standing urbanisation patterns that have accelerated the formation of marginal settlements, which have contributed to the hypertrophy of cities through new forms of “forced urbanisation” that are often not officially recognised due to their lack of “formality”. In Medellín, the lack of territorial and legal recognition of new marginal settlements (“invisible territories”) has generated an argumentative dichotomy of the advantages of being either “visible” or “invisible”.

6.2 The Production of Marginal Neighbourhoods: The Formation of “Invisible Territories” The rapid urbanisation process in Medellín follows a historical (and still ongoing) series of rural–urban migration waves from various regions of the country during the twentieth century. Initially, Colombia’s main cities were seen as attractive destinations for rural populations who saw how their life in the countryside did not fulfil their economic expectations. From early 1990s, with the intensification of armed conflict in the country’s rural areas, cities passed from being a socio-economic option to a survival refuge for these migrants. In this way, the large exodus of farming populations into cities started an overgrowth urbanisation process resulting in the emergence and ongoing formation of barrios populares (marginalised settlements) in Medellín.

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One of the central aims of this chapter is to understand the systematic formation of marginal settlements resulting from forcible displacement and resettlement. Henri Lefebvre’s work, The Production of Space, has had a profound influence on contemporary sociospatial analysis. On this matter, he states that “the producers of space have always acted in accordance with a representation, while the ‘users’ passively experienced whatever was imposed upon them inasmuch as it was more or less thoroughly inserted into, or justified by, their representational space” (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 43–44). Moreover, his “Spatial Triad” elaboration (representations of space, spaces of representation, and spatial practices)— which, according to Merrifield, is the pillar of Lefebvre’s Production of Space work (Merrifield, 2006, p. 109)—provides a substantial method of analysis for sociospatial phenomena within displacement–resettling processes. Furthermore, “Spatial Triad” implies tangible and intangible aspects of space that play an important role in social and political practice (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 41) and that define the way of territorial construction. For Lefebvre, society is defined by its mode of production (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39); therefore, spatial production in geographies of conflict determines systematic structural forms of “forced” urbanisation processes. Lefebvre explores the “dialectical relationship” between the three aspects of the Spatial Triad as the perceived (Spatial Practice), the conceived (Representations of Space), and the lived (Representational Spaces ) (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39). For instance, representational space, the “how we live the space”, is related to how we associate images and symbols in that space. The Spatial Practice, which is “is revealed through the deciphering of [society’s] space” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 38), implies an unfolding of the perception of the space by its inhabitants—although Lefebvre emphasises the contradictory association between daily reality (everyday routine) and urban reality (routes and networks that connect urban functions such as work, leisure, and housing). Representations of Space—the way in which space is seen by technocrats, politicians, architects, planners, etc. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 38)—plays a considerable role in the production of space due to their influence in social and political practice and, therefore, in the construction of the built environment (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 41–42). Lefebvre illustrates how his elaborated Spatial Triad “would have to be generalized in their application to cover all societies, all periods, all ‘modes of production’” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 41). However, the relationship between the three elements of the triad is neither “simple nor stable” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 46).

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Due to the multiplicity of socio-spatial-cultural backgrounds found in the “invisibilised” territories, in this text I have focused on the ontological rather than the epistemological approach of Lefebvrian sociospatial theory. In this way, the general interaction between their Representations of Space (dominating) and the Representational Spaces and Spatial Practice (dominated) could provide us with transversal clues regarding their formation. This is the case specifically because what is observed in the production of marginal settlements, and their subordinated invisibilisation, is not only the incapability of local governments to attend to the human crisis of forced displacement but also the patterns of capitalist urbanisation. In the former, large number of communities continue living in precarious conditions (i.e. hovels); in the latter, dominating classes see space usually as a commodity. Therefore, any territory that is suitable (technically, legally, and financially) for urbanisation can be subjected to intervention by neoliberal policies. Urbanisation is one of the preferred mechanisms for capital accumulation with the complicity of the state. In this process, “the State administration is always therefore an active agent in capital circulation and accumulation” (Harvey, 2006, p. 106). The capitalist logic behind social-housing production, for instance, is the standardisation of massive developments that permits “affordable” solutions for the low-income classes. While those solutions are nonetheless very few in number, this homogeneous approach to the sociospatial needs of the poor ignores the multiple sociospatial epistemologies that converge in these territories—and, therefore, the failure of this mode of housing production. Pierce and Martin (2015) discuss the general conceptualisations of Lefebvrian sociospatial theory. For them, Lefebvre’s Spatial Triad work offers little assistance in building an epistemological approach to (social) space; rather, they argue, he focused on its ontological construction (Pierce & Martin, 2015). Lefebvrian theory “is focused on the nature of the object of (social) space and how that space is produced, not how that (social) space can be known” (Pierce & Martin, 2015, p. 1285). Thus, “invisible territories” in Medellín follow the spatial operation of multidimensional experiences–imaginaries–practices wherein both dominating and dominated classes converge under the systematic politics of violence.

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The Politics of Invisibility: Sociospatial Alienation

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines invisible inhabited territories as: settlements generally located in urban peripheries, forming the so-called poverty belts, [that] are spatially, socioeconomically and functionally segregated, that is, they lack public services, basic sanitation, road infrastructure, connectivity, green areas, public space, health and education services and are far from the productive and commercial centers. (UNDP, 2017)

The endurance of specific invisibility or visibility depends on the command of dominating class(es), which “will always be driven to defend the system that creates their [the dominated classes’] alienation with all the power and brutality at their disposal because of their material position within it” (Cox, 1998, p. 7). In order to perpetuate the dominant status quo (cultural, economic, and political), the dominating classes opt “not to see” (Echeverría Ramírez, 2016, p. 44). Therefore, “invisible territories” are the result of political and socio-economic factors that are shaped by unjust urbanisation patterns. The formation of these “invisible territories” brings to the fore the relevance of “(in)visibility” as a concept in informal urbanisation discourses worldwide. Chatterjee, in his work The Politics of the Governed, illustrates how a refugees’ settlement group, which he calls an “empirical form of a population”, in a marginal settlement in Calcutta called Gobindapur Rail Colony was looking for official recognition; however, such a recognition implied the need “to give to the empirical form of a population group, the moral attributes of a community” (Chatterjee, 2004, p. 57). Chatterjee’s description of this settlement in Calcutta does not diverge greatly from the scenario that displaced populations in Medellín face when they look for official recognition. Moreover, within new imposed sociocultural-political conditions, these communities do not necessarily always wish for recognition due to the disadvantages that inflicted legitimisation could bring (i.e. taxation, bills, surveillance, etc.) to the “freedom” of informality. Some questions to raise here include: What is invisibility? Who is invisible? What makes something or someone invisible? A good starting point from which to address these questions would be an exploration of the “politics of invisibility”, drawing on the Foucauldian

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argument of invisibility and power (Foucault, 1979, p. 1) in the context of contemporary urbanisation in the Global South. While visibility is a strategy of domination to control society, invisibility is a practice of stigmatisation and marginalisation. In this sense, when dominating classes lose territorial control due to difficult accessibility in challenging areas, such as marginal settlements in the steep hillsides of Medellín, some techniques of visibilisation are applied. The construction of paved roads under euphemistic agendas such as “development”, “progress”, and “inclusion” allows accessibility to law enforcement where before, the winding, narrow, improvised paths, numerous steps, etc.—such as those observed in the favelas of Brazil—were the only access. This emphasises what Foucault (1979, pp. 30–31) would call tools of “examination”, which guarantee control through the surveillance of day-to-day life. Merrifield argues that the impact of this domination in day-to-day life is that “[e]veryday life had become at once colonized, fragmented, and politicized” (Merrifield, 2006, p. 62). Likewise, “Invisibility is a relationship between those who have the power to see or to choose not to see, and, on the other hand, those who lack the power to demand to be seen or to protect themselves from the negative effects of imposed visibility” (Polzer & Hammond, 2008, p. 421). Therefore, imposing (using urban devices) or denying visibility is evidence that unrecognised settlements are not invisible but “invisibilised” through processes of socio-economic, cultural, and political marginalisation. Visible and invisible territories are mutually dependent. Despite the frequent physical integration of “invisible” territories within the officially recognised urban milieu, they carry a tag of “marginality” that is relative or categorised. For instance, marginal settlements “can disappear from the cognitive map of those who allocate resources; settlers generally pay no land tax and are serviced accordingly” (Dovey & King, 2011, p. 21). However, these “invisible territories” have shown that they play a significant political and economic role in the structure of cities. According to Dovey and King, settlements outside the control of the state “are so economically, spatially and socially integrated with their urban contexts that most developing cities are unsustainable without them, yet the desire to remove them persists and is linked to issues of urban imagery and place identity” (Dovey & King, 2011, p. 11). In the case of Medellín, the last official figures indicate that 40.8% of employment is in the informal sector (DANE, 2020) and most of that informal sector lives in the margins of the city. Marginality can be physical but it cannot be economic. Thus,

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marginality is subject to sociospatial rationalities of rejection of what is not equal or at least similar, but in the economic arena the “visible” city depends intrinsically on the “invisible” one. The informal, disadvantageous bonds between “invisible” and “visible” economies in Global South cities provide an ontological reflection regarding the production of invisibilised territories. Revising literature based on Karl Marx’s (1975) alienation theory, we can find the relevance to spatial matters. According to Lefebvre, the concept of alienation was originally not very welcome; however, technological and scientific changes not only brought Marx’s theory to the foreground as “inevitable” through its “enlightening notions” but his concepts are “best affected by taking full account of space” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 343). Some authors concur with Marx that “[a]lienation meant loss of control” (Cox, 1998, p. 1; Seeman, 1975; Yuill, 2011). Although, Marx’s emphasis is on productive processes such as manufacturing or labouring, I argue that a similar loss of control applies to the process of production of space— specifically, considering the inherent connection between loss of control and powerlessness that IDPs displaced by an armed conflict experience. On this matter, historian Perry Anderson describes some characteristics of marginalised populations: “those aggregations of atomised city dwellers who feel crushed and benumbed by the weight of a social system in which they have neither significant purpose nor decision-making power” (Anderson, 1979, p. 56) Therefore, forced displacement and alienation theory seem to have a strong relationship due to their characteristics of change and loss of control, which are materialised in particular territorial urbanisation patterns such as invisibilised territories. The force behind those sociospatial patterns is the capitalist (urbanisation) system that navigates along with social injustice and even operational violence. According to Marx, in a capitalist economy, workers are alienated from the final commodity that they produce, and that production of their labour “begins to confront [them] as an autonomous power; that the life which [they have] bestowed on the object confronts [them] as hostile and alien” (Marx, 1975, p. 324). Moreover, Cox states that workers are connected to society through the buying and selling of the commodities that they produce (Cox, 1998, p. 3). But what happens when such commercial relationships cannot take place due to enormous economic disparities? The underpaid labour and sometimes inhumane working conditions of construction workers, for instance, remarks on an unfair paradox: the informal economy makes the formal tangible, while

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the formal tries to “invisibilise” the informal. In other words, the informal city builds the formal while the formal alienates the informal. A similar case occurred with the construction of Brazil’s capital in the 1950s, when a large number of the working population who moved to Brasília during the construction of the city decided to remain there. This led to lowincome housing developments being constructed; however, to retain the existing character of Brasília (high living standards) these settlements (satellite towns) were located outside of the pilot plan area (Evenson, 1973, p. 175). In this sense, and agreeing with Judy Cox, “Marx’s theory offers us an indispensable method of understanding how the production [of space] process shapes the whole of society” (Cox, 1998, citing Ollman, 1977, p. 202). For instance, “Mizruchi (1969) suggests that neither urbanism nor rural life per se increases alienation. It appears that it is change which creates most forms of alienation (social, political, spatial, etc.), and those who are forced to adjust to a different life-style feel it most strongly” (Parker, 1978, p. 241). Geis and Ross argue that “[m]ost studies of urban alienation measured alienation as lack of social ties, not as perceived powerlessness” (Geis & Ross, 1998, p. 242). Moreover, Cox argues that the theory of alienation has been used by Western Marxists “to explain the miseries of modern life” of marginalised populations from the standpoint of “psychology rather than the organisation of society” (Cox, 1998, p. 8). Escalating Marx’s theory of alienation within contemporary society in the Global South, it would conceptualise the effects of capitalism in the commodification of the habitat and societal organisation. For instance, the real-estate market could be understood as an alienating force; Cox stipulates that “[s]elling is the practice of alienation” according to Marx (Cox, 1998, p. 2) and “Alienation and commodity fetishism shape all relationships in society” (Cox, 1998, p. 7). Therefore, in a capitalist and neoliberal society, as in the Global South, one could agree with Geis and Ross, arguing how concentrated poverty is intrinsically related to the subjective powerlessness that increases urban alienation. For instance, the perception of powerlessness is related to the “messy” environment in which poor people live: dirty, unsafe, noisy, buildings not in good repair, high crime, and a lot of young people hanging out (Geis & Ross, 1998, p. 234), and these circumstances are perceived by the inhabitants of such neighbourhoods as consequences of external forces (Geis & Ross, 1998, p. 235)—in Lefebvrian terms, the imposed (producers) versus the passively experienced (users) of social space. This evidences the previously

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mentioned sociospatial phenomenon based on systematic hierarchies that today exacerbates exclusion and marginality in the periphery of the cities of the Global South. Moreover, “invisibility is not related to something hidden”, it is related to the “politics of apparition” (Bourdin, 2015, pp. 17–18): every four years, these territories become visible during political campaigns. Then, repetitious rhetoricisms such as “payment of social debt”, “social fairness”, and “justice” are developed into political discourses and performances (with usually false promises). Suddenly, the votes of the now “visible” and “valuable” citizens are very much appreciated: they contribute towards deciding the fate of the new political administration of the city. Moreover, economically, both the invisible and visible territories are also complementary—and what is more, they depend on each other in the market chain during the production or the informal commercialisation of goods. An evident example was observed during the recent lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, when national and local governments decided to reopen only some of the formal economic sectors. Immediately, they faced constraints on the commercialisation of goods, which is supported in great part by informal vendors who were not allowed to leave their houses. This situation generated massive protests in Colombia due to the incapability of the state to manage the economic crisis and the precarious living conditions of these communities. In this panorama, displayed a revealing reality in the daily news bulletins, the visible and invisible territories are also mutually dependent. Finally, invisibilised territories and city image have an exclusive relationship. (In)visibility in a city characterised by a high self-awareness of image, such as Medellín, has become a dichotomy when the city has placed itself in a brand of “the most innovative of the world”, forgetting its high levels of socio-economic inequality. Progressive urban interventions in marginal settlements have become a pole of attraction for national and foreign tourists, who want to observe the spectacle of “poverty and precarity” from a “secure lens” since these areas used to be inaccessible (mainly due to violence) for any outsider in the past. As some authors argue, the display of urban spectacle and iconic representations (e.g. “the most violent city in the world”, “the urban miracle”) are used as marketing for places to appoint themselves as global cities and to compete in the attraction of capital flows and foreign investments (Dovey, 2005; Dovey & King, 2011; Klingmann, 2007, p. 272; McNeill, 2008). To some extent, a certain “visibility” has been operating as local political economy, in

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which poverty is displayed in the manner of an interactive “museum” and the majority of the profits end up in the (inter)national businesses that provide tourism services. This process of selective invisibilisation is frequently attached to political image and economic platform (i.e. the attraction of tourism). Dovey and King affirm that “[g]overnments can be embarrassed by the image of informal settlements as signifiers of failure and a lack of law and order. Invisibility can protect informal residential and livelihood practices (including crime), and it enables the state to turn a blind eye” (Dovey & King, 2011, p. 21). I remember when I was very young, that Pope John Paul II visited Medellín, and the municipality painted the facades of the houses in a marginal settlement located along the road where he would pass by. In a day-to-day situation, this “generous” attitude does not occur, but local government was embarrassed that the Pope was going to see such levels of poverty and precarity. More recently, in 2014, when Medellín was (questionably) named the “most innovative city in the world”, it hosted the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum 7. Once again, the local government was very concerned with the image of the city. They gathered all the homeless people and beggars from the streets of the city centre and relocated them to temporary shelters, so that the thousands of visitors would not see the high levels of misery and inequality that the city faces. However, although “[i]nvisibility […] enables the state to abrogate responsibility” (Dovey & King, 2011, p. 23), the sheer magnitude of IDPs resettled in Medellín is a very significant fact that is impossible to hide—even more so with their location on the hillsides of the Aburrá Valley, in which the city sits. Therefore, if invisibility cannot be made physical, forms of subordination are used. As Bourdin argues, “there is not invisibility without subjugation” (Bourdin, 2015, p. 20), and in that process of subjugation what is not homogeneous is not accepted, not legal, not seen.

6.4

Invisibility as a Homogenising Force

When I define “invisibilised settlements”, I describe them as hidden, cultural “Towers of Babel”. The informal occupation of land by a rural diaspora of IDPs from a myriad of origins has created territories with a great variety of sociocultural backgrounds and invaluable social capital.

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In a recent transdisciplinary research project at EAFIT1 University, we have discovered how the sociocultural background of IDPs reveals the ways in which they shape the built environment on the hillsides of Medellín. Moreover, and unlike what is commonly assumed, these settlements “are not entirely unplanned or undesigned since they are the result of strategic speculative action by residents. Many land invasions are informally organized with ‘formal’ street plans and lot layouts, led by either community leaders or pirate developers” (Dovey & King, 2011, p. 12, citing Davis, 2006, p. 38; Martin & Mathema, 2006). The level of sophistication displayed to adapt and solve sociospatial problems in marginalised settlements where resources are very limited could surprise us. Standardised urban-planning policies that have been conceived as “paying a social debt” due to the inclusion of lower-income neighbourhoods—or, as pointed out by Samper and Marko (2015, p. 246), as the “heroic rescue” of long-term marginalised communities—have lost the great opportunity of learning heuristic land occupation and territorial transformation processes from these communities. Somehow, these policies have been part of a political agenda that has invisibilised great social capital that continues to be underestimated in its anonymity. The multicultural and community cooperation practices derived from rural life that have been introduced into these territories provides an invaluable pedagogical setting for the local authorities and urban dwellers. Local experiences such as the current “Escuela de Barrios de Ladera”2 (“Hillside Neighbourhood School”) in Medellín provide scenarios for knowledge exchange between academics, technicians, and community members in

1 Escuela de Administración, Finanzas e Instituto Tecnológico—Medellín’s School of Administration, Finance and Technological Institute. 2 The Territorial School of Barrios de Ladera is a community project for political training and the collective construction of proposals to improve the habitat of neighbourhoods with precarious conditions (i.e. community risk management, the right to stay in the territory) located in the northeast of Medellín. It is promoted by the Con-Vivamos Corporation—the Housing Board of Comuna 8, the Montanoa-A Corporation—and the active participation of different neighbourhood organisational processes in the communes 1 Popular, 3 Manrique, and 8 Villa Hermosa in the city of Medellín, with the support of volunteers and the Movimiento de Pobladores. Its process uses formative meetings based on popular education for a dialogue around knowledge and the social construction of knowledge. At the same time it generates participatory-action research that allows for the collective construction of thematic proposals, and for mobilisation and advocacy through dialogues with public institutions.

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order to tackle territorial problems. This has brought community empirical knowledge to the praxis. When standarised (formal) regulations are imposed on these territories, communities lose their autonomy. The disconnection of such policies from local realities frames the standardised urban planning that Medellín (along with many cities in the Global South) has been practising for decades (Calderón, 2017). And it is precisely in those scenarios of invisibility that heterogeneity, discontinuity, and differences should be highlighted (Bourdin, 2015, p. 19). Contesting standardisation and invisibility is a fight not to achieve equality but rather to gain recognition: equality homogenises but recognition diversifies. Standardisation, even following good intentions (i.e. massive housing solutions for the poor), brings a high risk of losing sociospatial and cultural identity. For instance, homogeneous high-rise housing buildings have been implemented as devices of “superficial” visibility. Their planning processes have not been participatory and their locations (on the urban edges) remain marginal. These imposed housing solutions seek to comply with an officially promised, and therefore mandatory, political agenda: “free or affordable housing for the poor”. Analysing the state’s various housing responses to displaced populations, and talking to some of the displaced families that inhabit them, one could conclude that the housing solutions are homogeneous despite their dissimilar geographical locations and socio-economic conditions (see Fig. 6.1). What does homogeneous mean in this context? That the

Fig. 6.1 Left—1500 social-housing “solutions”, MIA (Mestizo-IndigenaAfrodescendiente) on the outskirts of Quibdó, Chocó, Colombia; Right— Massive social-housing project, “Ciudadela de Occidente”, in Medellín (goal to 2020: 23,000 housing units) (Source Left—Photo courtesy of Santiago Chiquito; Right—Alcaldía de Medellín)

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lack of participatory processes or engagement with displaced communities, permeated by political agendas and private economic interests, have rendered housing solutions for the most vulnerable populations a mathematical solution—a quantitative response, in which “one size fits all”. But it is not only dwelling that comes under pressure from homogenisation; these planning approaches also neglect IDPs’ culture, traditions, and sociospatial practices. Carp argues that individual and collective (tangible and intangible) symbolisms are covered under “the technical rationality and strategies used to conceptualize and implement change in the built environment” (Carp, 2008, p. 136). Similarly, Watkins, analysing Lefebvre’s sociospatial theory, states that for Lefebvre, “the dominant contemporary notion of space has emerged from a traditional western, Cartesian logic to produce an abstract space – a scientific space. […] This has resulted in a mathematico-scientifically informed search for an understanding of space” (Watkins, 2005, p. 210). Consequently, we see how a forcibly displaced fishing family, originally from the tropical forest of Chocó (in the Colombian Pacific region), or a farmer’s family displaced from the Andean Mountains are forced to live in flats of, on average, 46 square metres in area. A traditional farmer’s or fishing family could easily have 3–6 children and their living conditions are dictated by rural production. This standardised housing approach ignores the “socially constructed nature of space” (Watkins, 2005, p. 211). But, how to overcome it? Perhaps participatory mapping could give us some clues.

6.5 Mapping “Invisible” Territories in Medellín: a Multidimensional Challenge, but a Good Starting Point Populations that have been forcibly displaced acquire a very extreme vulnerability. The immediate necessity for these populations is to meet their basic human needs: access to shelter, food, water, clothes, personal safety, etc. In response to this situation, the legal framework of displacement “alleviation” in Colombia focuses on socio-economic stability as the (temporary) provision of basic necessities such as housing, health, food, and education. However, while the housing solutions provided

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in Medellín by the national government are insufficient,3 and do not fulfil the aforementioned socio-economic stability requirements, it should be noted that merely “socio-economic consolidation and stabilisation” would not guarantee a sustainable solution for the displaced population anyway. Thus, it is necessary to guarantee the community not only socio-economic stability but also cultural and political participation, the restoration of their rights, and a guarantee of “no-repetition”. Within the sociocultural arena, which is a crucial aspect for rebuilding (if possible) the social tissue destroyed by more than six decades of the country’s armed conflict, the state’s responses must be assertive. “Assertive” here refers to sustainable solutions that visibilise the inter-cultural and multicultural dimensions involved in resettling together populations from different ethnographic and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, the complexity and unpredictable nature of the forceddisplacement problem pose challenges for infrastructure and for the technical capability of local governments to provide permanent, dignifying, and sustainable solutions. The quality and the assertiveness of the solutions remain a challenge. In the meantime, forcible displacement continues—followed by the emergence of new “invisible territories”. An analysis of aerial photographs of Medellín taken within the last two decades shows us that every year (and even within individual months) new marginal settlements appear, mostly in the periphery of the city (Fig. 6.2), and urban policy seems very fragile and disconnected from this reality. Mapping “invisibilised” territories are imperative in order to address issues such as the assessment of hazards, since marginal settlements are usually located in the most disadvantageous areas of cities. According to a study carried out by EAFIT and Harvard University, by 2012 there were 45,000 households living in highly hazardous conditions in Medellín (Werthmann et al., 2012, p. 8)—most of them IDPs. The most recent land-use-management plan of the city, Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (POT), estimated that Medellín has almost 1.15 square kilometres of urban land in zones of immitigable risk, where precarious settlements

3 According to the Instituto Social de Vivienda y Habitat de Medellín (ISVIMED), the

governmental institution in charge of attending to the housing necessities of the most vulnerable populations in the city, up until June 2019 only 6824 families displaced by the armed conflict had been provided with a permanent housing solution. The national office for attending to the victims of the armed conflict (Unidad de Víctimas) had registered 133,145 households received in Medellín by that date.

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Fig. 6.2 Google Earth snapshots of the informal settlement of Granizal on the outskirts of Medellín at three different dates: September 2009, September 2011, and June 2014. This is the second-largest informal settlement in the country caused by the resettlement of displaced populations (Source © 2019 Maxar Technologies via Google Earth Pro)

are located (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2014, pp. 376–378). Furthermore, the current COVID-19 pandemic is exposing the vulnerability to epidemiological hazards that IDPs face in conditions of overcrowding, poor sanitation, weak healthcare access, and intra-community tensions that reduce the chances of people acting together for communal protection. Currently, the Centre for Urban and Environmental Studies (in Spanish, URBAM) and Research in Spatial Economics (RiSE) institutes from EAFIT University, working together within the PEAK Urban programme framework and using an interdisciplinary approach, have started an initiative to tackle this challenge. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods with community participation, we aim to map (and make visible) those territories in Medellín that have not been officially recognised by government institutions. Furthermore—through participatory workshops, and using geovisualisation tools and remote-sensing imagery—we are aiming to identify the urban-morphology patterns of marginal settlements most of whose populations come from the same region. For this purpose, we use qualitative tools with experts and community participation to document the origin of displacement, location of resettlement, and cause of displacement in order to identify the sociocultural background of each population. Then we use very highspatial-resolution aerial imagery and remote-sensing image-processing tools to extract image metrics of each type of settlement. In this way, we quantitatively characterise the physical appearance of those informal settlements in terms of features that can be seen and measured from the air such as colour, spatial pattern, regularity, and vegetation presence. The objective is to see whether the sociocultural background of their populations has materialised during the resettling process through the way in

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Fig. 6.3 Participatory community mapping methods: community leaders drawing and “visibilising” their own territory over a map of the city (Source Photos by author)

which they have shaped the territory. In other words, we look to identify whether the displaced populations bring with them particular sociospatial behaviours that are linked to their place of origin. This study will not only permit us a better understanding of territorial dynamics in these marginalised settlements but will also encourage and empower communities through community mapping methods (see Fig. 6.3) and, in turn, be a useful tool in informing policymakers and local authorities to make more assertive decisions when designing housing solutions for IDP victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. We hope that the methodology we are developing could be useful for other geographies of conflict in the Global South that also face massive migration and/or resettlement of displaced populations. The methodology will not only provide more accurate information about the emergent territories (usually “invisible”) but will also increase local capability, putting communities in a better position to tackle their territorial problems—i.e. sustainable housing solutions.

6.6 Legitimising Visibility: Unidades De Vida Articulada (UVAs) (Units for Articulated Life) The creation of the Unidades de Vida Articulada (UVAs) in the hills of Medellín could be described as a fortunate opportunity to produce public space where opportunities to do so are extremely limited (if any exist at all). Through visibilising and transforming the former water infrastructure of the city, the UVAs and the new facilities that are integral to these units have helped to reduce violence since most of them are located in marginal places where the community has struggled to build peace.

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In 2010, the Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), the city’s utilities company, carried out a diagnostic study of the conditions of its lighting infrastructure (technical, environmental, social, spatial) in order to develop a lighting master plan for the city. Some concerns about this project were related to fraudulent access to electricity and to difficulties in providing maintenance of the electrical networks in marginal settlements located on the urban periphery due to the presence of illegal armed groups in these areas. During the technical study, juxtaposing some map layers of lighting infrastructure onto the map of the city, many “dark spots” (places without illumination) appeared in the electrical network of the city. They coincided with the zones showing higher levels of violence (i.e. homicide rates). Having identified these dark spots, professionals at EPM realised that some of them were water streams (mainly creeks) and others were very steep plots of land where construction would be extremely challenging for communities. But what caught their attention was the fact that many “dark sports” were water tanks that had been built in the peripheries of Medellín in the first half of the twentieth century— which still provided storage for the city’s water supply—had, due to the rapid urban growth of the city, now become part of the built environment of its informal neighbourhoods. These large, fenced, concrete tanks represent a physical barrier between neighbourhoods, dividing communities into areas with high-density indexes of occupation and low (if any) public space. When the information on the dark spots emerged (see Fig. 6.4), some EPM professionals thought that they would present a brilliant opportunity to create public space by removing the fences and walls that surrounded the tanks and opening them up to the public without compromising their functionality. From the 144 water tanks that Medellín A

B

C

D

Fig. 6.4 A. location of the 32 water tanks; B. UVA Los Sueños: water tank in 2004; C and D. Project aerials in 2016 (Source Images courtesy of EPM and Alcaldía de Medellín)

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has, EPM pre-selected 32 with the most potential to become open public space, and finally they intervened in 14 such cases. Through a participative process with the surrounding communities and in alliance with the Municipality (Alcaldía de Medellín), EPM led “workshops of imaginaries” addressing issues of communities’ significance, memories, and desires (social services that they needed or wanted) that were to be addressed and built around the tanks. Finally, the community named the spaces themselves. Based on these participatory workshops, EPM structured a social-services programme. In this way, the Unidades de Vida Articulada—Units of Articulated Life—project was created. The 14 UVAs were finished and opened to the community between 2014 and January 2017. Each one is different, physically and functionally, from the others. The design of their programmes depended on the requests of each local community. However, there are no obstacles to an inhabitant of one specific sector using the UVA of another that may offer a service of her/his interest (recreation, cultural, education, etc.). This sociospatial process of visibilisation has created a sense of belonging, social cohesion, and interaction between communities of neighbourhoods that, before the UVA project, had been disconnected. Some inhabitants have described them as their “second home” or as an extension of their own household. The UVA project, using Foucauldian terms, achieved visibility through architectural devices. The Units transformed, through a socioarchitectural approach, the sociocultural dynamics of deprived sectors in the hills of Medellín. Moreover, generally speaking, the UVAs were relatively easily accepted by the communities because the construction of these public spaces did not imply population displacement or relocation. Prior to the project, the water tanks had represented residual spaces for the community, related to drug users and criminal activity cloaked by their lack of illumination. The sophisticated design of lighting and the open access of the UVAs broke with social stigmatisms, invisible frontiers, and segregation of the surrounding communities. The intervening tanks became sociocultural and even architectural landmarks and georeferences for the neighbourhoods. The level of appropriation by the community has made each of them an urban centrality and a symbol of local pride. In fact, the Units have triggered the improvement and beautification of housing facades around them. UVAs offer to the community, at no charge, services such as educational courses towards self-employment generation (especially for female-headed households), nurseries, computer labs

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for children and adults, recreational services, and a rich cultural agenda. These activities have strengthened the social tissue and contributed to peacebuilding in areas where violence, poverty, and marginalisation had been the common denominator.

6.7

Conclusion

In 1990, Professor in Urban Planning, Michael Batty, stated, “Cities are becoming invisible to us in certain important ways and it seems that this invisibility is increasing at a faster rate than our ability to adapt our research methods to these new circumstances” (Batty, 1990, p. 130). More importantly, he pointed out the impact that the increasing dependency on Information Technology (IT) in urban-planning research would have on our society—for instance, on the decision-making in infrastructure investments that was based on its research outcomes. The problem is, as discussed in this chapter, that significant aspects of cities continue to be invisible. Thus, while some IT tools such as geovisualisation and remote-sensing imagery could be very useful to visibilise territories, some technological devices have been used in an authoritarian way in urban planning, undermining the importance that the “invisible city” has for the functioning of the “visible” city. Today, 30 years later, a pandemic situation has visibilised aspects such as the interdependence between visible and invisible urban economies. In some ways, it also shows that the entire technology dependence of urban planning would, unless alternative action is taken, perpetuate invisibility, and therefore inequalities. It is not only necessary but imperative to open up the circle of invisibilising practices in all dimensions (political, cultural, economic, social) in cities—because if one thing has become clear it is the fact that it is not urbanisation but the modes of urbanisation that promote invisibility. Opening up these circles requires social and political commitment that transcends merely territorial concerns. For instance, approaches such as “transformative participation” (White, 1996, p. 146) would overcome the current mutually exclusive relationship between participation and visibility. Also, it would complement IT urban-planning approaches, providing significant missing data from territories “off record” for the creation of more realistic, accurate, and fair planning policies. Theorising about urban planning in the Global South must involve analysis of the multiple forms that its urban realms take after following

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different processes of sociospatial production. The investigation of “invisible territories” in Medellín has built on informal urbanisation debates worldwide; rapid urbanisation is not homogeneous, and urban heterogeneity needs to be recognised along with the mutual dependency of the formal and informal dimensions of cities. Thus, addressing the systematic formation of marginal settlements as a form of “forced urbanisation” resulting from politics of invisibility would be a good starting point for “leaving no one behind”, as proclaimed by the United Nations, in order to achieve more sustainable cities.

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CHAPTER 7

Defensive Urban Citizenship: A View from Southeastern Tel Aviv Oren Yiftachel and Nir Cohen

7.1

Introduction

They tell us that the eviction of the Africans will protect the area, and we say – eviction is a crime! And besides, we are probably next in line for eviction […]. The City wants gentrification and big redevelopment, and these are sure to shatter what is left of our community […] Hence we say – the future of south Tel Aviv belongs to all its communities and people, all identities and colors! […] This rally is just the beginning of a long road to unite the people in the South over one struggle – keeping the city municipality for all of us! (Shula Keshet, public demonstration, 24 February 2018)

O. Yiftachel (B) Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel e-mail: [email protected] N. Cohen Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_7

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These strong sentiments were voiced by a leading local activist who was one of the speakers at a mass demonstration held in south Tel Aviv. The demonstration, organized under the slogan ‘For South Tel Aviv, Against Eviction’, was the largest of its kind, attended by nearly 20,000 people. It followed a new government policy to deport tens of thousands of African asylum seekers—labeled ‘infiltrators’ by the government and local vigilante groups—residing in the area. It occurred after years in which the main voice emerging from ‘south Tel Aviv’ strongly promoted their (forced) removal, using a xenophobic discourse and a fervent resentment toward the city’s long-term neglect of the area. Yet, Keshet’s words insightfully go beyond the immediate struggle over forced eviction, alluding to further forces threatening local communities—namely, city plans, which have bequeathed gentrification, rising rents and massive (re)development. These take place against a municipal strategy to ‘regenerate’ various areas in the South by drawing young, ‘creative’ in-migrants and cultural institutions, and encouraging a developmentalist agenda that promotes high-rise commercial and residential land uses (Alfasi & Margalit, 2014; Tzin, 2015). This strategy became official with the 2016 approval of the Tel Aviv Outline Plan (‘Tel Aviv 5000’), which rezones large parts of the city’s Southeastern neighborhoods for private redevelopment at densities far exceeding that of the existing urban fabric. Keshet’s words thus expose an attempt to defend urban citizenship from a range of exogenous threats. The episode opens a window onto this chapter’s main goal—conceptualizing and accounting for the emergence of ‘defensive urban citizenship’ (hereafter, DUC) at the urban frontier—the impoverished areas living under the shadow of planned radical changes. To do so, we focus on the Shapira Neighborhood—at the heart of Tel Aviv’s southern region. The chapter analyzes recent contestation over planning, underscoring the defensive attitudes and actions associated with the area’s three most prominent communities: (a) Veterans: Eastern Jews living in the area for several decades; (b) ‘Foreigners’ (mainly African asylum seekers and labor migrants); and (c) the young: mainly educated ‘petit gentrifiers’. The empirical study included content analyses of relevant documents and media, as well as extensive fieldwork—including urban and public attitudinal surveys—as well as 21 in-depth interviews of policymakers and local-community members. Based on the findings, we contend that the city’s urban policies have caused most communities in the area to be

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placed under growing threats. Typically, they find themselves in a longterm condition of ‘displaceability’, which we define as the state of being susceptible to eviction or distancing from urban rights and resources (Yiftachel, 2020). Based on the findings, we conclude that planning and urban policies have exacerbated a process through which local communities and residents increasingly find themselves under threats of displacement. To fend off their looming removal, residential groups—long disenfranchised by the urban capitalist regime and subjected to social stigmatization—selfmobilize to defend their imperiled social and material spaces. Informed by marginalized ethnic and class identities, DUC emerges as a persistent type of urban membership, which resists and challenges the city’s entrenched planning trajectories. We define DUC as a symbolic, material and political identity. It is based on a ‘cry for help’ and a series of coalitions, mobilizations and maneuvres for survival, instigated by those threatened with being robbed of whatever little bundle of urban necessities they still possess in the city. DUC emerges as a result of perceived urban threats and mobilizes residents against displacement, dispossession and the breakdown of community. The remainder of our chapter is organized as follows. We first set our study against the theoretical backdrop of planning and urban citizenship, proposing DUC as a new conceptual lens. Informed by a ‘Southeastern’ optic, which builds on the emergence of identities and perceptions ‘from below’, we then provide a brief historical review of urban planning in Tel Aviv, highlighting the decidedly neoliberal approach taken by the city in recent decades. We next introduce the southern neighborhood of Shapira, our field of research, shedding light on the urban frontier. Our empirical section examines the ways in which planning schemes and public policies have created a conspicuous perception of threats and propelled defensive actions by the three main communities noted above.

7.2 Urban Citizenship and Policy: a Theoretical Prelude Urban citizenship, particularly in rapidly changing cities, is back on the research and policy agendas. In recent years, studies have proliferated on urban struggles ranging from neighborhood branding (Masuda & Bookman, 2018) to everyday walking (Middleton, 2018) and the opening of a local casino (Balzarini & Shlay, 2016). While definitions vary with

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researched themes, we find the approaches of urban citizenship ‘from below’ (at times termed ‘agency-centered’) particularly useful (Ehrkamp & Leitner, 2003; Secor, 2004). Seen as a never-ending process rather than a static, legal or formal status, urban citizenship is ‘an institution which is constantly being challenged and reshaped by city residents’ (Varsanyi, 2006, p. 234) through changing perception, reaction and mobilization vis-à-vis hegemonically defined spaces, policies and developments. The urban citizenship ‘from below’ approach is especially suitable for studying the ways in which it is constituted through local activists who ‘draw on place-specific resources, mobilize local participants and maneuver local institutions and networks’ (Blokland et al., 2015, p. 656) to articulate claims to a more just city (Dikec, 2017; Harvey, 2012). Nowhere has this trend been more evident than in cities of the Global South-East (regions of the postcolonial world, including Latin America, Africa, the ‘Middle East’, the ‘Far East’ and South Asia), where constant inflows of newcomers—predominantly rural and international migrants and asylum seekers—deprived of their most basic security and needs, have been pressuring urban administrations to formulate more inclusionary policies (Bou-Akar, 2018; Roy, 2011). In this context, planning is often conceived as a potential tool for bettering adverse conditions, an instrumental through which the disenfranchised can rally their claims for a fairer (re)allocation of meager urban resources. Yet, although under certain circumstances planning could indeed usher in the production of more equitable urban landscapes, in most cases it has the tendency to deepen exclusion, dispossession and oppression (Hearn, 2017; Yiftachel 2017, p. 245). Large parts of the planning literature have turned a blind eye toward the side effects of what Yiftachel (1994) and Flyvbjerg (1996) have called ‘the dark side’ of planning, although recent years have seen a growing critical engagement (Hearn, 2017). Pointing to the (un)intended consequences of urban plans and development strategies, scholars have uncovered the myriad ways in which top-down planning trajectories have damaged the local living conditions of communities across geographical contexts (Marcuse, 2014; Yiftachel, 1994). Although studies have made significant strides toward our fuller understanding of the detrimental effects of planning, they often take a bird’seye view overlooking the ways in which plans are received (or rejected) by residents and communities. With some notable exceptions (Bhan, 2017; Roy, 2011), the reactions of these agents generally remain unexplored.

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This oversight is problematic not only because it presumes a certain passivity on the part of ‘planned for’ communities but also because it fails to take account of the multiple identities that undergird them. Thus, since planning shapes and is shaped by the classed, aged, gendered and ethno-racialized identities of the ‘planned’ groups, it is imperative that we decipher its differential effects upon them and vice versa. In this respect, and bearing in mind Blokland et al.’s (2015, p. 658) call to highlight ‘contexts, motivations and resources to claiming urban citizenship as continuous in the making’, we propose more nuanced, locally embedded ‘Southern’ and ‘Eastern’ perspectives on the formation of urban citizenship (Yiftachel, 2016). We join Bhan et al.’s (2020) call for an understanding of the detailed circumstances of collective existence in times of change and threat, which are aptly understood through the variegated experiences of ‘Southern’ and ‘Eastern’ cities. Such ‘Southeastern’ perspectives have recently emerged to better represent and conceptualize the dynamics of these cities. The points of departure for studying ‘southern urbanism’ include both specific postcolonial geographies, with their ‘stubborn reality’, and an epistemology and critical ethics applicable to the study of all cities, which cannot be drawn from theories of the Global North and West (Watson, 2016). In the main, such Southeastern approaches challenge the prominence of the large-scale, abstract and universalist theories that tend to cement the domination of Euro-centric epistemologies. Such theories often deny the structural role, voice and agency of the colonized and peripheral, and the dynamic approach needed to account for the multitude of forces required to understand contemporary cities. They have also been argued to perform poorly in non-Northern contexts and regions, whether as explanation for urban processes or foundations for urban planning.1 Drawing on the Southeastern experience, we adopt a ‘pluriversal’ epistemology for understanding social change (Grosfogeul, 2012), as opposed to most universal theories emerging from Northwestern settings. Hence, for us urban citizenship is viewed not as a formal notion of topdown civic status, which residents of urban peripheries often lack, but rather as an arena of continuous practice, a set of quotidian cycles and

1 For key interventions in this debate, see Bhan (2017, 2019), Brenner and Schmidt (2015), Marcuse (2014), Storper and Scott (2014), Watson (2014), Murrey (2019), and Yiftachel (2016).

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conflicts over urban space and power through which the urban frontier is shaped (Blokland et al., 2015; Cohen & Margalit, 2015). The changing nature of urban citizenship reflects this ‘pluriversal’ dynamism (Yiftachel, 2020), in which several structural logics interact in shaping urban rights—such as conditions of globalizing capitalism, strengthening nationalist identity regimes and unprecedented levels of migration and refuge. It is against this backdrop that DUC emerges. As an ever-increasing number of groups are marginalized and left suspended by urban planning, suppressing economic order and identity, they are compelled to defend their ‘turf’. Yet, in contrast to accounts that conceive of the stance taken by the urban disenfranchised as a form of reactionary identity or insurgent citizenship (Holston, 2008; Miraftab, 2020), DUC centers on the protective nature of their mobilization (rather than challenging authority) while articulating imminent threats and strengthening local communities. As the case of southern Tel Aviv exemplifies, groups pressed to defend their spaces of existence may well differ in class, ethnic-racial background and legal status. African asylum seekers; long-time (Jewish) residents; and, to a lesser extent, low- to middle-income ‘creatives’ (termed here ‘petit gentrifiers’) are moving to Tel Aviv’s deprived inner-city areas. These groups are expected to (differentially) pay the ‘double price’ demanded by the ‘neoliberal’ urban transformation, of which planning is a major tool. First, they must cope with the planned withdrawal of local social services, as well as rising property values, which threaten the very essence of their everyday survival. Second, they must face the channeling of deprived and exploited mobile populations—undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees—into their neighborhood. Thus, the emergence of DUC happens typically where global forces meet localized, marginalized communities who attempt to mobilize against the incoming flow of human (i.e. migrants) and financial capital. In the sections below, we focus on the emerging threats that have laid the foundations for DUC in southern Tel Aviv. This will pave the way to focusing on the organization and mobilization of the communities in subsequent sections. Let us move now to embed the above concepts into the thick’ urban fabric of southern Tel Aviv.

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A Brief History of Planning in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv was established in 1909 under Ottoman rule. Its location, to the north of Jaffa and west of a few large Palestinian villages, determined its primary trajectory of development northwards (Fig. 7.1). Its first master plan—the Geddes Plan (1932)—reflected the residential character of its central and northern neighborhoods while marking the south,2 then exterritory,3 an ‘unregulated’ urban frontier. It was this early plan that was largely responsible ‘[F]or the construction of the socio-spatial gap […] between the unplanned and the planned city’ (Marom, 2009, p. 90). Under the British-inspired zoning system (1940), the components of this binary urban system grew further apart. Some southern sections were slated for industrial and (mostly public) residential uses, while others— like Shapira, handled administratively by the City of Jaffa (Fig. 7.1)—were negatively affected by tense relations with its Palestinian neighbors. Tel Aviv’s post-1948 annexation of Southeastern Jewish neighborhoods notwithstanding, their (planned) marginalization persisted. The Horowitz Plan (1953) aimed to undermine the fissure between established neighborhoods in the north and the new ethnic enclaves that had emerged in the south and in Jaffa following the migration waves of the early 1950s. Yet, it too reproduced the distinction between urban sections, assigning greater open spaces and lower densities to neighborhoods of the center/north while labeling large parts of the south as slum areas slated for demolition and reconstruction (Marom, 2009). Though eventually rejected, the plan was indicative of the patronizing treatment of municipal administrations toward the south, and its historic subjection to ‘radical over-planning’ (Marom, 2009, p. 245). The southern neighborhoods stagnated throughout the 1960s and 1970s, while the city accelerated its northwards development (Hatuka & Forsyth, 2005). Noticeable gaps in municipal investments and growing ethno-class tensions between the upper-middle class, predominately Ashkenazi, neighborhoods of the north and the blue-collar Mizrahi 2 South(ern) Tel Aviv is a term used to refer to the southern and eastern neighborhoods of the city (Fig. 7.2). These 40 neighborhoods—which administratively make up Urban Quarters 7 (excluding Jaffa), 8 and 9—spread over nearly one-third of the city’s territory (~18,000 dunams —a unit of land area equal to 1000 square meters) and are home to roughly 40% of its residents (~150,000 people). 3 Several neighborhoods of present-day southern Tel Aviv, such as Shapira and Hatikva, were annexed to the city in the aftermath of the 1948 War.

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Fig. 7.1 Tel Aviv 1940: primary northward development trajectory (Source The authors, adapted from Marom [2009])

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Fig. 7.2 The southern and eastern neighborhoods forming south Tel Aviv

neighborhoods of the south have now congealed into distinct social urban identities (Bigger & Shavit, 2001). In 1973, under the heading of ‘Facing the South’ (literally, meaning the southern neighborhoods), new mayor, Shlomo Lahat, prioritized the development of disadvantaged neighborhoods. His call to investors, ‘to upgrade the culture of housing in the south’ (cited in Marom, 2009, p. 328), was the opening shot in a new (dis)course of southern ‘development’ in which the private sector was to become a key player. Against the backdrop of a dwindling population and deteriorating physical conditions, the Mazor Plan (1985) aimed to revitalize the metropolitan functions of the city and ‘narrow the gap between the north and the south through a more equal allocation of land and resources for development’. Rhetoric aside, the plan recommended that municipal authorities revitalize neighborhoods in—or close to—the historic city center, leaving the responsibility for hard-core southern neighborhoods to the national authorities, mainly in an initiative known as ‘project renewal’ (Carmon, 1999). Engaging with the more well-off urban sections indicated that

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while the city was facing south, ‘its heart remained in the center’ (Marom, 2009, p. 338). Southern neglect deepened in the 1990s as massive funds were channeled into luxurious beautification projects in the north and center, and along the gentrifying coast of Jaffa (Alfasi & Fabian, 2009; Monterescu & Fabian, 2003). Spiraling into disrepair, the south has witnessed a massive out-migration of long-term residents (Schnell, 1999), which was quickly balanced by the inflow of mostly young gentrifiers (Menahem, 1996) and (un)documented labor migrants from Eastern Europe, South America and Asia (Cohen & Margalit, 2015). Drawn to the area because of its proximity to transportation hubs and the availability of cheap housing, migrants (mainly Africans) now constitute 20% of the southern population—although in some neighborhoods (e.g. Neve Sha’anan, Shapira and Hatikva—Fig. 7.1) their proportion is nearly double this figure (Knesset Center, 2016).

7.4 New Plan, Old Rhetoric: ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ and the ‘New South’ As elsewhere, planning in Tel Aviv was about to undergo a major change. During the last decade, the city has fully embraced the globalizing neoliberal approach—as clearly noted in the most recent comprehensive ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ Plan: The plan sets the boundaries of – and defines the space of – planning possibilities; yet, the mechanism, which eventually leads to the operationalization of the plan is the market mechanism. (Tel Aviv Municipality, 2016, p. 5)

The document was endorsed in 2016 by the local planning committee. It outlines urban-planning objectives and development trajectories until 2025. It advances a pluralist vision and solidifies the city’s core position at the metropolitan and national scales. Specifically, it sets four key objectives. First, a city for all its residents —namely, to make it a plural city that is attractive to all ages. Second, maintaining Tel Aviv as an economic and cultural center aims to solidify its position as a national and metropolitan core. Third, creating an attractive environment promotes a sustainable urban environment characterized by mixed-use planning, open space and efficient transportation means. Finally, administration facing its

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citizens promotes greater public participation, alongside cooperation with adjacent cities. ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ devotes considerable attention to the city’s southern and eastern neighborhoods. Embedded in a market-oriented planning rhetoric that ‘pays special attention to urban renewal’, its predilection for market-driven solutions to south-based urban ‘deficiencies’ is clear. Examples abound, ranging from business-friendly zones to private– public partnerships, but here we highlight three: (1) property-led urban regeneration; (2) urban development through the attraction of middle class, creative residents; and (3) the establishment of flagship cultural institutions. Property-led urban regeneration is used as a planning strategy in various countries (He & Wu, 2007; McGuirk, 2000). While it takes different forms, its main tenet is the prioritization of privately initiated construction projects. Under this logic, designated urban areas mark the city as ‘renewable’, paving the way for the development industry to engage in physical transformation projects. Tel Aviv has embraced this strategy, and has, from the 1990s, seen the involvement of small investors alongside large, private developers and the municipality (Carmon, 1999). This trend has accelerated in recent years, fueled by a range of statewide and local incentives and regulations. ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ takes this strategy further, designating entire city sections for massive urban renewal. Not surprisingly, many of these are in southern neighborhoods, where resistance to planning projects has traditionally been weak or absent altogether. For example, a radical plan is in store for Yad Eliyahu, which lies at the heart of Quarter 9 (Southeast). This quiet, suburban community of 15,000 is slated to almost double its housing stock (from 9500 to 17,500) and population within the next decade as a result of allegedly the largest urban-regeneration project the city has ever seen. Attracting the creative class to so-called deteriorating city sections is a ubiquitous development strategy. Florida (2002, 2005) conceptualized the ‘creative class’ as a new segment in the labor force whose professional ingenuity drives economic progress. He argued that cities must engender the right ‘people-climate’, like cultural facilities and a progressive social atmosphere, ‘or they will wither and die’ (Florida, 2002, p. 13). The attraction of ‘creatives’ into Tel Aviv’s southern quarters is not new. The ‘back to the city’ movement of students, artists and young professionals has been under way since the late 1980s, but

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recent municipal initiatives have sought to lure these ‘quality’ populations ever-more aggressively. From awarding scholarships to students who relocate to designated southern communities to providing subsidies for refurbishing the facades of physically deteriorated buildings in order to appeal to incoming groups with higher economic and cultural capital, municipal authorities are determined to revamp the human landscape of the southern neighborhoods. As the mayor’s economic advisor explained, ‘[i]n southern areas […] we shall try to attract populations that at the moment do not want to move there, by giving them all sorts of incentives’ (Protocol of Municipality Management Meeting, 21 February 2010, p. 12; available online). A third strategy is the establishment of flagship cultural institutions in the southern neighborhoods. This follows in the footsteps of numerous cities that have made culture (e.g. sporting events, arts-and-crafts fairs and music festivals) a cornerstone of their urban-revival strategy (Eizenberg & Cohen, 2015; Garcia, 2004). In Tel Aviv, the majority of these initiatives traditionally take place in the city’s central and northern sections,4 but ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ underscores the need to (re)locate some of them into southern neighborhoods. In this context, the city has been supporting fringe art installations in public spaces, subsidizing young-artist studios and workshops, and converting bomb shelters into cultural centers in the southern quarters. The planned relocation of the famous Israeli dance company, Bat Sheva, to the neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan is a recent case in point for this culture-based urban-regeneration scheme. ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ continues this trajectory, planning to introduce ‘leverage initiatives’ (Meyzamy Manof ) to several southern neighborhoods in order ‘to encourage the development of […] the entire area’ (Tel Aviv Municipality, 2016, p. 12). This grand strategy of urban renewal in the Southeastern quarters has not always been well received by residents. The glamorous urban vision stood in contrast to urban processes taking place in these very same neighborhoods, including blight; property abandonment; and the influx of labor migrants, asylum seekers and, recently, petit gentrifiers. Consequently, as the following subsections demonstrate, planning has been 4 The northern bias of cultural events has been challenged by groups of southern activists, who called for a more spatially balanced policy. A case in point is their resistance to the annual ‘White Night’, which, some argued, was neglecting avant-garde culture produced in southern neighborhoods.

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associated with the creation of local ‘displaceabilities’, thereby facilitating the emergence of DUC. As developed elsewhere (Yiftachel, 2020), ‘displaceabilty’ has become a growing condition characterizing contemporary urban citizenship, in which the stability, security and rights of urban residents have been eroding. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has worsened this condition as a result of growing health, economic and housing crises (Balakrishnan, 2020). 7.4.1

Shapira: A Frontier Neighborhood

Like other Jewish neighborhoods in British-colonized Palestine, Shapira was municipally unaffiliated. Being extra-jurisdictional to both Jaffa and Tel Aviv determined much of its development trajectory. Accepting waves of Jewish refugees with little financial and administrative support from either city, Shapira was deprived of elementary services including education, sewage and (paved) roads. Its 1949 annexation to Tel Aviv did little to improve local conditions, and by the 1960s it had become quintessential ‘transit neighborhood’. Like the entire south, Shapira has seen significant population loss,5 and has ‘turned from a frontier region to an urban periphery’ (Rotbard, 2008, p. 40). Since the 1990s, the neighborhood has attracted large numbers of labor migrants, later joined by young gentrifiers and African asylum seekers. These groups were drawn (or channeled) to Shapira for its relatively low housing costs and existing sociocultural diversity. They received a lukewarm welcome from local residents, who feared that their neighborhood would be taken over by a new ethno-racial class of ‘others’. Yet, over time and despite occasional resistance toward ‘foreigners’ by longtime residents (Cohen & Margalit, 2015), inter-group relations in Shapira have been largely peaceful (Rotbard, 2008), although recent developments at both the national and urban scales have changed the atmosphere in the neighborhood. Politically, a xenophobic discourse has designated non-Jewish migrants in general and African asylum seekers in particular as the chief obstacles to southern development. Consequently, conservative politicians and residential groups have come together to advocate their forced removal. Simultaneously, rising real-estate values in north/central 5 It is estimated that its population has declined from a total of 12,000 residents in the 1970s to roughly 7000 in 2017 (Shaul Zonsein, personal interview, Tel Aviv, 2017).

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Tel Aviv have made the neighborhood a sought-after destination for urban entrepreneurs. Backed by the ‘neoliberal’ vision of the outline plan, Shapira has become a hotspot of urban-regeneration projects. These planning projects have been justifiably perceived by southern residents as an attack on the very fabric of their communities. Seen as a radical move to (over)-plan the south and, consequently, drive out the lower and middle classes, they have organized resistance to the looming threat. Under the slogan ‘The Battle over Our Home’ (Facebook page; Yad Eliyahu, 2018), residents of the Southeastern neighborhood of Yad Eliyahu, for example, took to the streets to protect their ‘turf’ and prevent it from falling prey to eager developers. Groups were anything but homogenous—comprising students, young gentrifiers, working-class families and even labor migrants. Although strategies varied by neighborhood, the rationale was similar, positing that planning schemes must take account of residential needs and wants. As a leader of one group explained, in the absence of proper consultation with residents, ‘our neighborhood would turn prestigious, but without its residents’ (Avidan, 2017).

7.5 Threats, Identities and Defensive Urban Citizenship As previously mentioned, we focus in this paper on communally identified perceptions of urban threats, and perceived futures, as foundations of DUC.6 These threats emerge from a variety of sources but most commonly from the recently approved ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ Plan, which uses all three market-oriented practices mentioned earlier—namely: (a) property-led regeneration; (b) the attraction of middle-class, creative residents; and (c) the establishment of cultural institutions. In addition to ‘large-scale urban development’ projects (LUDs; see Weinberg et al., 2019), it promotes increased-density mixed-use projects and residential high-rise towers reaching 40-plus stories on some main streets in order to attract young, educated individuals (our ‘petit gentrifiers’). Finally, the plan to vacate the infamous central bus station and designate it

6 Due to space limitations, in this chapter we touch only briefly on the strategic mobilization processes of residents. We engage with these more thoroughly in another paper in the making.

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and adjoining areas for leading cultural institutions7 will fundamentally transform the social and physical landscapes of the neighborhood and surrounding streets. These policies, some of which are already underway, have contributed to the emergence and galvanization of three main communities in the neighborhood that are roughly equal in size: (a) ‘The Veterans’—mostly low-income Mizrahim (Eastern Jews), who are themselves first- or second-generation migrants from Muslim countries of the Middle East or Central Asia. The majority are traditional (Masorti) in their religious affiliation and maintain close-knit family and ethnic networks, often anchored in some 34 local synagogues. (b) ‘The Foreigners’—mostly African asylum seekers. These comprise the most prominent part of a larger and more diverse community dubbed ‘foreigners’ by most Jewish residents, made up of a multitude of labor migrants from developing countries. (c) ‘The Young’ (petit ) gentrifiers—these arrived in the neighborhood from the early 2000s onward. These (mainly) Ashkenazi (Western Jewish) gentrifiers are often young, educated professionals—many following ‘creative’ pursuits in the arts and entertainment. For our fieldwork, we conducted 21 in-depth interviews with policymakers, real-estate agents, planners, business owners and key personalities in each of the local communities. These interviews showed, inter alia, that residential co-existence notwithstanding, the three main groups have little in common. They subscribe to different ethnic, racial, religious and class groups; are entitled to different bundles of civic and political rights; reside under different occupancy arrangements (owners, long- and shortterm renters, respectively); maintain different social networks; and draw on separate educational and communal services in and around the neighborhood. Social relations at the individual or group levels are highly limited and, apart from food shopping, they seldom interact in everyday

7 Recently, it was revealed that the Ministry of Transport is pushing for the station to remain in the area (Buso, 2018), throwing things into doubt again.

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Table 7.1 ‘Please assess the threat to Shapira from developments’—Entire survey population (in %; N = 242)

Entry of foreigners High-rise buildings Gentrification Entry of more young people

these

future

5—High Threat

4

3

2

1—No Threat

Total %

48 34 32 7

11 18 20 8

13 10 5 16

12 7 21 15

16 31 22 54

100 100 100 100

public spaces. One exception is the local community center, which caters primarily for children and the youth, but it is mostly frequented by young gentrifiers and their young children. Jonathan, a young entrepreneur who was concerned about the absence of shared communal spaces, recently established a coffee shop in a local, well located, open park in order to lower inter-communal barriers: I noticed that the three communities, who live in the same small neighborhood, don’t ever meet, speak, let alone rally together for common purposes. One reason to open this place was to provide a neutral space [where] all are welcome. We keep kosher kitchen, we respect all communities and they do meet here, much more than before.

Despite this welcome effort, insecurity and uncertainty, augmented by recent policies, dominate social relations and lead groups to develop different versions of DUC. Not surprisingly, defensive positions vary, though they all echo and dialogue with policies and plans (or lack thereof) that threaten their right to remain in the neighborhood and make them displaceable. Attitudes and Threats To supplement the above investigation, we conducted a detailed attitudinal survey in order to map more systematically the range of opinions about Shapira’s situation and planning (Tables 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4).8 Due to space limitations, we focus here 8 Anonymous surveys were conducted face-to-face (N = 110) over three evenings at the

two shopping areas along Mesilat Yesharim and Salame streets. The sample was random. Another batch was returned online (N = 132; total N = 242). Due to ethical issues, we managed to survey only 16 Africans and hence do not include them in the tables. However, their replies were quite uniform and seem highly representative. Having differentiated between long-timers and gentrifiers, our sample had a good fit with the surveyed

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Table 7.2 ‘Please assess the threat to Shapira from the entry of foreigners’ (in %; N = 242)

Veterans The Young

5—High Threat

4

3

2

1—No Threat

Total %

64 26

15 17

8 11

7 16

6 30

100 100

Table 7.3 ‘Please assess the threat to Shapira from high-rise buildings’ (in %; N = 242)

Veterans The Young

5—High Threat

4

3

2

1—No Threat

Total %

27 52

10 16

18 9

7 7

38 16

100 100

Table 7.4 ‘Please assess the threat to Shapira from gentrification’ (in %; N = 242)

Veterans The Young

5—High Threat

4

3

2

1—No Threat

Total %

16 46

10 18

11 6

15 7

48 23

100 100

only on one part of the survey, mapping attitudes toward the neighborhood’s future—the essence of what groups mobilize to defend and promote Indeed, as shown in Table 7.1, a sense of threat is conspicuously evident—although not evenly distributed. It is not surprising that the entry of foreigners evokes the highest fears among the residents. Yet, the specter of high-rise redevelopment and gentrification also poses serious threats—particularly among the young (Table 7.1). The sense of temporariness articulated in the interviews was corroborated by our attitudinal survey. While perceptions differ by the group due to age, class or occupancy status, they all rest on the assertion that

population, for socio-economic, locational, ethnicity and educational characteristics of the neighborhood population (T value = 0.37; P = 0.81).

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current plans and policies enhance residential uncertainly and displaceability. Recent urban planning, which has often left local groups in a state of enduring temporariness, is the impetus for current campaigns to protect urban space and community, reflecting as they may the emergence of DUC. To this end, a quotation from a prominent architect, living in the area for a decade, is indicative of a general attitude: We feel that one the main threats to the area which wasn’t central in your survey is the lack of a secular primary school, at times even more than highrise or rising prices. We feel such a school would be the best way to secure our community in this transient area. We formed a group of parents and are busy campaigning candidates for the next City elections. (D. L. interview, 2 April 2017)

Veterans and the Young While the sense of threat and temporariness is felt across Shapira communities, one notable split surfaces from the survey results—namely, the impact of the length of time spent living in the neighborhood. ‘Veterans’ (Jews living in Shapira for over 20 years) show higher levels of fear from migration. A staggering four-fifths of this group identify the entry of foreigners as a distinct threat—twice as high as the ‘young’, who are under 40 and moved to the area during the last 20 years. This translates of course to concerted efforts to mobilize against the migrants—as expressed by a veteran resident, the owner of two houses in the neighborhood: One cannot hide the fact that the Africans have caused terrible damage to our neighborhood. This is the reason we push politicians for their removal. We demonstrate, not because we are racist, but because we defend our homes. We have nowhere to go. (Y. C. interview, 3 June 2017)

Yet, the perception of ‘threat’ is reversed when it comes to rapid development or gentrification of the area: here, the young are far more worried. Nearly four-fifths of them identity high-rise buildings planned for the area as distinct threats, and nearly two-thirds see gentrification as such. Let us remember that these two urban transformations (high-rise development and gentrification) are actively promoted by the recent ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ Plan. The stark difference between these two sets of responses might be explained by the higher rate of homeownership among the veterans, who hope to benefit from rising land values—although, as

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the owner of a small bakery on the neighborhood main street frankly commented, Sure, I may benefit from rising land value as I own the shop, but this is also problematic, as both my sons, who are working with me, had to move with their families to remote areas (Lod and Or Yehuda) because housing has become too expensive here. (B. B. interview, 3 June 2017)

The attitudes expressed in the survey also chart the likely future course of struggles in Shapira, creating some new and unlikely coalitions. This was expressed in recent mobilizations against the evictions of Africans, in which local groups of ‘the young’ joined hands with some veterans and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to organize an impressive campaign. Despite persistent and violent government efforts to evict the Africans, many of them found a haven in southern Tel Aviv—forcing the government to shelve some of its eviction plans. This campaign has a material and ideological foundation, related to the emergence of DUC. Our data also show that over four-fifths of young residents are renters who have a clear interest in keeping land prices down. They are also likely to be more liberal in their racial and ethnic attitudes, creating the ground for a refugee–young coalition that seemed unlikely before the drafting of the pro-development ‘Tel Aviv 5000’ Plan. The survey thus reveals the need for intersectional analysis, whereby materiality, ethnicity and length of stay are assembled in order to create different types of urban citizenship through the practices and connections of the everyday. Displaceability Returning to the in-depth interviews, it is notable that a sense of threat was evident in the narratives of members from all communities. Although the proposed plans are expected to have varying effects on local groups, their potential to turn the neighborhood into a zone of temporary existence is felt by all. Let us briefly illustrate this process for each group. Migrants—or foreigners, as they are often called—are temporary by definition. They are either subjected to eviction and deportation policies or quietly tolerated as temporary illegals. Living in a state of uncertainty is clearly related to the state’s reluctance to assess the asylum claims of non-Jewish migrants, but it also has much to do with planning policies. Thus, for example, in the absence of public housing or rent-control laws, migrants must rent apartments in the ‘free market’. Local landlords often take advantage of their

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precarious situation, asking them to pay grossly inflated rents. In other cases, landlords, dividing their properties into many small sub-units, cram a dozen migrants or more into tiny apartments. In addition, rampant cityled gentrification in the south has placed many southern sections of Tel Aviv out of the reach of migrants.9 In such an unregulated planning environment, it is no wonder that migrants in Shapira remain in a constant state of temporariness. In the words of Johnny, an Eritrean national who runs a kindergarten for children of African migrants, Life in Shapira is a day-to-day affair. Most of the parents of ‘my’ children are undocumented, under eviction order, or in short-term employment […] It is quite common for children to disappear and then suddenly return […] But we [did] not accept this situation, and organized ourselves […] for example, I have five kindergartens in south Tel Aviv for foreigners, and there are several others […] we are looking after our children the best we can […]. (Johnny, interview 2 April 2017)

The situation worsened with the launch of the aforementioned campaign for the deportation of migrants. Blaming them for a host of social and physical ailments in southern Tel Aviv, the campaign is guided by the notion that proper planning in neighborhoods is only possible after migrants are forcibly removed. Under the slogan, ‘Rehabilitation begins with deportation [of infiltrators]’, its organizers have created a solid, if fundamentally problematic, link between migrations and (under)planning. As was to be expected, it induced elevated levels of fear among migrants in Shapira and elsewhere, making them ever-more displaceable. As Tugud, a Sudanese asylum seeker, claimed emphatically at a recent rally against the campaign, Each one of us, asylum seekers, lives as if on [the] edge of a cliff […]. One constantly fears – of being sent to prison in the desert, being detained on the street […] and the biggest fear of all – deportation […] our saving grace[s] are those who have helped us to survive; they are our angels. (Tugud interview, 3 June 2017)

9 A recent report estimates that as many as 15% of migrants have left the area between 2014 and 2017, quoting rising rents as one key reason for their mass departure (Calcalist Online, 15 February 2018).

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Ironically, veteran residents (themselves by and large secondgeneration immigrants) target later migrants as threatening. The so-called ‘unbearable reality’ in southern neighborhoods since the arrival of new migrants has long been a contentious issue (Cohen & Margalit, 2015). In the eyes of many long-time Jewish residents, the lack of municipal and national policies has allowed African migrants to ‘take over’ southern Tel Aviv. Quoting a recent report by the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), which shows that between 2010 and 2014 nearly 10% of the Jewish residents who lived in neighborhoods with the largest concentrations of African migrants have moved out,10 long-timers make a strong claim for their own sense of local precariousness. As Shefi Paz, a key figure in the ‘Front to Save Southern Tel Aviv’, argues, Shapira has been occupied by Africans who have told us time and again: ‘more and more of us are coming, and we are the majority here! Soon you will go, not us !’. […] Many Israelis have understood the hint, packed up and left. Others may go soon – when they are mugged or attacked […] Our campaign to keep our community and the hypocritical liberal organizations call us racist. This is survival, not racism. (Public gathering with Ben-Gurion University students, 19 June 2017)

Finally, the uncertainty is also impacting upon the everyday life of the ‘petit gentrifiers’: alongside their privileged status, they face a growing degree of uncertainty. While educated and mobile, some lack the financial resources needed for purchasing a home in Shapira and consequently feel threatened by rising property values in the neighborhood as well as proposed changes in local land uses. Although they were highly visible in the public hearings leading up to ‘Tel Aviv 5000’, voicing their worries over projects of high-rise office and residential developments planned on the main arteries in and around Shapira, they were unable to prevent its approval. Concerns were eloquently described by R. G., the past head of the residents’ board: True, there were some meetings of ‘public participation’ [during the drafting of TLV 5000] and we prepared our case very well with our architects and planners and were rejected […]. We became very worried when we realized the plan increases the density […] more than originally

10 These neighborhoods are mainly Hatikva, Shapira and Neve Sha’anan—see Fig. 7.1.

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promised and worse – [would] build massive towers along the main roads and in neighboring blocks. This was three years ago [2014], and we can see now the effects – developers are buying and redeveloping [properties], other investors ‘discover’ our neighborhood for speculation, and rents are increasing fast […]. I feel as if we cannot protect our space and may be forced out. Our next move is to run candidates to the City Council, hoping they put ‘a foot in the door’ of implementing the plan. (R. G. interview, 3 June 2017)

7.6

A Final Word

As we have shown, ‘Defensive urban citizenship’ (DUC) is shaped through processes embedded in proliferating urban threats born of market-led policies, intertwined with identity regimes to cast a shadow of ‘temporariness’ on most residents of the urban frontier. In such settings, planning exposes its ‘dark side’ and acts as a set of guidelines for rapid development and property speculation, with little regard for its impact on migrants, marginalized groups and the young. We use the concept of ‘displaceability’ to illustrate the condition in which whole groups are left in a state of limbo due to threats emanating from urban (and state) plans and policies. These threats—in Tel Aviv and, most likely, elsewhere—form the foundations of DUC, spawning the making of new urban communities who mobilize to defend their space and resources. In so doing, local communities connect with broad networks and coalitions—using government, the city, civil society and a range of local organizations to defend their own version of a desired local future. Our ‘southeastern’ approach for understanding the city shows how DUC emerges from engagement with the field, drawing on the complex reality of urbanism outside the affluent and mainly liberal Global North and West (see Bhan, 2019; Miraftab, 2020; Roy, 2011; Watson, 2016). Such perspectives draw on the patterns of uncertainties, informalities, group identities, migrations and colonization prevalent in cities of the Global South and East, as a vista point from which to understand the transformation of most contemporary cities of our time. Most importantly, this chapter highlights the manner in which groups become increasingly ‘displaceable’ as an emerging foundation of the urban regime and citizenship. This constellation causes the rise of DUC among those who struggle to protect their threatened identity,

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housing, rights and ‘turf’. Against a backdrop of predatory planning and widespread xenophobia, new alliances are created to resist hegemonic attempts to divide and conquer and, instead, work together to fend off looming threats. For the final word, let us return to the southern activist Shula Keshet, who continues to lead at the time of writing (2021) the unlikely and very local joint campaign for veterans, some gentrifiers and ‘foreigners’. At the large rally ‘against eviction for the south’ with which we opened the chapter, Keshet insightfully claimed, Our main threat is not the Africans […] sure, they ‘landed’ here without our consent, but remember […] they also keep the rents relatively low and allow us and our children to stay in this good location. Our big threat comes from city plans […] this is an urban disaster. Many Mizrahi and young families have been forced out because of the neglect and recently the rising rents. This is why we need to defend against these development plans as much as we can – all of us together.11

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Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities: From the right to the city to urban revolution. Verso Books. Hatuka, T., & Forsyth, L. (2005). Urban design in the context of glocalization and nationalism: Rothschild Boulevards, Tel Aviv. Urban Design International, 10(2), 69–86. He, S., & Wu, F. (2007). Socio-spatial impacts of property-led redevelopment on China’s urban neighborhoods. Cities, 24(3), 194–208. Hearn, M. (2017). What is a city for: The remaking the politics of displacement. Cambridge: MIT Press. Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton University Press. Knesset Center for Research and Information. (2016). Residence of infiltrators in the neighborhoods of Southern Tel Aviv. Knesset Publications. https://fs.kne sset.gov.il/globaldocs/MMM/9df2d286-3623-e611-80d5-00155d0acbc2/ 2_9df2d286-3623-e611-80d5-00155d0acbc2_11_8915.pdf. Marcuse, P. (2014). Critical urban theory versus critical urban studies: A review debate. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(5), 1904– 1917. Marom, N. (2009). City of concept: Planning Tel Aviv. Babel Press. Masuda, J., & Bookman, S. (2018). Neighborhood branding and the right to the city. Progress in Human Geography, 42(2), 165–182. McGuirk, P. M. (2000). Power and policy networks in urban governance: Local government and property-led regeneration in Dublin. Urban Studies, 37 (4), 651–672. Menahem, G. (1996). Urban restructuring and the absorption of immigrants: A case study in Tel Aviv. In N. Carmon (Ed.), Immigration and integration in post-industrial societies (pp. 144–165). Palgrave Macmillan. Middleton, J. (2018). The socialities of everyday urban walking and the ‘right to the city.’ Urban Studies, 55(2), 296–315. Miraftab, F. (2020). Insurgency and juxtacity in the age of urban divides. Urban Forum, 31, 433–441. Monterescu, D., & Fabian, R. (2003). The ‘Golden Cage’: Gentrification and globalization in the Andromeda Hill Project, Jaffa. Theory and Criticism, 23, 141–178. (in Hebrew). Murrey, A. (2019). When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion: Antiracism, decolonial options and theories from the South. In E. Faddia-Qumiye & P. Daley (Eds.), Routledge reader of South-South relations (pp. 59–75). Routledge. Parnell, S., & Oldfield, S. (Eds.). (2014). The Routledge handbook on cities of the global south. Routledge. Rotbard, S. (2008). White city. Babel Press (in Hebrew).

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CHAPTER 8

Everyday Practices and Public Space (Re-) Appropriation in El Cisne Dos, Guayaquil Xavier Méndez Abad, Hans Leinfelder, and Kris W. B. Scheerlinck 8.1

Introduction

Informal urbanization has become a global phenomenon and the main form of space production for many cities in the Global South. The association of informality with illegality and marginalization has supported interventions that result in displacement and social dislocation. Such types of association are also linked to the persistence of dualistic approaches

The original version of this chapter was revised: The author’s last name is corrected from ‘X. M. Abad’ to ‘X. Méndez Abad’. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_12 X. Méndez Abad (B) · H. Leinfelder · K. W. B. Scheerlinck Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] H. Leinfelder e-mail: [email protected] K. W. B. Scheerlinck e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_8

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that present informality mainly in negative terms. In contrast, alternative perspectives, discussed since the 1960s, call for a recognition of the values embedded in informal urbanization and the permanent condition of informal settlements (Perlman, 1976; Turner, 1972). An increasing number of current discourses also argue for emphasizing people’s agency in the production and transformation of space and the multiple interdependencies between formal and informal sectors (AlSayyad, 2004; Hernández & Kellett, 2010). In addition, claims against the stigmatization and homogenization of self-built urban areas parallel arguments for in situ upgrading instead of eradication. However, these arguments encounter the “conflicting rationalities” between conventional urban research, planning and design, and the logics operating in contexts of urban informality (Watson, 2009, p. 2268). According to Varley (2013), a tendency to generalize and to use misconceptions remains. While renewed architectural rhetoric on urban informality has presented its potential as a laboratory for architecture,1 it tends to overlook processes of exclusion and everyday injustices (Van Ballegooijen & Rocco, 2013). Emphasis on physical improvement and embellishment rather than on the positive results in terms of livelihood improvement has been associated with the “aestheticization of poverty” (Roy, 2004, p. 296). Likewise, the reproduction of globalized languages and official planning recipes can involve promoting norms and regulations that have an impact on people’s livelihoods in neglected urban areas (Anguelovski et al., 2019; Schwab, 2018). Over the last few decades, in Latin American cities, the transformation of historically neglected areas has been based on the strategic renovation and development of new public spaces. Consolidated informal neighborhoods have formed the primary focus of well-known upgrading programs that have been recognized for their successful practice.2 Recent spatial interventions offer a new framework relevant to public-realm improvements and inclusion (Cruz & Forman, 2015). Nevertheless, the actual impact at the local scale needs further examination. Critical observations

1 For instance, Brillembourg et al. (2005). 2 They include Favela Bairro (Rio de Janeiro), Programa de Mejoramiento Integral

de Barrios [Program of Integral Neighborhood Improvement] in Bogota; Proyecto Urbano Integral in Medellin; and Programa de Mejoramiento de Barrios [Program of Neighborhood Improvement] in Buenos Aires.

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warn about an attitude of physical determinism and foreground the relevance of community participation and appropriation during processes of urban transformation (Angotti & Irazábal, 2017; Hernández & Becerra, 2017). Transformed public spaces become part of pre-existing sociospatial structures and influence community relations and inhabitants’ everyday urban experiences. The landscape and everyday dynamics that are embedded in informality can be overlooked if interventions encourage specific typologies, uses, and aesthetics. There is a need for a better understanding of urban life in informal areas in order to overcome the flaws of conventional spatial practices. In Latin American cities, research about the transformation of this urban life has mainly concentrated on the analysis of well-known examples. Few studies have analyzed the interaction of spatial interventions and inhabitants’ everyday practices of appropriation. Recent literature has advanced understanding on the production of public spaces in informal areas (Hernández García, 2010; Schwab, 2018); however, knowledge on the topic is still limited. Although the notion of appropriation has been part of discussions on informality, it has hardly been explored (Lawhon et al., 2018). This limited knowledge of the interaction between diverse citymaking practices hinders effective spatial responses. “If [design thinking] flattens the finely honed organic practices of livelihood and association, it will simply fail and produce even more oppressive (unintended) consequences” (Simone & Pieterse, 2017, p. 156). Thus, new urban policies and projects may need to reconsider the relationships between people and the characteristics of informal urban landscapes that integrate the social, economic, and cultural conditions shaping everyday spaces and appropriations. This chapter aims to examine the inhabitants’ re-appropriation practices in the public spaces of El Cisne Dos, Guayaquil, Ecuador. It touches upon interactions between the conditions defined by institutional spatial interventions and the everyday dynamics of this informally developed neighborhood. The chapter starts with a brief review of theoretical discourses on urban informality and everyday practices. A further section contextualizes the case study within governments’ upgrading initiatives for Guayaquil’s informal areas. A description of El Cisne Dos and the spatial governmental interventions in its public space is followed by an examination of the multiple re-appropriation practices identified. The final section discusses the interactions and tensions between official notions of public space and spatial conditions and the neighborhood’s dynamics,

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looking at how individual everyday actions are subverting institutional schemes.

8.2

Everyday Life and Informality

Dominant understandings of informality still present dualistic frameworks of formal–informal spaces, suggesting opposing logics and reinforcing the separation of spatial-production processes. However, processes of autoconstruction do not develop in isolation or in clandestine ways. Meanwhile, discourses on globalization concentrate on the spaces of urban elites, and everyday spaces have been largely ignored (Mehrotra, 2008). There is a gap between current institutional city-making approaches and the contemporary urban conditions and reality of everyday life in cities in the Global South (Pieterse, 2008; Watson, 2009). Approaches that focus on inhabitants’ ordinary lives constitute an alternative that foregrounds and integrates their practices, dynamics, and potentialities into urban research. Everyday life has been the subject of study by many authors concerned with the exploration of urban socialities; the emergence of new forms of insurgent citizenship; and, above all, the experience of urban life. De Certeau (1984, p. 100) refers to everyday life as a view from below and suggests an analytical focus based on spatial practices or “ways of operating” and tactics determining urban-space production. From de Certeau’s point of view, everyday tactics are linked to the spatial dimension of a place; they constitute possibilities of resistance and subversion responding to strategies for spatial production (de Certeau, 1984, p. 94). Tactics used by local actors to transform their own environments can be associated with distinctive forms of agency and modes of inhabiting the city. Other accounts of the “below the radar” actions executed outside institutions (Pieterse, 2008, p. 113) include survival actions and efforts for improving living conditions in cities in the Global South. Nevertheless, beyond survival, everyday dynamics play a central role in the appropriation of urban space through sentiments, actions, and relations that permanently remake the city (Simone, 2014, p. 151). This view moves the focus from an exclusive attention to marginality and poverty to an exploration of the daily lives of inhabitants in interaction with their complex environments. Using the analytical lenses of “the ordinary,” informal processes and practices is emphasized (Bhan, 2019; Lombard, 2014, p. 11). At the same time, it has been noted that some

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of these discourses seem to depoliticize and romanticize informality and poverty (Roy, 2004; Varley, 2013). Nevertheless, a shift to the analysis of these situated modes of knowing the city seems helpful for expanding urban research with insights from places that tend to remain unknown (Robinson, 2006). It can also be fruitful for adding to limited narratives of the micro-processes, practices of appropriation, and local dynamics of informality in Latin American cities.

8.3

The Appropriation of Public Space

The notion of appropriation brings a spatial dimension to inhabitants’ everyday practices. It suggests a relational phenomenon emerging from the interaction between the individual and their environment (KorosecSerfaty, 1984), and it is often associated with place attachment, place identity, or a sense of place. Lefebvre (1991) presents appropriation as a dialectical relationship between space and social practices. It becomes a process through which its users configure themselves by this interaction. The “right of appropriation” is presented as a constitutive part of the notion of right to the city. It is associated with social struggle and inhabitants’ rights to access, occupy, and use of urban space (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 356). However, Lefebvre’s theorization and articulation of appropriation and rights have been reformulated in the context of urban peripheries in the South (Holston, 2009). Moreover, as suggested by Lawhon et al. (2018), the conditions of southern cities provide a situated perspective of Lefebvre’s arguments. In addition to the perspectives mentioned above, spatial appropriation can also be part of alternative narratives engaging with informality’s everyday dynamics. Bayat (2010) argues that everyday encroachments have virtually transformed many cities in the Global South. Accordingly, the conceptualization of “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” suggests an appropriation of space based on everyday activities driven by the necessity to survive and improve lives. From this viewpoint, ordinary practices take the form of localized, individual actions aiming at specific concerns. They are carried out gradually and with no clear ideology or political aim. These are mundane activities contesting state notions of order, public-space control, public–private distinctions, and modernity (Bayat, 2010, p. 56). These arguments on local actions resonate with Mehrotra’s (2008) understanding of the patterns of temporary occupation and its particular “local” logic. Mehrotra conceptualizes the informal

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city as the expression of cultures and identities, and the ways in which they temporarily redefine spaces based on citizens’ needs and uses (Mehrotra, 2008). This attention to the intersection of ephemeral activities and urban space is relevant for understanding the appropriation of public space, especially in informal contexts. In informally developed neighborhoods, the plurality of functions, meanings, and associative values assigned to public spaces remains (Duhau & Giglia, 2008, p. 344). These neighborhoods present complex everyday patterns of use, transgressing the dichotomy between private and public, and challenging top-down institutional models (Hernández García, 2010). Mehrotra (2008) argues that insights from the temporary appropriation of these spaces can inform the production of urban form in order to respond to contemporary realities, aspirations, and changing meanings. Although new spatial settings offer opportunities for inhabitants’ everyday spatial practices, the dynamics of the self-built city are often in conflict with the rationalities of conventional planning and design practices, which tend to alter and recodify them.

8.4

Methodology

The following sections present an examination of the practices of reappropriation of public spaces in the informally developed neighborhood of El Cisne Dos in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The evidence was collected during two fieldwork periods in which analysis of secondary sources, observations on site, and semi-structured interviews were combined. First, literature and historical maps were collected and analyzed in order to understand the neighborhood’s socio-spatial transformations since the beginning of the occupation of the area. This information was complemented by spatial analyses of historical aerial images from 1972 to 2015 and the revision of institutional documentation. These were used to identify changes in the morphology of the neighborhood and its public spaces. Then, direct observation allowed a detection of re-appropriation practices in the public spaces and their surroundings. These practices were mapped and listed with information regarding the number of participants, the moment in time, and the spatial conditions. The mapping process was repeated on different days and at different moments in order to detect patterns of activities. Finally, in-depth observations were conducted together with photographic surveys and interviews with participants involved in the activities at these locations.

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The Upgrading of Public Space in Guayaquil’s Informal Areas

Guayaquil, the most populous city3 and main port of Ecuador, presents an exemplary case of Latin American informal urbanization. With more than 2.6 million inhabitants, it accommodates around 16% of the country’s population and is one of its two major urban centers. Since the 1950s, the high informal urbanization rates that characterize other major cities of the Latin American region have also manifested themselves prominently in Guayaquil. The city’s informal urbanization process is linked to massive waves of migration that resulted in the occupation of its low-lying areas. Thus, its periphery has been shaped by the progressive self-construction of dwellings and urban space (Rojas & Villavicencio, 1988, p. 98). Currently, southern informally developed areas such as El Suburbio Oeste, El Guasmo, and Isla Trinitaria have turned into consolidated neighborhoods, which, despite legalization and physical improvement, still face acute socio-economic and environmental threats. Over the last few decades, as a response to these challenges, governmental urban upgrading initiatives have focused on public space as a catalyst for their transformation. Since 1992, the Municipality of Guayaquil has led a series of urban interventions within the ongoing urban-regeneration process. This governmental initiative includes the development of public spaces and emblematic projects as a mechanism for impacting on the city’s economic structure and legitimizing a political discourse (Navas Perrone, 2019). On the one hand, the local government seeks to highlight the outcomes of its policies, such as the positioning of the city in global market networks, foreign investments, tourism, job opportunities, and the recovery of self-esteem and a sense of identity for its inhabitants. On the other hand, critical voices have pointed out shortcomings that affect the potential for urban improvement and the desired appropriation of the urban-regeneration projects. They have stressed the imposition of regulations and control mechanisms, the creation of generic landscapes based on predefined models, biases in the allocation of resources, and insufficient participation of inhabitants and community groups (Andrade, 2006; Garcés, 2010; Villavicencio, 2012). 3 By 2017, Guayaquil’s population was 2,644,891, according to Ecuador’s National Institute of Statistics and Censuses—Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INEC) in 2018.

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Concerns about the spatial-intervention model have also reached the public-space projects executed in the city’s consolidated informal areas. Through their emphasis on recreation and tourism—waterfronts and water parks—these have increased the number of designed open spaces, improving to a certain extent the physical conditions of the projects’ immediate surroundings. However, these interventions tend to focus on embellishment strategies and overlook historical problems related to infrastructure, social injustice, and decision-making. Allán (2011) illustrates how the implementation of these public spaces has brought about changes opposed to local sociocultural practices of socialization, recreation, and livelihood. In addition to the local administration’s projects, the national government also embarked on a strategy of urban transformation in Guayaquil’s southern consolidated informal areas. In 2009, it claimed jurisdiction over the Salado Estuary areas and started executing a component of its emblematic project “Guayaquil Ecológico.”4 This spatial intervention aimed to provide the inhabitants of the city with green areas for recreation and contact with nature, thereby encouraging the generation of permanent environmental services in the city (Ministerio del Ambiente, 2018). The project originally planned the redevelopment of 37 kilometers of waterfront, divided into 11 Tramos (portions) of a linear park along the Salado Estuary. Although its partial construction has significantly increased the city’s tally of recreation areas, it had by 2014 involved the eviction of more than 15,000 people (MIDUVI, 2015) from several southern informal settlements such as El Suburbio Oeste and Isla Trinitaria.

8.6

Public Space in El Cisne Dos

El Cisne Dos is part of El Suburbio Oeste, the city’s oldest informal area, which by 1950 had become the foremost site of informal occupation in southern Guayaquil. Since then, it has absorbed the demands for housing caused by massive migration waves of people moving from the central tugurios 5 to peripheral marshlands. In El Cisne Dos, individual 4 The project Guayaquil Ecológico has included interventions on Santay Island and in the Salado Estuary—and the construction of Samanes Park. 5 Rented, precarious, small housing units in subdivided buildings in the center of the city that usually house several families in poor living conditions.

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land occupation6 and auto-construction started in the 1970s and consolidated through an incremental process. Newcomers settled on marshlands, configuring a regular grid of plots of 10 × 30 meters and an urban grid which, over the years, has expanded into the Salado Estuary. Initially, the estuary’s wooden stilt houses lacked sewage, electricity, and water; the urban landscape was dominated by catwalks that tried to address the absence of roads and sidewalks (Moser, 1997, 2009, p. 2). According to Moser (1997, p. 29), initial precarious conditions started to improve by the 1980s with the replacement of wooden houses by permanent structures and the filling in of the mangrove swamps. Between 1992 and 2000, with most of its inhabitants still living in poverty,7 the legalization of plots introduced the first institutional interventions for upgrading public space and community facilities in the area. The process of spatial production and transformation in El Cisne Dos has included the interaction between inhabitants’ efforts and institutional responses. Social organizations—comités barriales [neighborhood committees] and sports associations—and community facilities have been crucial for articulating inhabitants’ claims and institutional initiatives to provide infrastructure, services, and social programs (Moser, 1997, p. 79). Although “bottom-up” processes were fundamental for the neighborhood’s development, the conditions for spatial or social improvement have also been very much determined by top-down political agendas and political clientelism. Alliances between neighborhood associations and political parties were based on promises of spatial improvement, infrastructure, or legalization in exchange for votes (Menéndez-Carrión, 1986, p. 216). These different types of interactions have been part of the gradual environmental improvement through which El Cisne Dos has become a consolidated area occupying about 225 hectares and housing about 90,000 inhabitants8 (Sánchez, 2014, p. 42). Over the last few decades, local and national governments have executed several spatial interventions to provide extra public space.

6 The public municipal land in El Cisne Dos has followed a process of individual occupation rather than of organized invasions. 7 According to Moser (1997, p. 32), the levels of poverty in El Cisne Dos by 1997 were higher than in the country as a whole. 8 In 2001, El Cisne Dos had 71,296. Current population is calculated with a rate of population growth of 1.8% (annual change).

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Besides the improvement of street infrastructure, new projects have introduced sports facilities and waterfronts. Nevertheless, “the heart of the popular Guayaquil”9 still presents issues related to infrastructure and land ownership (El Telégrafo, 2019). Being part of larger governmentled initiatives and political agendas, these interventions differ in location, schemes of implementation and social participation, spatial configuration, and management approaches. They also differ in terms of their impact on community dynamics and inhabitants’ appropriation. Three interventions are representative for the following examination: La Pista, Tramo 5—Guayaquil Ecologico, and Las Palmeras. 8.6.1

La Pista

The area known as “La Pista,” at the waterfront of the Puerto Lisa Estuary, houses a combination of spaces for recreation, religion, and community care in a fenced site of 45,000 square meters. These were designed and implemented gradually by the Municipality of Guayaquil, starting with the construction of a CAMI10 and sports courts in 1995. By that time, the area was already a reference point for recreational activities within El Suburbio Oeste. These first interventions were followed by the construction of a municipal healthcare center in 2003, a Catholic church in 2011—redeveloped in 2017—and a baseball pitch and covered outdoor area in 2016. Lastly, a redeveloped waterfront and a plazoleta were inaugurated in August 2017—since when this public square hosts the annual “Procesión del Cristo del Consuelo,”11 attracting thousands of people around the city’s tallest monument protruding far above the twostory buildings around it. The local government manages this project and, similarly to many other public spaces in the city, its security and control are in the charge of private security guards.

9 Term used by the Mayor Jaime Nebot S. during a public intervention on 4 July 2017 in the context of the urban regeneration in El Cisne Dos. 10 Centro de Atención Municipal Integral [Municipal Center of Integral Attention]: CAMIs are spaces that aim to offer a wide range of services for individual and community development. They focus on the rural and urban marginal areas of Guayaquil. 11 Procesión del Cristo del Consuelo [Cristo del Consuelo Procession] is the one of the most significant Catholic events in the city. It occurs once a year during Easter and attracts thousands of people. In 2019, 500,000 people completed their pilgrimage in the plazoleta of El Cisne Dos.

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Tramo 5—Guayaquil Ecológico

This 3.5 kilometer linear park, inaugurated in 2015, is part of the national government’s Project Guayaquil Ecológico. It develops the waterfront of two neighborhoods, La Colmena and El Cisne Dos, along the Palanqueado and Mogollón estuaries and includes an open pedestrian corridor with recreation areas and green spaces. The project’s claimed “green” ambitions included ecological restoration measures such as 40 purification islands on the estuary. Guayaquil Ecológico’s impact, in ecological and social terms; its design; and its implementation mechanisms have been contested because of the displacement of the urban poor and a lack of engagement with local dynamics. In El Cisne Dos, the new project’s construction has resulted in a radical landscape transformation and the relocation of about 800 families to the northern periphery of Guayaquil. 8.6.3

Las Palmeras

This initiative, near La Pista and Tramo 5, has emerged from the neighborhood’s prize in the “Mejoremos Nuestra Cuadra” contest in 2018. The Municipality of Guayaquil organized the competition, which was officially presented as an initiative to encourage citizen participation in benefit of the collectivity, and linked to the neighborhood’s self-esteem and aesthetic improvement. This intervention model—based on aesthetics and intense, temporary neighbor participation—has led to interventions on the streets, sidewalks, and open spaces in Las Palmeras. Neighbors’ actions have concentrated on embellishing the streetscape, painting building facades, traffic signs, and a covered exterior place for social interaction. After the intervention, the management and maintenance are still the responsibility of the Municipality of Guayaquil; however, inhabitants take care of plants and ornaments.

8.7

Multiple Re-appropriation Practices

The characteristics of the spatial interventions mentioned above have defined particular conditions for interaction with the daily life of the inhabitants of El Cisne Dos. Modes of production, spatial configuration, materiality, and regulations influence everyday interactions and spatial appropriation. In these urban landscapes, socialization, recreation, and economic and productive activities configure the neighborhood’s

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dynamics and rhythms. The different categories discussed below describe practices of re-appropriation identified in the implemented projects, revealing the interactions between inhabitants and their physical conditions. They also reflect local cultural practices as well as the neighborhood’s socio-economic structures. The re-appropriation activities have been grouped into categories that try to summarize the nature of these multiple mechanisms of appropriation. 8.7.1

Re-appropriation and Livelihood

Similarly to other areas in Guayaquil, the informal sector in El Cisne Dos has always been an essential source of income and livelihoods (Moser, 1997, p. 33). Streets have been the primary places for informal vending and trade. Currently, the area displays many inhabitants appropriating the neighborhood’s public spaces in order to meet economic needs: vendors occupy sidewalks and streets near nodes of activities, for example. However, none of the government’s upgrading projects contemplates any form of commercial exchange within its borders—for instance, there are access restrictions on vendors in La Pista while sports and socialization are encouraged. Nonetheless, the area does not avoid the presence of street vendors, who temporarily occupy some spots there. Daily, they walk around within the fenced areas, selling snacks to people training or playing sports—or they meet potential customers in the surrounding streets and the redeveloped waterfront by using bicycles or tricycles. While non-stationary vendors do not have a fixed selling point, a few non-permanent food kiosks temporarily appropriate the sidewalks along the fenced perimeter of La Pista (Fig. 8.1). Often, these sellers locate their kiosks close to main pedestrian flows, next to the accesses or nodes of activities at the waterfront. Their number increases during weekends and holidays when the use of interior sports courts intensifies. The streets in the project’s surroundings are also appropriated for commercial purposes. Although the urban fabric near La Pista is mainly residential, the analysis identifies a few tiendas,12 workshops, and restaurants occupying the sidewalks and streets. In addition, mobile food kiosks place plastic furniture to mark temporary spaces in order to allow for income-generating activities.

12 Small local stores that usually belong to the owner of a house and that occupy a room on the ground floor of the dwelling.

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Fig. 8.1 Temporary food kiosks in the perimeter of La Pista Photograph taken in El Cisne Dos in 2018

In Tramo 5 and Las Palmeras, the spatial appropriation by street vendors is not as common as in La Pista. In Las Palmeras, residential activities dominate the streetscape and only a few itinerant street vendors move around the streets. The most noticeable appropriation is the one by a workshop that uses the sidewalk and street as working space. On the new waterfront of Tramo 5, too, relatively few spots are appropriated by economic activities. Only a handful of small workshops use part of the sidewalks as spaces for accumulating tools or construction materials. A tienda, next to the linear park, is an exception in the field of spatial appropriation: it occasionally extends its activities to an area that is configured by permanent benches installed in the linear park.

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8.7.2

Re-appropriation and Recreation

The provision of spaces for recreational activities has been the main focus of the projects developed in El Cisne Dos. The area’s historical lack of planned public spaces, as in other parts of El Suburbio Oeste, led to the use of streets as the primary places for playing sports and socialization. The implementation of the projects has provided a new setting for these activities and also a different normative framework. Although the new projects offer the spatial conditions for socialization and recreation, they have not prevented people from using other places in the neighborhood for the same purpose, as part of their traditional routines. La Pista includes sports courts for soccer, baseball, and basketball and attracts people from other parts of the city—especially from Trinitaria Island, across the estuary. However, the inhabitants of the neighborhood still play in their three drawn-up sports courts on the project’s perimeter; these spaces still constitute essential places for social encounters. The temporary arrangement of goals, nets, and furniture attracts adult men in the afternoons and at weekends. Similarly, in Las Palmeras, soccer pitches drawn on the street provide areas in which to play and interact. The street is a temporary, near-home social space used mainly by people from the surrounding blocks. The activities in these temporary spaces are organized and managed by the inhabitants, who determine the conditions for use and possible regulations. They also deal with negotiations and potential conflicts emerging from the temporary transformations. For instance, soccer and ecuavoley 13 games in the perimeter of La Pista affect passers-by because of the closure of streets and the interruption of pedestrian and vehicular circulation. Likewise, runners training at the redeveloped waterfront and in the open plazoleta occupy streets and areas assigned for resting. By contrast, the areas within the fenced perimeter of La Pista allow fewer programmatic alterations or temporary adaptations. Access restrictions, opening schedules, spatial functionality, permits, and planned schedules managed by the administration determine their use. Tramo 5 presents better conditions regarding access and restrictions. It is open, with no control access or regulations, and with several recreational areas; however, its spaces are severely underused and empty most of the time.

13 A variant of volleyball played in Ecuador.

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Re-appropriation and Socialization

The re-appropriation of the neighborhood’s streets and sidewalks allows for planned and unplanned social interactions. Around La Pista, the organization of afternoon bingo sessions attracts women from nearby areas who concentrate in ephemeral spaces in front of a tienda or an organizer’s house (Fig. 8.2). The host of the itinerant sessions configures a temporary space through the arrangement of plastic chairs and tables, and tents. Other spaces for ephemeral socialization can be identified at the waterfront in Tramo 5 and in La Pista. They emerge at the stops of the informal canoe connections that seek to improve accessibility to Trinitaria Island. The flows of people, generated by these canoes transporting inhabitants from the island, sometimes result in spontaneous gatherings and opportunities for commerce and interaction around these waiting spots.

Fig. 8.2 Neighbors playing bingo on the streets in front of La Pista Photograph taken in El Cisne Dos in 2018

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In Las Palmeras, opportunities for social interaction occur differently. Such encounters are influenced thereby the extension of domestic spaces rather than by organized gatherings. Interior areas—of small, and often uncomfortably hot, houses—expand onto the sidewalks. Using nonpermanent furniture, inhabitants sit outside their homes and interact—by force or desire—with neighbors or passers-by. The governmental interventions in Las Palmeras have aimed at fostering neighbors’ encounters by constructing a new covered community area, but ordinary interactions still mainly occur in near-home spaces. Although inhabitants identified this facility as a novel gathering place and symbol of collective effort, the observations and the sign “Thanks for your visit” suggest that it is a place assigned for visitors more than for everyday use by locals. 8.7.4

Re-appropriation and Personalization

Some different acts of appropriation are also visible in inhabitants’ initiatives for personalizing or territorializing the projects. On the waterfront of Tramo 5 along the Palanqueado Estuary, signs of a new identity and collective effort coexist with the appropriation of some areas by specific groups. Underused spaces, new playgrounds, and exercise areas have been occupied by drug consumers and homeless people, who dispute the space with neighbors and visitors. These occupations also raise concerns about neighborhood safety and privacy, motivating inhabitants’ interventions in the new public space to deal with these conditions. Gardens and wooden fences have been installed to make new transition zones, transforming portions of the interface between the public space and the facades or blind walls that have remained after the demolition of houses. Most of these appropriations do not allow any activity but contribute to privacy and visual identity. At the same time, they avoid the use of these areas by the aforementioned undesired groups. Organized collective actions toward the territorialization and personalization of exterior areas also constitute responses to new challenges that the project has brought about in terms of management and maintenance. In the initial years of the project, it was properly maintained by the local and national government but, due to a lack of institutional maintenance today, neighbors have organized themselves to take some soft measures for its management and care. These include the installation of trash cans, signs on the walls, and fences to protect trees (Fig. 8.3). Similar actions are evident in Las Palmeras, where the overall project

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Fig. 8.3 Fenced gardens along Tramo 5—Guayaquil Ecológico Photograph taken in El Cisne Dos in 2018

has encouraged these types of interventions on sidewalks, streets, and facades. However, the interventions there have emerged from a top-down initiative supporting a pseudo-grassroots organization. It responds to a scheme based on isolated actions in which the actual contributions to the neighborhood’s everyday re-appropriation practices remain questionable.

8.8

Conclusions

The practices of re-appropriation identified in El Cisne Dos respond to inhabitants’ ordinary needs and desires. Through actions related to livelihood, recreation, socialization, and spatial personalization, the inhabitants of this area re-appropriate spaces that have been built within institutional conceptualizations of public space. Here, as in other cities in the Global South, outdoor spaces are fundamental assets for livelihood and sociocultural expression for people living in poverty (Bayat, 2010, p. 12).

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However, the new spatial settings, which are not deeply immersed in local conditions, have defined certain constraints on spontaneous social interaction and possibilities for appropriation. Analyses reveal that daily practices represent renegotiation initiatives linked to the neighborhood’s cultural and socioeconomic characteristics. In this sense, individual and collective actions can be considered as non-organized claims for spaces and use not fully incorporated into the upgrading initiatives. The analysis also provides insights into inhabitants’ active role in transforming public space in El Cisne Dos. As in other consolidated informal areas in Latin American cities, temporary changes unfold primarily in streets and open spaces (Duhau & Giglia, 2008; Hernández García, 2010; Lombard, 2014). In the proximity of the interventions, everyday practices constitute tactics that respond to spatial divides and rigid regulatory frameworks. Physical barriers and regulations reinforce boundaries—separating interior regulated activities from the neighborhood’s dynamics. Nevertheless, the recurrence and multiplicity of actions in the surrounding streets demonstrate the inhabitants’ agency and mechanisms for creating opportunities and favorable conditions. Limits become blurred by the use of mobile objects and furniture that allow for flexibility and adaptation. Temporary spatial arrangements emerge from inhabitants’ routines and needs, defining specific urban rhythms. Nevertheless, the participation of inhabitants in the reconfiguration of space led by institutions has been limited. The acts of re-appropriations in El Cisne Dos also include varying degrees of permanent negotiation, cooperation, and conflict between different groups. The transformed landscapes manifest the tensions between inhabitants’ everyday lives and certain groups’ illegal activities in public space. As an open area, with no regulations, Tramo 5 sees appropriations and conflict emerging simultaneously. To manage these tensions, local knowledge—developed through inhabitants’ daily urban experience—is fundamental. Beyond the tension emerging from diverse interests, these settings were also the places where collective actions and social cooperation started to emerge. In Tramo 5, the high degree of personalization is linked to collective identification and spatial-improvement efforts. These forms of association are connected to distinctive mechanisms of cooperation and cohesion that have allowed the endurance of these neighborhoods. Such tactics evidence the potential that association has for the material and social transformation of spaces

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linked to a social fabric, which has been developed over decades of the auto-construction of urban space. An examination of the aforementioned multiple re-appropriation mechanisms offers the possibility for foregrounding the specific realities of consolidated informal neighborhoods like El Cisne Dos. At the same time, it highlights the need to reconsider the application of standardized spatial models within them. Spatial interventions should use a perspective grounded in their inhabitants’ everyday appropriations, incorporating their multiple ways of operating in space, local practices, and meanings—looking beyond approaches aimed at standardized aesthetics and spatial products. An emphasis on the role of inhabitants in transforming spatial and social dynamics, and the actions undertaken for this transformation, could inform ways of reconfiguring spaces as platforms of opportunities for social relations and livelihoods. Spatial interventions should also respond to the changing conditions of everyday processes rather than being schemes based on rigid models and control. They need to incorporate the mechanisms, multiple devices, local experiences, and practices that enable appropriation—so as to overcome a focus on specific uses and users. A context-specific approach to public-space upgrading should integrate the dynamics of urban informality into spatial practices, responding to the imperatives for urban practice that enable meaningful environments, social inclusion, and the flourishing of social life. Acknowledgements Xavier Méndez Abad’s research at KU Leuven is funded by an scholarship from the Ecuadorian Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) within the program “Convocatoria Abierta 2016”.

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CHAPTER 9

Situated Modernities: Socio-Spatial Co-Production in Namibia Guillermo Delgado

9.1

Introduction

There has been a significant transition in Namibia that has been neither documented nor theorised sufficiently. This transition constitutes a shift from a kind of Western European capitalist modernity to processes based on principles fundamentally different from it, which can be observed in bottom-up processes in urban development. This chapter illustrates this transition by tracing the emergence and outlining the workings of these processes while highlighting the contrast between them and statutory processes—which arguably follow the specific, dominant kind of modernity that I define further below. The decades prior to independence

This chapter is dedicated with gratitude to Prof Vanessa Watson. G. Delgado (B) Department of Land and Property Sciences & Integrated Land Management Institute, Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), Windhoek, Namibia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 197 Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_9

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in 1990 were characterised by modernist approaches, creating an ubercontrolled territorial and urban development that was led by a strong state and professional elites. However, around the time of independence, this model suffered important transformations that allowed spatial production in the country to open up. The new administration saw the limits of the kind of provision that had characterised the previous dispensation, and some bottom-up groups and a few committed professionals mobilised nationally and internationally to develop mechanisms that were much more widely accessible. The individuals involved in these processes— professionals, community organisers, church leaders—were influenced by figures such as Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire, who inverted notions of development by placing the grassroots, instead of the state, at the centre of the action (Freire, 2000 [1968]), and John Turner, whose writings became internationally known for foregrounding the relevance of the inhabitants of precarious settlements leading and implementing the improvement of their own living conditions (e.g. Turner, 1976; Turner & Fichter, 1972). While these processes have gradually earned legitimacy at different levels, today they still are regarded as marginal vis-à-vis the support that other initiatives currently draw. In this chapter, I expand on the relevance of these processes by discussing their theoretical and practical relevance. For this chapter, I draw on the work that I undertook when documenting bottom-up-led processes and researching urban development in Namibia during my doctoral research (Delgado, 2019). In particular, I refer to the earlier chapters outlining the historical context of spatial production in Namibia. For this purpose, I reviewed historical documents and triangulated these with in-depth interviews with actors who were professionally active before the time of independence. For this chapter, there was a need to expand on the way that planning for housing took place in the 1980s. To do this, I conducted another round of semi-structured interviews with professionals who were active then. Researching the decades of the 1980s and 90s is strategic, as it is still possible to find living professionals working during that decade in order to triangulate the existing documentation. For this, I asked them to outline the general context in which their practice took place; the actors involved in planning; and, particularly, the role of professionals and inhabitants in the process. I use their accounts as evidence to qualify existing documentation and literature on spatial production, and to pinpoint the ways in which inhabitants were engaged in these processes. In the discussion,

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I mobilise this to contrast the statutory and the bottom-up processes emerging in the 1990s. This chapter begins, in Sect. 9.2, by outlining definitions of modernity by thinkers in Latin American and Africa, linking conceptualisations of modernity to spatial production. Section 9.3 outlines the key spatial developments that I use for the subsequent discussion. I focus on development in the 1980s and 1990s—the time around independence—and on the expansion of bottom-up practices in the decades that followed. In Sect. 9.4, I contrast contemporary statutory development with the bottom-up practices, and thereafter discuss the relevance of these in the context of Namibia as well as for theoretical debates on modernity in the Global South. The paper concludes in Sect. 9.5, drawing together the main arguments of this chapter.

9.2

Modernity and Spatial Production

Numerous volumes have been dedicated to a critique of modernist planning and logic, but it is important to spell out the kind of modernity employed when referring to it. It is well established how the modernist ethos, which seemed to promise universal welfare through a specific definition of progress, had, since the time of the Industrial Revolution, been constructed in the image of the factory. This kind of modernity was premised on centralised power—notably in the state and its technocrats— a critique that is well articulated in the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno (2002 [1947]) among others. What are less well established, and are currently the locus of vibrant debates, are alternatives to this paradigm. To engage in this conversation, I draw from thinkers of the Global South. The first key point is to highlight the difference between the broadly used term “modernity” and the kind of modernity that could be appropriate to account for spatial production in Namibia. For Echeverría (2016), modernity has its origins in Western Europe and is capitalist in nature. While the nature of this modernity is dominant and totalising, he acknowledges that it is far from having “buried” or “annulled” other “non” or “pre-modern” organising principles (Echeverría, 2016, p. 17, own translation). Garuba, in his writings about modernity and colonialism, reflects on the disciplinary separation characterising the modern project and the disregard for whatever escapes such categorisations. Although he refers primarily to the production of knowledge, I mobilise this argument here in the context of the production of space. He argues that the colonial/modern rejects “the ‘messiness’ of the ‘lesser’ disciplines” and relegates what is outside to the realm of the other—i.e. that

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which is not civilising and which, ultimately, pertains to the field of “animism” (Garuba, 2012, p. 5). This coincides with Echeverría juxtaposing Western European capitalist modernity to the realm of magic (Echeverría, 2016). This will become relevant as we discuss the role of spatial professionals and their defence of the discipline. Colonialism provided a specific way for this modernity to be imposed in “new” territories. Garuba writes of how “colonial conceptions of space and people […] were premised on a Cartesian logic which foregrounded the fantasy of an autonomous subject with a privileged view casting his [sic.] eye over transparent space” (2002, p. 87). This “Cartesian” logic of surveying and mapping would lay the ground for the project of parcelling up land at territorial and urban scales, imbuing it with expectations (e.g. monetary value, increase in value), liabilities, and procedures that could only be administered by those to whom this logic was legible. The appalling gap between those holding such knowledge and those inhabiting the land is an attribute of both the modernity that was imposed in places like Namibia as well as of the mechanisms (e.g. colonialism) through which these logics were instituted. This Western European capitalist modernity was propagated and established through various mechanisms: colonialism; asymmetrical international and trade relations; and, in some cases, war. In the African context, Coquery-Vidrovitch proposes the disaggregation of processes that—while indeed interlinked and related—can be analytically approached individually, such as colonisation, the introduction of the capitalist system, the Western European definition of modernity, and urbanisation (1991). Too often, it is assumed that all these aspects were part of one single process, which reduces the process of urban development to a product of colonialism, capitalism, and modernism. However, mobilising Echeverría’s and Garuba’s arguments allows us to look at these processes separately and reassemble them to situate a definition of modernity that speaks to the experiences I outline below. For the remainder of this chapter, when speaking about modernity, I thus speak of a Western European capitalist modernity introduced and implemented in Namibia through colonialism. Once a definition and critique of modernity have been outlined, the crux of the matter remains in locating the limits to and/or cracks within these processes. Echeverría speaks of a freedom preached by modernity that “generates just the opposite than what was announced [e.g. civilization, progress through technical innovation]” (Echeverría, 2016, p. 31).

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He notes how for some the “vision of a new man or woman is individualistic”. Freire also points out how the resolution of the contradictions of oppression can give way to liberation, but warns of the different visions of “liberation”. He exemplifies this with the call for land redistribution, saying how, for some of those pursuing this goal, “it is not to become free […], but in order to acquire land and thus become landowners – or, more precisely, bosses over other workers” (Freire, 2000 [1968], p. 46). He also speaks of a “private revolution” (2000 [1968], p. 46) that coincides with Echeverría’s critique of modernity, noting how society’s unit is reduced to an individual rather than a family unit or a village (2016). The key points in these arguments are twofold: on the one hand, the risk of a false or distorted liberation as the contradictions of one oppression are overcome (e.g. independence); and on the other, the tendency to reduce liberation to the freedom of an individual, a small group, or an elite. These two outcomes provide a second theoretical argument regarding what could lie beyond “false” or “reduced” definitions of freedom. The last theoretical point is to situate Namibia in discussions about the state on the African continent. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, state formation took place at a time when neoliberal policies, predicating a retreat of the state, were starting to take hold elsewhere. This created the irony of so-called developed countries—in many cases, the former colonial powers—encouraging the recently independent states to establish government structures (Bratton, 1989). However, in the case of Namibia—as was also the case in South Africa and other countries in the region—the state was rather well established at the time of independence, and followed a version of the modernist logic of Western countries. In Namibia, this had a characteristic racial emphasis that left a strong legacy on urban development. More than emphasising the racist aspects of Southern African planning, what is worth highlighting in this chapter is the modality in which planning took place in Namibia. It was implemented by a strong, centralised, and well-resourced state assisted by a technocratic elite executing modernist planning in an overtly reductive and authoritarian way. This relegated inhabitants to beneficiaries with, at best, some level of local democracy (e.g. neighbourhood committees) and at worst, a reduction of their set of rights to the bare minimum in urban areas. The almost total control over the movement of Black bodies in urban areas is something that cannot be overstated (Lemon, 1991). This fact is relevant to note as we unpack contemporary spatial production in Namibia in the following sections.

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9.3

Namibia’s Emerging Modernities

The establishment of modernity has been a gradual process with a relative recent history. Namibia’s process of colonisation also began gradually, with early British traders and Finnish missionaries paving the way for an eventual German colonisation towards the end of the eighteenth century. While comparatively brief, German colonial rule left a strong imprint on the country—particularly in its land-administration system, its governance, and its small yet well-educated and -endowed settler population. During this time, not only were the basic structures of spatial development and governance created but settlers also kept ties to European institutions, continuing to implement such practices—surveying, mapping, parcelling, and redistributing the territory—as they deemed fit for their own benefit. The subsequent—and, for a long time, illegal— administration of Namibia by South Africa from the end of the First World War until independence in 1990 consolidated this form of development, shifting the centre of state power from Berlin to Pretoria. From a governance point of view, Namibia was a province of a stronger power elsewhere, thereby reducing local government to the targeted function of running a few centralities strategic for the administration of the territory: ports, administrative centres for the broader agrarian hinterland, military outposts, and the ever-exceptional capital city Windhoek. For urban development, a key transition happened around the time of independence. Already in the 1980s, the spatial logic of apartheid started to be dismantled; but at the same time, conventional modernist planning and segregational practices (e.g. unevenly distributing the benefits of urban development) continued. Around this time, grassroots associations focused on issues of access to land for housing emerged and gained increased support from professionals and other actors and institutions (e.g. churches). Local government was transformed significantly in the 1990s and, although decentralisation as an aim held some sway in the later part of the decade, it remains today an underdeveloped and underfunded endeavor. Experimentation through international cooperation projects started to take place during this decade. In short, this period is relevant for studying and pinpointing the actual difference that emerged in spatial production in Namibia after decades of oppressive rule. The following sections focus, therefore, on the way in which urban development and housing production took place in the 1980s and 90s and outline a few events, which proved key for bottom-up practices, that took place subsequently.

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Modernist Planning: Property and State-Led Housing Production in the 1980s

“It was very top down”. That is how a young architect working at the time in a state-owned housing company described the process of planning for housing in Namibia in the 1980s. At that stage, the regulations of apartheid had begun to be dismantled—and Namibia was seen as a kind of laboratory for South Africa to test the effects of a transition to democratic rule. At this point, home ownership for Blacks1 was introduced through the sale of existing public housing to tenants and through the development of new housing through the state-owned “National Building Corporation” (Nasboukor, a contraction following the name of the company in Afrikaans). This model was brought to Namibia by professionals from Zimbabwe, who were invited by the administration to introduce a system of homeownership for Blacks that had been implemented there at this point. The notion of homeownership was nonexistent among Black communities in the 1980s because they had not previously been allowed to own land in urban areas. Those Blacks living in urban areas had to have a clear “purpose” to be there, usually defined by formal employment; otherwise, they were expected to return to their so-called homelands. In urban areas, their only housing option comprised municipal or company-owned rentals, contract labour compounds, or staff quarters on employee’s premises. Nasboukor emerged as a professional institution that, while efficient, had almost no engagement with the future inhabitants of its housing projects. Nasboukor was an unpopular organisation at various levels. At the grassroots, it was seen as a project of the loathed racist administration, whose schemes made payments for housing more expensive. The repayments for homeownership introduced by Nasboukor were higher than the rentals that inhabitants had been used to. Although the monthly payments were intended to eventually lead to homeownership, the lack of involvement of inhabitants in the process created a deficit of awareness and, for many, housing simply became more expensive. The purported “liberatory” welfare objectives of the institution (i.e. homeownership for Blacks) around the time of independence were implemented in a similar, if not identical, manner to previous state-led interventions: in a very top-down 1 Here “Blacks” is capitalized to refer to the consciousness and intellectual tradition reclaiming race as a field of struggle (Gordon, 2018).

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way. The organisation no longer exists but it can be said to be the predecessor of the National Housing Enterprise, a state-owned enterprise in charge of housing delivery in a similar—yet reduced-capacity—fashion. During the decade of the 1980s, urban development in Namibia was squarely a state endeavour. It is important to emphasise that the apartheid administration was premised on almost absolute control, and urban areas—being comparatively dense centralities—received considerable attention from the regime at that time. Professionals were primarily employed directly by the state, and were therefore expected to contribute to its aims. The administration resorted only occasionally to private consulting firms for projects that could not be undertaken by its own staff contingent. In the 1980s in Namibia, there was only one townplanning consulting firm—which was, furthermore, a local branch of a South African company. Planning was “just copied from South Africa”, the architect that I interviewed recalls. In some cases, a town planner working in Nasboukor in the 1980s recalled, consultants would not even visit the site and drew plans for entire municipal extensions with little regard for the place. Engagement with communities in local governance did not happen at this stage; local governance included representatives from different neighbourhoods, but these were not instrumental. Nasboukor allocated housing based on a waiting-list system, and the institution would only engage those selected as beneficiaries. This engagement was, however, intended merely to match applicants with the housing types developed. As the planner working there in the 1980s recalled, “there was no community engagement or development, it was about the house itself”. Other actors in urban development were not part of the process back then. Large-scale private developers only started to operate in the country in the mid-1980s. Up to that stage, individuals would resort to buying land and developing their own houses. In the 1980s, as restrictions on movement started to ease, the need for low-income housing started to surpass supply, and the state was beginning to reach the limits of its capacity to provide housing. At the same time, there were no non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in the field of urban development, which would be another significant change with the advent of independence in 1990 (Fig. 9.1).

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Fig. 9.1 Diagram of actors involved in the development of land for housing in urban areas in Namibia throughout the decades. Red lines indicate actors involved in the bottom-up processes described below (see 9.3.2) (Source Delgado [2018, 2019])

9.3.2

The Emergence of Co-Produced Urban Development

The key change for urban development in the following decade or so (1990–2000s) was cooperation between a wider set of actors and the new government. Locally, the ease of restrictions for gatherings allowed grassroots organisations to start forming and gaining increased recognition and support. Independence brought an influx of foreigners to Namibia, including diplomats, professionals, and international cooperation agencies. These agencies left an imprint through projects in the growing urban areas in the country, many of them experimenting with new ways of ensuring inclusion and participatory governance. These initiatives approached participatory urban development in different ways—from instituting grassroots organisations to lead development—e.g. Oshakati Human Settlements Improvement Project (MRLGH & Ibis, 1996)—to engaging through consultation and sensitisation—e.g. Oshatotwa (SUMMcNamara Consultants, 1993). A thorough study of these projects remains outstanding and is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, in what follows, I focus on the emergence of the now well-established grassroots movement of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) and its support NGO, the Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG),

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tracing their development in order to illustrate the various influences informing their practice. The transition to independence changed the state itself in many ways. In a very short period, the government shifted from being led by a privileged white elite to the Black majority that had been thus far disadvantaged by the system. The novelty of being in charge for the first time is a factor to consider. In her autobiography, the first Minister of Local Government and Housing recounted that she did not have much knowledge about urban development when she came to power, as she had been trained as a medical doctor (Amathila, 2012). She embarked on a quest to inform herself, being genuinely interested in mechanisms to support the urban poor. The mechanisms to support shelter established during her tenure ranged from having some component of community empowerment to more paternalistic schemes. To illustrate the former, she invited a Sri Lankan architect who had experience with his country’s “Million Housing Programme” to develop the Build Together Programme, a state-supported micro-finance scheme supporting access and improvement of shelter (UN-Habitat, 2014). This programme continues today and is generally regarded as being one of the country’s most impactful government-housing initiatives. For the latter mechanism, the idea of government building houses for and on behalf of the poor and relocating the inhabitants of informal settlements was also entrenched during her tenure. The government would “pick people from the dumpsites, put them in houses, and shortly after people were back at the dumpsites”, the architect recalls. While the former approach entailed support for lowincome inhabitants’ initiatives, the latter aimed at providing a kind of middle-class housing delivery (i.e. entailing repayments requiring a formal job) for the urban poor. These contrasting examples illustrate the context that influenced the pace and manner of delivery during this decade. In the light of such developments, the emergence of grassroots mobilisation around the issue of land for housing is an example of the convergence of multiple influences with a need and a process already taking place at the grassroots. It was around the time of independence, when informal settlements had started to grow and the work of government entities had already started to appear insufficient. Lowincome communities were already congregating for savings and religious purposes. Members of the Catholic Church at the time were influenced by the teachings of Freire. The impact of Catholic Church members on issues of shelter happened around the world, and can be exemplified by

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the development of institutions and networks like the Latin American, African and Asian Social Housing Service (SELAVIP) and Shack Dwellers International (SDI). The interest of religious groups in improving the living conditions of the most vulnerable led to the focus on shelter—and in Namibia, this was also the case. “It coincided with what we were already doing”, says the architect, who in the 1980s was researching communities gathered around issues of shelter, referring to the influence of the churches and Freire. She was herself influenced by the writings of Turner when pursuing postgraduate degrees in architecture in the UK. Some congregations of Catholic churches built a small number of houses for vulnerable members, but it soon became clear that a more adequate strategy was to facilitate access to land for inhabitants to produce their own housing. This was both a Freirean approach and the beginning of co-productive development in the country. Life-size housing models, built out of affordable fabric, served to visualise the planned housing and helped as a mobilisation tool. This happened around the time of independence in 1990, a time imbued with high hopes and the promise of freedom and equality. The co-productive practices, which are described in more detail below, were community-initiated and entailed a process of accessing land for shelter collectively and incrementally upgrading it in partnership with local authorities and others. Initially, the relationship between savings groups and local and central government was “lukewarm”, recalls the architect, who worked with these groups in the 1990s. Organised lowincome groups were still generally regarded as “recipients” of welfare and incapable of undertaking the kind of development so far designed and implemented by the professional elites. During the early stages of SDFN, the risk of the professionals supporting the processes taking over the lead was identified—so a discussion started on how to enable communities to remain in the central role. The group of professionals assisting communities in their process eventually institutionalised an NGO in the late 1990s. Its rationale was to make clear that the professional body, constituted as an NGO, was only there to support the community-based organisation. During the initial years of SDFN/NHAG activity, the process of household enumerations served as a way for members to take ownership of the process. This entailed gathering information about the informal settlement in question and its inhabitants, which also served as a way of negotiating with the local authorities and others. This activity has since been consolidated in the Community Land Information Programme

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(CLIP) (SDFN, 2009). CLIP is the initial step in the process of upgrading informal settlements; today, it provides information on almost all informal settlements in the country, which is used in official government documents and programmes. Dialogue with sister federations and NGOs opened up in the 1990s, with visits to South Africa and India. This was facilitated by NGOs and religious groups and allowed for a mutual strengthening of organisations as well as the realisation of the planetary dimension and relevance of local experiences. The exchange was not only about technical aspects of improving living conditions but also about the relationships between actors—particularly, inhabitants and the state. Reflecting on the exchanges with India, a South African community leader remembers how “Indians were leading the discussion then” (Molokoane, 2019, p. 2) and how some federation members visited South Africa in 1991 and warned them about not expecting living conditions to automatically improve after electing a new government. This was something hard to grasp in the midst of the high hopes that the imminent Mandela Presidency in South Africa would inspire in many. The limits of state-led delivery were, however, laid bare soon afterwards (Bond, 2000). The concrete recognition of so-called people’s processes by the Namibian Government was catalysed by some of these exchanges—particularly one in which the Namibian minister was confronted by a member of the homologous federation in South Africa, who challenged him to match people’s savings with government contributions (Molokoane, 2019). Her intervention was actually effective and, since then, the Namibian government has been making an annual contribution to the Twahangana Fund, the funding instrument of the SDFN. Exchanges also enabled the possibility of upgrading in situ instead of displacing in the case of the Municipality of Gobabis, arguably the site of the largest and most accomplished informal-settlement upgrading in Namibia (for further reading, see Delgado et al., 2020). This is a practice that is ongoing (ILMI & ONE Economy Foundation, 2019; ILMI, 2017), and that continues to open up spaces for overcoming blockages through co-learning and mutual exchange. Transformations in spatial production through bottom-up processes can further be illustrated by tracing the funds. The grassroots practices outlined above eventually led to the formation of the SDFN and, shortly afterward, its support NGO: NHAG. Today, the Federation and their support NGO have mobilised millions in savings and funds from other partners to improve the living conditions of the urban poor (see Fig. 9.2).

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Fig. 9.2 Twahangana Fund since 1995: channelling over N$180 million (about US$11 million) directly to the urban poor of Namibia (Source Adapted from NHAG and SDFN [2019, p. 12])

They do so through the Tawahangana fund, a mechanism owned by the Federation and managed by the support NGO. They have gradually increased their number of active projects, and currently have sixteen of them in ten urban areas across the country, which is to eventually result in housing opportunities for about 43,000 households/families (National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading, 2020a). After decades of steady work, the ambition today is to scale up these processes nationwide (National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading, 2020b). A clear visualisation of their mobilisation of efforts and actors lies in the mapping of the sources contributing to the fund financing their processes (see Fig. 9.2). The diversity of funding and the sizeable portion of resources mobilised from inhabitants themselves demonstrate how these processes are not only led but also co-financed from the bottom up. A serviced plot of land for housing is one of the most rare and precious assets in Namibia today. Land delivery is regulated by various policies, and the process requires at least a dozen steps mediated by professionals and government institutions. The cumbersome nature of accessing land in the country is noted as a setback even in high-level institutions (World Bank, 2017) and the challenging nature of other land transactions (e.g. subdivisions, consolidations) is also well-documented (de Villiers et al., 2019). Apart from some cases in which land delivery for housing entailed an ad

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hoc subsidy for this process—e.g. during the Mass Housing Development Programme (Lühl & Delgado, 2018)—generally the costs entailed in land servicing are absorbed by the so-called end user. In 2018 or thereabouts, the average cost of a fully serviced plot of land was around N$85,000 (about US$5140), which is beyond the reach of the vast majority of the country’s low-income inhabitants. About three quarters of the population reports an individual income of less than N$10,000 (about US$600) per month (NSA, 2019), which makes any form of commercial housing finance inaccessible for them. Even if someone from this portion of the population were able to access a plot of residential land, planning regulations impose a set of requirements not only establishing permitted land use but, in some cases, also the value of the housing to be developed within a certain time frame. In addition, for many first-time urban residents (a phenomenon still important in Namibia), monthly rates and tax requirements are unexpected and often unaffordable. While much more could be said about “formal” land, it is key to highlight that this mechanism is de facto only accessible for a small minority in the country. Today, the majority of urban residents live in some kind of “informal” arrangement. Some government-run and supported programmes (e.g. Build Together and the SDFN respectively) offer assistance to those not able to access “the formal”, but the need vastly outnumbers current delivery. Local government, while historically underdeveloped and still considerably underfunded, has implemented some measures that assist the country’s lowest-income groups through operating in between existing statutory processes (e.g. through “planned layouts” for future development; see Esterhuizen, 2016). However, while these measures are currently gaining momentum and are being scaled up, illegal occupation of mostly public land remains the de facto way for the majority in Namibia to access land for housing today.

9.4 Contrasting Statutory and Bottom-Up Processes of Land Delivery I argue that these processes reimagine spatial production and can be considered a “mirrored” sequence in the process of modernist urban development. Practically speaking, the bottom-up process is initiated because modernist planning does not provide viable options for the urban poor. It is important to bear in mind that such processes start, in many cases, with illegal occupations of land, and statutory institutions engage in

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a process of upgrading these. The relevance of this process lies in its recognition of the original agency of the poor in realising independence-era promises of development, and in obtaining legitimacy through presence (Ferguson, forthcoming). These processes are, I argue, an alternative planning paradigm co-developed gradually over more than three decades that provides a feasible way for the majority of the urban population to obtain land rights. Critical to its success is the fact that the process is conceived as community-led—i.e. collectively—and that knowledge of the development process is something made accessible to and transformable by the lowest-income groups. As mentioned above, the complexity of the statutory land-delivery process in Namibia requires NGO support to provide professional technical support to federation members, but only as a flanking mechanism. The appropriation and transformation of landdelivery mechanisms developed, and conventionally managed, by a small professional elite servicing only a minority of inhabitants today is a key aspect to highlight in the transitions discussed in this chapter. A detailed discussion of the process of land delivery in Namibia, contrasting it with the steps of the bottom-up process, would extend beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I visually illustrate the key steps and parties involved in the land-delivery processes in Fig. 9.3. For the statutory process, it is central and local government, professionals, and the private sector that are the main stakeholders. In this process, inhabitants are only involved on the basis of public consultation (usually advertised in newspapers and limited to those with access to such formal platforms). Bottom-up processes show continuous engagement by inhabitants and their support NGO with the local authority, only resorting to other stakeholders as the need arises and increasingly involving university students for professional support. Universities involve students and lecturers in these processes through coursework and internships. The statutory land-delivery process ends upon the transfer of the land, whereas bottom-up processes support and incentivise members to continue with the construction of a house. It is important to note that Fig. 9.3 does not align every step, as the nature of each process differs (to take just one example, the point at which the installation of municipal services takes place in the respective processes); neither does it include a comparison of costs or time. As an indication, bottom-up processes can service land for N$15,000 (about US$900), which is almost six times less than the cost of servicing a conventional plot of land. The key point I aim

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Fig. 9.3 Comparison of statutory and bottom-up processes. Half squares in the diagram indicate only partial engagement (Source [Statutory processes—Genis, forthcoming; Ulrich & Meurers, 2015]. Bottom-up processes—National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading [2020a])

to make is that the variety of actors and the role of inhabitants (or lack thereof) in each process reveal a fundamentally collective process building on different constellations of actors assembling at various stages. There are other approaches to land delivery that are, for the sake of space, not mentioned in this section. They range from legal reform to large “affordable” housing estates driven by financial investment, to affordable forms of tenure, to the development of greenfield land made affordable through skilled project management and corporate social responsibility. All these types of development have taken place over the last decade, and their impact is still to be seen and assessed. What is already evident, however, is their relationship with inhabitants—which currently appears to be reduced to that of clients or to be regulated through mechanisms that are, to all practical purposes, beyond the

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members’ control. For now, what is most relevant to ask about these developments is whether their contribution does indeed represent a transformation of the trajectory of modernity thus far followed—or whether it is a new manifestation/iteration of it. While the bottom-up processes have demonstrated the benefits of their approach, they remain marginal today. At the moment, statutory and community-led models coexist, but it is worth noting that the former continues to be prioritised by the state. The state’s contribution to the SDFN—which has active projects in more than a dozen urban areas across the country—amounted, in the 2019/20 financial year, to N$10 million (about US$600,000). Over the same period, the capital, Windhoek—which has a limited record of successful land delivery to the urban poor—received an allocation five times this amount to service land through largely conventional methods benefiting a very small number of households (Republic of Namibia, 2020). While recognition of the bottom-up process by the state is gaining traction, the allocation of state funding does not reflect this. The recent land-delivery mechanisms briefly mentioned in the paragraph above seem also to be gaining increased attention and attracting funding, despite the fact that none has been yet implemented in full. Furthermore, a fundamental contrast exists in the way in which inhabitants are understood within the processes. The state-led approach understands inhabitants as “beneficiaries” or “recipients”, notions drawing from Western welfare-state models, but also reduces them to “households”, based on Western conceptualisations of the nuclear family. Statutory schemes are premised on individual incomes (e.g. of the head of a household, occasionally of a working spouse or relative, or a pensioned elder), limiting the possibility for resource mobilisation at the individual household. Bottom-up approaches, on the other hand, are fundamentally premised on a collective process—led by necessity vis-à-vis the scale of resources required to secure and upgrade land, but also influenced by some of the ideas outlined above. This creates a modality whereby mobilisation of resources takes place through the contributions of several households, both through monetary contributions and often through shared labour.

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9.5

Conclusion

The bottom-up process of land delivery in Namibia discussed here represents a situated modernity that is fundamentally different from the trajectory of modernity so far followed by urban development in Namibia. Through it, inhabitants have mobilised their agency and resources, and rallied professional support to negotiate and produce a city that is both accessible and transformable. New actors have come to the table and engaged via different platforms, including universities, civil-society organisations, and the private sector. Professionals have started to operate through new platforms in which their disciplinary skills can be mobilised for broader impact, such as NGOs and universities. The bottom-up processes might not be linear or fully legible for those operating through conventional professional practice—but the fact that statutory land delivery, in effect, services only a small minority in Namibia evokes Thomas Paine’s reflection on the colonial absurdity of a continent (the US, specifically) being ruled by an island (Great Britain) (Paine, 2020 [1776]). In other words, a small minority, still in receipt of most state resources, dominating the regulatory framework reproduces the spatial production of colonial modernity. However, as Echeverría noted, despite its apparent all-encompassing nature, modernity is in essence merely an attempt; it is unable to fully bury or annul other realities and possibilities. Community-led, bottom-up processes in Namibia have transformed structures by providing an alternative to the kind of spatial production that had taken place under the modernist paradigm, brought about through colonialism and consolidated through apartheid. The aforementioned transformations in spatial production are therefore, I argue, not only a medium-term transition with implications for theory at the meso level but also pregnant with the potential of subverting a seemingly allencompassing and yet inadequate and insufficient modernity. I argue that these are situated modernities, forged by the local context, which have emerged from the ground after a crack appeared in the dominant modernity—as such they are emergent; they are “young”. Bottom-up processes in urban development have been taking place for about three decades, which is a short time considering the longue durée of modernity (some placing its early origins in the European Renaissance and others, like the Frankfurt School and the critical urban theorists, in the Industrial Revolution). However, their existence can be potentiated or trumped, and the current moment, which some of us view as a “crossroads”, needs to be

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seen as such (Delgado & Dempers, 2020): as an opportunity to either fulfil a transition or perpetuate continuities that keep the largest number oppressed. These situated modernities have shown both material results and immaterial empowerment for those taking part in them. Revisiting the track record of state-led approaches from the 1960s onwards, and the new iteration of government projects since the 1990s, shows that the improvement of living conditions for the urban poor (the vast majority) will not be realised through such processes. Instead, bottom-up processes hold the potential not only to improve the living conditions of the majority but also to transform society as a whole by reconfiguring the role of the state, inhabitants, and other actors in spatial production. There is a unique potential currently at stake, in danger of being opted-out of in favour of a pathway leading to a new iteration of top-down, stateled approaches characteristic of the past. The contemporary relevance of Freire’s ideas speaks to a planetary shift away from a modernity that has become obsolete—certainly in the Global South. For professionals, this implies the need to overcome a “trust in the technical, based on the use of a reason that protects itself […] through self-control of mathematic consistency” (Echeverría, 2016, p. 14, own translation) and engage with the “messiness” that is antithetical to Western European capitalist modernity. The shift outlined here is from a mechanistic, top-down manner relegating inhabitants to the status of “recipients” or “end users” in an individualised manner (i.e. not as groups, but as individuals) to a collective, inhabitant-led mobilisation of various social actors in the production of the city. These situated modernities are emergent not only in the sense of “emerging” in a relatively recent time but also in the fact that they respond to a matter of emergency. Expanding and potentiating these processes, which I argue represent an affirmation of a transition at many levels beyond “land/housing delivery”, can be regarded almost as a matter of survival. As I have shown here, these represent a more fruitful way to access land for housing for the majority in Namibia as the statutory processes have simply not been able to respond to the needs on the ground. Privileging and pursuing further the statutory processes over the needs of the majority does not merely negate factual arguments but rejects a much-needed transformation—and, arguably, moves further into crisis. Echeverría warns that aspirations of modernity are like aiming to climb up an escalator that is quickly moving downwards—as in a Charlie

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Chaplin film: as much as one tries to climb upwards, the speed of the escalator is greater than the climber’s efforts (Echeverría, 2016, p. 31). For those engaged in these situated modernities, the call for action therefore lingers even louder than the cry for independence, as the aim is not a “private liberation” but a collective takeover of an urban life that can be transformed.

References Amathila, L. (2012). Making a difference. University of Namibia Press. Bond, P. (2000). Cities of gold. Africa World Press. Bratton, M. (1989). Beyond the state: Civil society and associational life in Africa. World Politics, 41(3), 407–430. Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. (1991). The process of urbanization in Africa (From the Origins to the Beginning of Independence). African Studies Review, 34(1), 1–98. Delgado, G. (2018). A short socio-spatial history of Namibia. ILMI Working Paper No. 9, Integrated Land Management Institute. http://ilmi.nust.na/ sites/default/files/WP9-DELGADO-A-short-history-of-Namibia-WEB.pdf. Delgado, G. (2019). Land and housing practices in Namibia: Cases of access to land rights and production of housing in Windhoek, Oshakati and Gobabis. Ph.D. thesis, University of Cape Town. https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/ 11427/31363. Delgado, G., & Dempers, U. (2020). The second crossroads in Namibia’s ‘land question’. Namibia@30 Dossier. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. https://www. rosalux.de/en/news/id/42884/the-second-crossroads-in-namibias-land-que stion?cHash=6b2f8fee2f8617296dbca6f3b7acd5fb. Delgado, G., Muller, A., Mabakeng, R., & Namupala, M. (2020). Co-producing land for housing through informal settlement upgrading: Lessons from a Namibian municipality. Environment and Urbanization, 32(1), 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247820903981. de Villiers, S., Christensen, Å., Tjipetekera, C., Delgado, G., Mwando, S., Nghitevelekwa, R., Awala, C., & Katjiua, M. (2019, September). Land Governance in Namibia. Paper presented at the 2019 Land Governance in Southern Africa Symposium, Windhoek. http://landsymposium.nust.na/ sites/default/files/2019-08/Land%20Governance%20in%20Namibia%2034%20September%202019.pdf. Echeverría, B. (2016). Modernidad y blanquitud. Era.

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Esterhuizen, L. (2016). Planned layouts v. ‘Planning for slums’: The case of Rehoboth Ext. 5 & 6. ILMI Document No. 3/2016, Integrated Land Management Institute. http://ilmi.nust.na/sites/default/files/EST ERHUIZEN-On-Rehoboth-Ext-5-6-WEB.pdf. Ferguson, J. (forthcoming). Presence and social obligation. Prickly Paradigm Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo9149 9643.html. Freire, P. (2000 [1968]). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. Garuba, H. (2002). Mapping the land/body/subject: Colonial and postcolonial geographies in African narrative. Alternation, 9(1), 87–116. Garuba, H. (2012). On animism, modernity/colonialism, and the African order of knowledge: Provisional reflections. E-Flux, 36. https://www.eflux.com/journal/36/61249/on-animism-modernity-colonialism-and-the-afr ican-order-of-knowledge-provisional-reflections. Genis, P. (forthcoming). The policy and regulatory framework for land, livelihoods and housing in Namibia. ILMI Working Paper, Integrated Land Management Institute. Gordon, L. R. (2018). Black intellectual tradition. In S. J. Bronner (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American studies. Johns Hopkins University Press. https:// eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=780&from=search&query=black%20intelle ctual&link=search%3Freturn%3D1%26query%3Dblack%2520intellectual%26s ection%3Ddocument%26doctype%3Dall. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002 [1947]). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments (G. S. Noerr, Ed.). Stanford University Press. ILMI. (2017). The role of universities in participatory informal settlement upgrading: Experiences from Kenya, Namibia, Uganda, and Zambia. ILMI Document Note No. 1/2017, Integrated Land Management Institute. http://ilmi.nust.na/sites/default/files/ILMI-DN-The-role-of-universitiesin-participatory-slum-upgrading-Namibia-Kenya-Uganda-Zambia-WEB.pdf. ILMI & ONE Economy Foundation. (2019). Seven Ideas for Informal Settlement Upgrading in Namibia: Practical and implementable insights based on the SDI-UPFI High Level Roundtable, February 2019. Document Note No. 2/2019, Integrated Land Management Institute and ONE Economy Foundation. http://urbanforum.nust.na/sites/default/files/events/ILMI-ONE-Eco nomy-Seven-ideas-for-informal-settlement-upgrading-WEB.pdf. Lemon, A. (1991). Homes apart: South Africa’s segregated cities. Indiana University Press. Lühl, P., & Delgado, G. (2018). Urban land reform in Namibia: Getting ready for Namibia’s urban future. Paper presented at the Second National Land Conference, Windhoek. http://dna.nust.na/landconference/submis sions_2018/policy-paper-urban-land-reform-2018-final.pdf.

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Molokoane, R. (2019). Informal urbanisation and peoples’ processes. In G. Delgado & P. Lühl (Eds.), Namibia’s urban future: Rethinking housing and urbanisation: Proceedings of the public forum on housing and urbanisation. 27–28 February 2017. Windhoek, Namibia (pp. 1–11). Namibia University of Science and Technology. http://urbanforum.nust.na/sites/default/files/ Namibia’s%20Urban%20Future-Rethinking%20Housing%20And%20Urbanis ation-EBOOK.pdf. MRLGH & Ibis. (1996). Upgrading of Shanty Areas in Oshakati, Namibia. OHSIP Best practice report. Ministry of Regional and Local Government & Housing and IBIS. National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading. (2020a). Informal Settlement Upgrading Process. National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading. http://nationalalliance.nust.na/sites/default/files/2020-03/Nat ional-Alliance-PROCESS.pdf. National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading. (2020b). National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading. Concept Note, National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading. http://nationalalliance.nust.na/sites/def ault/files/2020-03/National-Alliance-CONCEPT-NOTE.pdf. NHAG & SDFN. (2019). Annual Report. SDFN/NHAG. July 2018– 2019. Namibia Housing Action Group and Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia. https://www.shackdwellersnamibia.com/Documents/Ann ualReport2019.pdf. NSA. (2019). Namibia Labour Force Survey 2018. Namibia Statistics Agency. https://d3rp5jatom3eyn.cloudfront.net/cms/assets/documents/Namibia_L abour_Force_Survey_Reports_2018_pdf.pdf. Paine, T. (2020). Common Sense (Excerpt) SHEC: Resources for Teachers. American Social History Project. Center for Media and Learning. https:// herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1127. Republic of Namibia. (2020). Progress Report (October 2018–August 2020) on the Implementation of the Resolutions of the 2nd National Land Conference. Republic of Namibia. SDFN. (2009). Community Land Information Program (CLIP). Shackdwellers Federation of Namibia and Namibia Housing Action Group. https://citiesall iance.org/sites/default/files/NamibiaCLIP092.pdf. SUM-McNamara Consultants. (1993). First steps. Progress Report No. 1; Oshatotwa Housing Programme. National Housing Enterprise. Turner, J. F. (1976). Housing by people: Towards autonomy in building environments. Marion Boyars. Turner, J. F., & Fichter, R. (1972). Freedom to build: Dweller control of the housing process. Macmillan.

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Ulrich, J., & Meurers, D. (2015). The land delivery process in Namibia: A legal analysis of the different stages from possession to freehold title. GIZ. http://the-eis.com/elibrary/sites/default/files/downloads/literature/ The%20land%20delivery%20process%20in%20Namibia.pdf. UN-Habitat. (2014, July). Lalith Lankatilleke, Father of the “People’s Participatory Process” of Reconstruction, Bids Farewell to UN-Habitat after 36 years. https://unhabitat.lk/news/lalith-lankatilleke-father-of-the-peoples-participa tory-process-of-reconstruction-bids-farewell-to-un-habitat-after-36-years/. World Bank. (2017). Doing business 2017: Equal opportunity for all: Economy profile: Namibia. World Bank Group.

CHAPTER 10

Planning and Pentecostalism in the Spatial (Re-)Configuration of Lagos Taibat Lawanson

10.1

Introduction

Religious institutions have been identified as significant actors in the creation of urban forms that contradict the goals of land-use planning in many African and Asian cities (Bouma & Hughes, 2000; Garbin, 2019; Hancock & Srinivas, 2008; Meyer, 2002). In Nigeria, and perhaps even in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the most recent, dramatic and ambitious transformation of the urban landscape has been driven by religion, with Pentecostalism spurring new urban practices of visuality and space making (Katsaura, 2017; Ukah, 2012, 2017). Pentecostalism in this study refers to the brand of revivalist and charismatic global Christianity, with its early roots in the USA, that emphasizes personal experience of God and the imbuing of the Born-Again with the ‘Holy Spirit’ (Asamoah-Gyadu, 2005). While there are no disaggregated statistics on the numerous Pentecostal and Charismatic denominations in Nigeria, they are believed

T. Lawanson (B) Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_10

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to make up about 42 per cent of the country’s Christian population (Johnstone & Mandryk, 2001, p. 488). In Lagos, Nigeria’s premier city, the activities of religious organizations have resulted in changing morphology and land-use reconfigurations at both the micro and macro scales. The intensification of new Pentecostal denominations, economic networks and allegiances are breeding new forms of parochial spatial practice, which are often at variance with extant planning regulations. While some religious organizations acquire large tracts of land to build prayer camps in the city’s peri-urban areas, others buy up properties in built-up areas—stealthily contributing to gentrification across the city core. Also observed in many low-income communities is an increasing number of temporary conversions of religious buildings to other uses. In Nigerian planning’s administrative framework, religious land uses are broadly labelled ‘public’ or ‘institutional’, and are thus assigned to the same category as schools, libraries, hospitals and government buildings. As such, the nature, pattern and consequences of emergent religiousinspired land-use change go largely undetected and unaddressed. This is a cause for concern, in that these practices have implications for land governance, urban planning, and even urban management. Apart from the fact that religious uses in many urban areas are springing up in industrial schemes and residential neighbourhoods, often flouting zoning permissions and requirements, they also result in distortions of the city’s streetscape and the exacerbation of social-interaction and safety/security challenges in many communities. The interaction between religion and urban space is emerging as a focus of exploration in understanding how cities work. Religion is as enmeshed in struggles for urban spatial representation as it is in other areas of social and cultural life of the Nigerian city (Adebanwi & Obadare, 2010; Garbin, 2012; Färber, 2014, p. 131; Ukah, 2016). Recent scholarship on the nexus between religion and urban space in Nigeria includes Adeboye (2012), Obadare (2018) and Katsaura (2020)—all of whom highlight how the activities of faith-based organizations influence urban culture and everyday life. Ukah (2011, 2016) and Janson and Akinleye (2015) also studied religious practices in Lagos—focusing on the political economy of prayer camps in the city’s peri-urban interface. These articles place limited emphasis on how religious activities affect the reconfiguration of the city across spatial and temporal scales, and how the administrative frameworks of urban planning respond to religion-inspired

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change. Urban planning as a political and technical activity is an important land-use management tool for addressing urban-development challenges and for achieving some socio-economic, political and sustainable urbanization goals (UN-Habitat, 2004, p. 32). However, in Lagos, it operates sub-optimally due to the combination of systemic institutional challenges such as centralized planning frameworks, informality, and an unwieldy land-tenure system as well as public apathy and/or antipathy. Therefore, this chapter will examine the role of religious institutions in changing land-use patterns and urban planning in Lagos. It will ‘deep dive’ into case studies of top-down (enclave urbanism/prayer cities) and bottom-up (transient conversion of religious buildings) planning. The goal is to assess how Pentecostal congregations are shaping the urban environment and under which urban-planning conditions. The chapter will begin with a literature review of the interface between religion and urban land-use planning; proceed to examine some of the religion–urbanization–planning linkages in Lagos; and then, through the case studies, highlight the various contexts of religious-inspired urban transformation and the response of the relevant planning institutions. It will conclude with a discussion of the emerging thematic issues and provide some recommendations for conciliating across the gaps identified.

10.2 Obfuscating the Interface Between Religion and Urban Land-Use Planning Religious institutions have, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, deliberately and strategically targeted cities (Katsaura, 2017; Keller, 2011), with Pentecostal churches reinstating themselves as oases in the seemingly unending hustle and hardship of city life. In response to urban precarity (poverty, inequality, insecurity), religion often plays the role of a socio-psychological, institutional signifier and resource mobilizer to adapt to urban exigencies (Myers, 2011, p. 17; Simone, 2004, p. 232)—often engaging in building businesses and establishing institutions that supplement or replace weak public infrastructure (Omenyo, 2014, p. 138). In Nigeria, the Pentecostal churches consider this their responsibility stating that ‘[t]he church also has a role to play in terms of urbanization’.1 In fact, according to Onuoha (2013), Nigerian Pentecostal movements have come to play a central role in urban spaces, where they have displayed a resilient form of associational life in the face of the immense failure

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of the state. This position is corroborated by a pastor in one of the Pentecostal churches: The overall development of the country is the role of the state. I can say that the churches have realized that the state has failed. That is why there is this support from the churches. It is not the role of the church, but the churches have to step in.2

According to Cobbinah and Korah (2015, p. 99), the role of religious organizations in the city has resulted in an increasing demand for land by faith groups, with serious implications for land governance, urban planning and urban management (Hoernig, 2006). These often-vast land appropriations, especially by Pentecostal assemblies with international networks, are believed to have economic undertones (Kirby, 2019; Ukah, 2016) and they exemplify the interface between religion, globalization and neoliberalism (Fesenmyer, 2019, p. 36; Meyer, 2004, p. 69). The growth of prayer camps seemingly confirms this position (Omenyo, 2014, p. 136). Even though there is increasing demand for land for religious purposes, the land-use planning and regulatory structure to administer to these demands is weak (Hancock & Srinivas, 2008, p. 619; Justin, 2011; Kinney & Winter, 2006, p. 338). Apart from the mainstream capacity gap, the truth is that in mainstream development planning and practice, religion is often neglected (Rakodi, 2012, p. 621) or considered a benign presence (Day, 2014). In fact, the logic of development does not recognize the agency of religion in the construction of space. Hence, where provisions are made for the location of places of worship, they usually fall within broad categorizations such as ‘institutional’—as is the case in Lagos (Lagos State Government, 2014, p. 4)—and are subject to gross abuse, as is typical in many African cities where planning authorities compromise land-use planning schemes in order to respond to the needs of influential faith groups (Cobbinah et al., 2015, p. 23). The result is an unregulated coordination of planning activities, especially from large-scale development of vacant land to smaller-scale land-use changes due to religious activities (Hancock & Srinivas, 2008, p. 616; Justin, 2011). Although historically places of worship represented smallscale uses designed to serve specific residential neighbourhoods or small settlements (Ashley, 2009, p. 11), and they can still be appropriate in residential areas today, the recent construction of mega-edifices had

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tended to distort neighbourhood aesthetics while the gradual infiltration of residential neighbourhoods has resulted in enclaving and ‘religious gentrification’—redefining these neighbourhoods’ economy, architecture and even demographics (Lawanson & Millington, forthcoming). Religious practices have also enabled the changing use of space on a temporal dimension—i.e. ‘creating interim spaces of “social innovation” focused on the satisfaction of human needs, which tend to elaborate alternative discourses and actions’ (Moulaert et al., 2007, p. 40). Pentecostalism in Lagos has attempted to create a new kind of physical environment and to generate a new spatial order (Ukah, 2003). This process occurs in three main forms: 1. New Towns are new settlements built on either rural land or newly reclaimed land and transformed for urban land use. Their objective is to become self-sufficient towns (De Klerk, 2007). The Lagos periurban axis has seen a proliferation of new towns in the form of prayer camps and cities, with the self-governing Redemption Camp being the largest and most prominent of these. 2. Enclaving manifests as an entire system of urban life in its economic, political and symbolic-cultural forms being imposed upon already existing towns and cities that have been organized on quite different bases (Gilsenan, 1982, p. 162). Across Lagos, communities of faith have drawn populations to settle in hitherto residential areas, providing resources for the adaptation and reconfiguration of urban life—a religious gentrification of sorts. Religious enclaving is apparent in many Lagos neighbourhoods, including Ifako Gbagada—the Deeper Life Church, Onike—the Mountain of Fire Church, Oregun—Believers Loveworld and Oniru–RCCG3 — the City of David. 3. Interim Spaces refers to an understanding of time-measured and time-designated activities in space, thus shifting away from a focus on temporary land uses and amplifying real-time dynamism in the appropriation of existing urban space (Awan et al., 2011, p. 27). In Lagos, this manifests itself in two forms: the appropriation of secular spaces such as hotels, bus terminals and sports stadia for religious purposes, and the desacralization of religious spaces through the more temporary changing uses of religious buildings for secular activities that occur in low-income communities (Dora, 2016, p. 63)

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All these forms of religious practice to some extent challenge conventional forms of urban planning and management (Ukah, 2013, p. 77) including zoning and development control.4 Faith-based organizations materially and symbolically anchor their significance in the urban landscape and reorchestrate these places in particular ways, often at variance with planning regulations (Coleman & Elsner, 1995, p. 96). In fact, religious organizations at various scales have become major political players who frequently collaborate with, bypass and even replace state planning agencies in order to realize their own future-oriented visions of the urban good (de Boeck, 2013, p. 533; Hancock & Srinivas, 2008, p. 619). In doing so, they impact infrastructurally on the urban landscape, employing diverse tactics of control that reshape the life and form of cities—including economically (AlSayyad & Massoumi, 2012, p. 31). According to Martin (2002, p. 287), Africa is witnessing a form of unofficial globalization from the very bottom of society whereby members of Pentecostal groups are encouraged and provided with the opportunity to participate in the remaking of their immediate social and economic environments. Marshall (1991, p. 29) earlier described how Pentecostalism in Nigeria offers ‘powerful metaphors for new types of practice’ and material resources that create autonomous spaces and articulate ‘strategies to create, exercise and legitimize new power relations and new opportunities for survival’. There is therefore a need to lift the cloak of invisibility from religion as a subject in urban space (Colomb, 2015, p. 13) and to interrogate the impact of religion in the planning and management of Lagos—especially in the context of the three new forms of spatial order described earlier.

10.3 The Nexus of Planning and Pentecostalism in Lagos From the initial intervention of the British in the affairs of Lagos, religion has consistently produced a series of spatial ‘shockwaves’ that influenced and are still influencing the process of urban restructuring in the city. The conquest of Lagos in 1852 was, in part, instigated by British Christian missionaries on the pretext of introducing ‘civilization and legitimate trade’. This resulted in the bequeathing/gifting of extensive land areas to both the Catholic and Anglican churches (Akinyeye & Osifodunrin, 2003, p. 13) by the colonial and traditional authorities of the time, and a wielding of state power to ensure that the expansionist

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agenda of these denominations was achieved.5 The location of the Christ Church (Anglican) Cathedral at the intersection of dominant commerce and government interests on Lagos Island6 is a bold testament to this development. The annexation of Lagos as a British colony under the Secession Treaty of 1861 ushered in the beginning of formal urban planning in the city. Urban planning during this period was restricted to certain localities and guided by a series of promulgations that focused mainly on segregation, public health and city beautification (Abubakar et al., 2020, p. 379). These include the Lagos Town Improvement Ordinance of 1863 for the control of development and urban sanitation, the Cantonment Act of 1904 for the segregation of Europeans from natives and the Administration of Government Reservation of 1908. The exclusionist logic that informed colonial urban planning was never totally abandoned, as both the Nigerian Town and Country Planning Ordinance No. 4 of 1946 and the Nigerian Urban and Regional Planning Law—Decree 88 of 1992 made provision for the planning, improvement and development of cities and regions through the use of planning schemes. The 1946 Ordinance was also used as a tool for segregation—as can be seen in the issue of Government Reservation Areas vs. native areas, a precursor to the dual-city paradigm that shapes many urban centres in Nigeria today (Abubakar & Doan, 2017, p. 547). Post-independence planning regulations and practices continued along these lines, with the development of government-owned planning schemes and housing estates as well as privately owned, gated communities. The emphasis was on development control within these areas, and the rest of the city was left to develop on its own terms. The interface of religion and politics also continues in contemporary times, with significant impact on the growth and development of Lagos. The spatial growth of the metropolis has gone beyond the physical boundaries of Lagos State and spilled over at many points into the adjoining Ogun State (Lawanson et al., 2012, p. 464). The resulting Lagos Megacity region includes the continuously expanding area comprising, for the moment, all of the 20 local-government areas of Lagos State and its peri-urban interface—i.e. the communities that make up the continuous built-up area outwards from the administrative boundaries of Lagos (Federal Government of Nigeria, 2006). The Lagos peri-urban interface extends outwards, annexing nearby settlements along the southwest end of the Ojo–Badagry Expressway, the

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southeast axis along the Lekki Epe corridor, the northeast axis along the Ikorodu corridor, the Alimosho–Igando–Iba–Lasu corridor northwest of metropolitan Lagos and the northern axis along the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway (see Map 10.1). The corridors along the Lagos–Ogun State borders—including the Ota, Ibafo/Mowe, Ojodu/Akute and Ogijo areas—have been experiencing heavy and intense pressures of physical growth. This physical growth, often without indicators of real development such as infrastructure or economic opportunities, renews calls for regional-development considerations into the development plans and programmes of both Lagos and Ogun states (Salau et al., 2013, p. 88). According to Ukah (2016), much of the impetus for the transformation of Lagos has deep roots in the irrepressible and socially strong form of Pentecostal Christianity that has come to characterize social life in southern Nigeria since the 1970s. Pentecostalism in Nigeria has grown tremendously from its beginnings as a fringe religion in the early 1970s, and has transited from humble and often apolitical forms stressing holiness (Ojo, 2008, p. 24) to more assertive, and sometimes more economically and politically active, forms. Lagos is home to some of the largest facilities for worship in the world (Leadership Network, 2018). The city can boast mega-churches that seat tens of thousands; churches on seemingly every street corner; and prayer camps along the peri-urban interface that are expanding into

Map 10.1 Lagos and Ogun states, showing the peri-urban interface (Source Taibat Lawanson field work)

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self-sustaining, micro-city ecosystems. There are 36 prayer camps/cities along the Lagos–Ibadan peri-urban axis alone (Lawanson, 2020) (see Map 10.2). It is often observed, however, that the practices as well as the spirit of Pentecostal urbanism jar with its theological ethic (Coleman, 2009). These include the privatization and commodification of religious sites, alongside an increasing tendency to adapt them to secular use or to a mix of religious and non-religious functions. Across Lagos, many of the religious-inspired developments being carried out are more commercial than religious—and often not compliant with operative planning–administrative procedures. The following section outlines the operative institutional framework in Lagos, and will be followed by case studies on how Pentecostal practices interface with this framework in the process of implementing their agendas.

Map 10.2 Prayer camps and cities along the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, September 2020 (Source Taibat Lawanson field work)

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10.4 The Institutional Framework for Urban Planning in Lagos The responsibility for urban planning and development matters in Lagos lies with the state’s Ministry of Physical Planning and Urban Development, and its relevant agencies. The activities of these agencies are guided by a number of policy and planning documents. Those relevant to this study are the: 1. Lagos State Urban and Regional Planning Law (2010/2014), which stipulates the process for application and approval of the various types of planning and development permits in the state. This law establishes and empowers the various agencies that are accountable for development control in the state. The Lagos State Physical Planning Permit Authority (LASPPPA) is responsible for granting planning approval and development permits, the Lagos State Building Control Agency (LABCA) monitors development and ensures compliance, while the Lagos State Urban Renewal Agency (LASURA) (2010) is responsible for facilitating the regeneration of decaying neighbourhoods. 2. Operative development plans, which stipulate and allocate land for various uses. In general terms, religious land uses are permissible in mixed-use areas where plots have been allocated for institutional and/or cultural uses. Dedicated religious land uses are also permissible in areas designated as community spaces. Actual development must be preceded by a development-permit application, a process overseen by the LASPPPA. The space-standards requirements for places of worship include a minimum plot size of 1500 square metres, a required distance between places of worship (400 m for premises of the same sect, and 250 m for other sects) and one parking space per 10 square metres (Lagos State Government, 2014). The documentation required to accompany an application for a development permit includes the land title, survey plans, architectural and engineering drawings and planning technical reports—i.e. enviro nmental and/or traffic reports, as well as geotechnical investigations in the case of megastructures. Once building-permit approval is obtained, the development is supervised by the Lagos State Building Control Agency (LABCA), which visits the sites

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to ensure adherence to the approved plan during the actual construction phase. For new town developments, both in Lagos and its peri-urban axis, a layout approval is required for any plot exceeding 10,000 square metres in area. Approvals for land layouts are applied for and received through the State Ministry for Physical Planning and Urban Development (specifically, the Development Matters Department in Lagos and the Planning Bureau in Ogun). The required documentation includes a layout plan, topographical and perimeter survey plans and title documents as well as technical (environmental-impact) reports, engineering and infrastructuredevelopment reports and geotechnical reports. If there are no objections, approval for a layout is expected to take between one and two months.

10.5

Case Studies

This section will, through a series of case studies, attempt to highlight how Pentecostal practices interface with the institutional planning–regulatory framework described in the earlier section. The use of case studies is drawn from the work of Numrich and Wedan (2015), which recommends that analysing the spatial dimensions of urban religion can be done through contextualized theoretical and empirical work in order to enable a deeper understanding of the relationship between religion and cities. This section will outline how Pentecostal denominations have operationalized the various forms of urban (re)development in line with, or in spite of, extant planning regulations. 10.5.1

New Town Development: Redemption Camp

The Redemption Camp is the international headquarters of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). It is located within the administrative boundaries of Ogun State, along the continuous, built-up, peri-urban axis of Lagos. Although initially intended as a site for occasional prayer meetings, it has grown to a city—and its well-structured environment and efficient urban-service systems have made the camp a destination of choice for many seeking to escape the chaotic environment of Lagos. In fact, the camp has inspired expansive urban development that has involved the creation of numerous residential estates stretching from Lagos to Sagamu, a distance of about 104 kms (Janson & Akinleye, 2015).

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The camp was opened in 1983 and, as of early 2021, has reached a size of 25 square kilometres—making it larger than countries like Vatican City, Nauru and Monaco.7 It is still growing because the Church is buying up whole villages to achieve its expansionist agenda. According to a member, ‘Redemption Camp is still expanding, until the Lord comes, until Jesus comes. The type of vision God gave him (our leader) is a city without boundaries’.8 The land-ownership regime in the camp is exclusionary because only members of the RCCG can acquire land and property. All its land is corporately owned by the Board of Trustees of the Church, and so cannot be transferred. Within the camp are 15 gated communities accommodating 12,000 residents in over 5000 houses. Each plot has the same size—464 square metres—which is smaller than the Nigerian standard plot size of 648 square metres, and every allottee is required to set aside a ‘self-contained’9 apartment for the use of the mission. The mission uses these apartments to accommodate its pastors and official guests during Church programmes. According to a pastor in the RCCG, [t]he right you have as a home owner is based on the premise that you are a member of the organization and the day you renounce your membership of this organization, you lose [all] rights and privileges of that land. But at that instance the land will be valued and be transferred at the current value of the property. So you cannot use the land because it is non-collaterable, and your children cannot inherit the property as it reverts to the church when you die.

Aside from the various auditoria and church-related structures, Redemption Camp is a thriving city with roads, a police station, hospital, supermarkets, banks, fun fair, post office, schools, printing press and an independent power plant—all functioning optimally. Urban-management facilities—including water supply, waste disposal, security and environmental beautification—are also provided by the physical-planning unit of the Church. This has resulted in high demand for land and property in the camp, even from non-members who opt for rental agreements: Development in this camp in the past thirteen years has been so alarming and you can also project that in another 10 years, the population most likely would have doubled. People want to move into the camp because [of] some of the things they enjoy like constant light.10

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The entire camp currently operates outside statutory city-planning control. Urban planning and management on camp is subject to ‘self and internal regulations’.11 The Church has a physical-planning unit, with various built-environment professionals employed in it. There is also a security unit to provide relevant services to the community. Fees for the use of facilities and services in the camp are similar to regular rates obtainable in private estates within the Lagos metropolis. The RCCG has encountered challenges regarding regularization of its land titles, chiefly because some of the land that it has acquired falls within government acquisitions and government-planned schemes. In order to rectify this, the Church prepared a physical-development plan and has now approached the government for approval for it. According to a member of the master plan committee, RCCG is the first and only corporate body in Ogun state to request […] government approval of its camp master plan without any push from the government. This was done in July 2020.12

10.5.2

Religious Gentrification/Enclaving: The Onike Community

Onike is a residential neighbourhood in Lagos where the international headquarters of the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries (MFM) is located. The MFM purchased an initial plot of land in 1994, and has continued to buy land and property in the area since then. It currently owns 36.4 per cent of the total land area in the neighbourhood, with over 70 per cent of its properties having been purchased since 2010. The Church further cements its identity in the community by painting all buildings in its signature colours of purple and cream. The land-use pattern in Onike has shifted from core residential to mixed use, with the MFM properties ranging from events centres, guest houses, a music school, children’s recreation centre and park to a bookshop and mechanic workshops. All these facilities are open to members of the public on a fee-paying basis. In Lagos, religious land uses are permissible in areas designated as mixed use, institutional or cultural (Lagos State Government, 2014), and in designated community spaces according to the Lagos Mainland Model city plan (2012–2025). Onike is designated residential in the model city plan and the specific part of the area dominated by the Church is designated mixed use in order to accommodate the emerging

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pattern of MFM-inspired land-use conversion. What is most interesting, however, is the manner of property acquisition and its interface with the planning–administrative framework. The Church has an aggressive land-acquisition agenda and usually offers above market value in order to buy up property. According to a real-estate professional in the area, [a]s for landed properties, property prices around MFM has been influenced by the presence of MFM in that they all want to sell their property to the church because they know the church will pay more money than an individual.

This has driven up the value of land in the area. According to the same agent, [b]efore the siting of MFM in that area, the value of land was low because the area was swampy. When MFM got there, they started expanding. After MFM got there and started to expand, land prices started shooting up. Rent also started increasing. From 1990 when a plot was valued at 1.5 to 3 million naira,13 now land prices around MFM [are] around 30–40 million, while land in Onike, but not too far from [the] MFM axis is between 15 million and 17 million naira.14

More worrisome is the disregard for the extant land-use and development control process. Construction often proceeds without the necessary approval, or applications do not match the use to which a property is eventually put. The Yaba District office of the LASPPPA exercises jurisdiction over Onike, where the MFM church is located, and surrounding areas. According to the district officer, it is difficult for Pentecostal churches to obtain some of the required planning documents—particularly the technical reports (Environmental Impact [EIA] and Traffic Impact [TIA] reports) and clearance letters from the relevant agencies to verify the status of land title, and to verify that the location would not exacerbate local traffic and drainage challenges. As the planning-approval process cannot proceed until all requirements are met, the churches simply tend to abandon the process and build illegally15 —highlighting a tendency towards impunity and disregard for the planning process by religious institutions. The Yaba District Officer interviewed commented, ‘Many of the [Pentecostal] churches start the approval process, when we ask them to

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bring a particular documentation, they usually abandon the process’.16 In the case of the MFM, available records from the district office reveal that some of its applications have been abandoned since 2012 despite the fact that the properties are all fully built and in full use. The Church also often circumvents the planning-permit application process by applying for permission for a use (residential or renovation) at variance with the intended purpose of the property (commercial). This is because requirements for residential planning or building-renovation permits are easier to comply with. Table 10.1 includes three applications for the site of the MFM’s main auditorium. While the application for residential use was approved, the two for institutional use are still pending. Since the Onike area is fully built up, the Church now also purchases residential properties, pulls them down and applies for fresh building permits. This approach was corroborated by a local resident who is also a church member. He said, ‘When the church buys property, if it is the one they can easily demolish; all those old buildings, they demolish and fence it immediately’. However, the applications are often submitted in the names of individuals (usually previous owners) as it is easier and cheaper to obtain the development permit as an individual than as a corporate entity. According to the General Manager of the LASSPA, The buildings around the MFM headquarters area are definitely bought over by the church, but the church might not probably regularize same to church’s title. This is because they will not be able to meet special application regulations and approval order which churches belong to.17

It is thus impossible to verify the actual number of applications that were submitted by the Church for building permits or renovation permits. 10.5.3

Interim Spaces: The Iwaya Community

A common occurrence around Lagos is the conversion of secular spaces such as bus stops, cinema halls and restaurants to interim religious uses. What often goes undetected, however, is the conversion of religious spaces to interim secular use—a process described by Dora (2016, p. 63) as desacralization—i.e. the unmaking and remaking of sacred spaces. Iwaya is a low-income residential communityclose to the University of Lagos main campus.

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Table 10.1 Planning-permit applications by MFM Year Address application commenced

No Applied of use floors

2012

Remi Abuah Crescent, Onike

2

Institutional Main auditorium

2012

Prof. Ayodele, Awojobi Avenue, Onike Remi Abuah Crescent, Onike Muyideen Bello Street, Onike 3, Remi Abuah Crescent Street, Onike 1, Olu— Osifeso Street, Onike

4

Institutional Teenage church

2

Institutional Main auditorium

Under Clearance processing letter—Land-use allocation/traffic

3

Residential Main auditorium

Approved

None

4

Residential Music school

Approved

None

4

Institutional Church/event Under Planning centre processing technical report—TIA Clearance letter—Traffic Geotechnical report

2016

2016

2016

2018

Current use of property

Status of Outstanding application documents Abandoned Architectural drawings Engineering drawings Planning technical reports (EIA/TIA) Clearance letter—Land-use allocation/traffic Under Planning processing technical report Clearance letter

Source Register of applications for building permit—Lagos State Physical Planning Permit Authority, Yaba District Office, September 2018

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The ‘Sanctuary by Day, Residence by Night’ situation is usually intended to support Church members who are new migrants to the city or members of the public faced with the threat of homelessness, irrespective of denomination. According to the pastor of the church involved, ‘We currently harbour a family whose house got burnt. For the meantime, we have them staying here in the church where we provide for them till they are able to secure another accommodation’.18 This type of assistance is not unusual, and the Church claimed to have supported many families for periods ranging from four days to two years. In return, the families are responsible for keeping the church premises clean. However, in using the space the protection of its sacredness is mandatory. For example, the wearing of footwear is prohibited within the sanctuary and access to the altar area is also restricted. Failure to abide by these rules has resulted in eviction in the past. A number of church buildings in the community are also used for educational purposes—ranging from informal after-school lessons to vocational-skill training sessions. Iwaya’s elementary school, which runs a structured curriculum with classes in shifts, is situated in the church building of an RCCG parish. The school is open to children across the entire community, irrespective of denomination, bridging a clear gap in accessibility to education and affordability. According to a parent, ‘We pay the teacher per day, and the church does not charge [for the use of the space], so the school fees [are] not high’.19

10.6 Conclusion: Pentecostal Urbanism as a Complex Planning Approach in Lagos The three case studies above show us how, in various ways, religious institutions interface with the making and remaking of the city. In response to urban precarity in Lagos, its religious organizations have leveraged their roles as socio-psychological, institutional signifiers and resource mobilizers (Myers, 2011, p. 17; Simone, 2004, p. 232) in order to advance neoliberal interests in the guise of supplementing/replacing weak public infrastructure. They have employed diverse tactics of control in achieving this (AlSayyad & Massoumi, 2012). In fact, one could say that religious organizations are instituting an alternative planning praxis based on their needs for expansion and spatial annexation.

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At the city scale, the Redemption Camp’s acquisition of an area of land the size of a small country—and its private governance of the same—highlights the comatose state of the prevailing land-governance regime. The RCCG is able to acquire whole villages, restrict land ownership to church members and enforce strict planning oversight and zoning control in its gated communities. The Church can design and enforce planning standards and ideals either in defiance of or by bypassing the state’s regulatory planning requirements. This corroborates the earlier assertion that religious organizations at various scales have become major political players who frequently collaborate with, bypass, and even replace state planning agencies in order to realize their own future-oriented visions of the urban good (de Boeck, 2013; Hancock & Srinivas, 2008). The fact that the RCCG has presented a master plan for the Redemption Camp to the Ogun state government for approval is further testament to the huge gap in official planning at the city scale. The disregard for extant planning regulations on the part of RCCG’s independent planning unit and MFM’s contravention of planning processes without penalty also shows the weakness of the institutional planning framework at the neighbourhood scale. The Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries has acquired properties in Onike through various means, it employs subterfuge in planning-approval applications, and it proceeds to construct buildings without planning approval. It also converts buildings to diverse commercial uses and attempts to entrench its spatial representation in the neighbourhood through the painting of these properties in the colours of the Church. All this is done without consideration for other members of the community. Tensions between the MFM and some residents of their immediate communities over the eclipse of their original use by ‘invading’ religious organizations largely go unaddressed (Nsibidi Institute, 2017). This is also the case with the Church’s ‘prayer city’ along the Lagos–Ibadan expressway,20 and even locally. In Onike, a former resident stated, I thought that they [the MFM] shouldn’t have been allowed to stay there because basically the Environmental Impact Assessment was not done. But because their members are stubborn, they overruled almost every planning regulation and when it came to a point my property was in chaos. All those facilities [water and electricity] were affected. Aside that, whenever they had any program the effect on the environment was terrible, I just had to leave the area.21

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The neoliberal leanings of these religious interests are also apparent in the fact that the MFM’s commercial ventures are open to the feepaying public and it charges market rates. Even the strict residential rules at the Redemption Camp do not restrict renters who are not church members, while the RCCG also charges fees commensurate with commercial ventures in the city core. What remains unclear is how transfer of ownership and/or secondary transactions on land and properties in the camp will be achieved, given inheritance and identity issues. When a man (homeowner) dies, will his family have to vacate the property that he built—since they cannot inherit—or does the title automatically transfer to them if they are members of the Church? The desacralization of churches in Iwaya also highlights a form of ‘alternative urbanism’ or urban hybridity that is prevalent among lowincome communities, whereby there is a perpetual renegotiation of the boundaries of cultural (and religious) identity (Bhabha, 1994, p. 119). This is a particularly poignant issue, in that religious organizations in under-served areas often consider their function as learning and social spaces to be as important as their religious purpose (Baker and Beaumont 2011, p. 5), while in higher-income areas their approach is much more businesslike. This is apparent in the benevolence of the RCCG in the low-income community of Iwaya in releasing their church premises for education purposes. This chapter has shown that the wide spectrum of practices that religious organizations employ in their engagement with city processes can serve as an effective entry point into understanding their often-neglected influence in urban planning and development in Lagos. The case studies in this chapter have revealed the fact that Pentecostalism can be just as aggressive, dictatorial and benevolent in its interface with the city as any secular entity. Hence, it is important that further interrogation of the complex interactions between urban processes and religious organizations be undertaken. Land-governance and regional-development planning regimes also need to be urgently constituted bearing in mind the large-scale land acquisitions and spatial reconfigurations being implemented by religious entities along the Lagos peri-urban axis—especially along the Lagos– Ibadan Expressway. In fact, one can say that religious organizations (under cover of the ‘institutional’ land-use category) are propelling the rapid and haphazard growth of the Lagos peri-urban axis.

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Ultimately, the studies have revealed that Pentecostalism is also a political process that wields significant influence in the planning and development of Lagos. Special attention should be paid to the expansionist agenda of these assemblies and their land acquisition tendencies, while consideration should be given to strengthen the institutional structures that govern urban development in order to ensure that no one is left behind. Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-funded ‘Cities and Infrastructure Programme’ of the British Academy. Some of the data used in this chapter were collected in the course of a 2018 research project on ‘Religious Urbanization and Infrastructural lives in African Megacities’ (rua-project.ac.uk).

Notes 1. Interview with Pastor of Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Redemption Camp, August 2018. 2. Interview with RCCG pastor, Redemption Camp, August 2018. 3. The Redeemed Christian Church of God. 4. See Sect. 10.4 on the institutional framework for urban planning in Lagos. 5. http://www.hcclng.org/history.html; https://www.anglicancommunion. org/structures/member-churches/member-church.aspx?church=nigeria. 6. The church is located between the UAC Building (a major commercial interest) and the State House (the seat of government). 7. https://www.infoplease.com/world/population/smallest-countriesworld. 8. Interview with a pastor of the Church, Redemption Camp, August 2018. 9. This phrase is used to describe a studio or one-bedroom apartment with en-suite toilet facilities. 10. Interview with a pastor of the Church, Redemption Camp, August 2018. 11. Interview with resident of the Redemption Camp who works in the RCCG Physical Planning/Development Control Unit, Redemption Camp, September 2018. 12. Interview with member of RCCG Masterplan Committee, Redemption Camp, August 2018. 13. The naira, subdivided into 100 kobo, is the national currency of Nigeria. 14. Interview with real-estate agent in Onike Area, July 2018. 15. Interview with Yaba District Officer of the LASPPPA, Alagomeji, July 2018. 16. Interview with Yaba District Officer of the LASPPPA, Alagomeji, July 2018.

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17. Interview with General Manager of LASPPPA, [Ikeja, October, 2018]. 18. Interview with Shepherd in charge of the Celestial Church of Christ, Ona Ara Parish, Iwaya, [November 2018]. 19. Interview with parent at the Iwaya School, [November 2018]. 20. https://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/12/mfm-owns-prayer-city-bou ght-land-twice-says-general-overseer-olukoya. 21. Interview with former resident of Olumo Street, where MFM headquarters is situated.

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Casanova (Eds.), Topographies of faith: Religion in urban spaces (pp. 207– 225). Brill. Rakodi, C. (2012). Religion and development: Subjecting religious perceptions and organisations to scrutiny. Development in Practice, 22(5–6), 621–633. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2012.686602. Accessed 15 April 2021. Salau, T., Lawanson, T., & Yadua, O. (2013). Amoebic urbanization in Nigerian cities: The case of Lagos and Ota. International Journal of Architecture and Urban Development, 3(4), 83–90. Simone, A. (2004). For the city yet to come: Changing African life in four cities. Duke University Press. Ukah, A. (2003). The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Nigeria. Local identities and global processes in African Pentecostalism. https://epub. uni-bayreuth.de/968. Accessed 13 April 2021. Ukah, A. (2011). God unlimited: Economic transformations of contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism. In L. Obadia & D. C. Wood (Eds.), Economics of religion: Anthropological approaches (pp. 187–216). (Research in Economic Anthropology Series, Vol. 31). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Ukah, A. (2012). Religion and globalization. In E. K. Bongmba (Ed.), The WileyBlackwell companion to Africa religions (pp. 503–514). Blackwell Publishers. Ukah, A. (2013). Prosperity theology. In A. Butticci (Ed.), Na God. Aesthetics of African charismatic power (pp. 77–79). Grafiche Turato Edizioni. Ukah, A. (2016). Building God’s city: The political economy of prayer camps in Nigeria. International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies,40(3), 524– 540. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12363. Accessed 13 April 2021. Ukah, A. (2017). The miracle city: Pentecostal entrepreneurialism and the remaking of Lagos. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322063 464_The_Miracle_City_Pentecostal_Entrepreneurialism_and_the_Remaking_ of_Lagos_The_Miracle_City_Pentecostal_Entrepreneurialism_and_the_Rem aking_of_Lagos. Accessed 13 April 2021. UN-Habitat. (2004). The state of the world’s cities 2004/2005. Earthscan.

CHAPTER 11

A Grammar for Transformative Urbanism Sony Pellissery and Juliana Gómez Aristizábal

11.1

Introduction

What does the future look like for Southern urban praxis? Writing at a time when global governance institutions are weak (even unable to respond collectively to survival questions such as those posed by a worldwide pandemic) and populist politics is gaining traction within national borders, the whole project could be seen as reactionary (or opportunist) in the current prevailing political climate. However, the quest for Southern models in urban planning has a history of at least two decades long. Its burgeoning literature has arrived at a consensus on the need for context-specific theories that signals a transition from a “Euclidian world order of stable entities” to the emergence of a “non-Euclidian world of many space–time geographies” (Friedmann, 1993, p. 482). In this

S. Pellissery (B) Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India e-mail: [email protected] J. Gómez Aristizábal Center of Urban and Environmental Studies, EAFIT University, Medellín, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_11

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chapter, we move away from “either Euclid or nothing”1 to a grammarian alternative as one of the Southern models in urban planning. The aspects that make Southern cities distinctive have remained illegible to scholars (Schindler, 2017). The dominant theories that have attempted to understand Southern processes evidence their struggle to comprehend the multiple urban processes that constitute the Southern territories—labelling them interesting, but anomalous (Roy, 2009) or abnormal (Robinson, 2006). Several of the existing models are useful for creating a new city or for managing urban agglomerations, so here we must make a distinction: both creating and managing may avoid creating discontinuities to the urbanism. However, apart from the planning functions of creating and managing, Southern models need to be transformative—challenging and modifying the urban space that perpetuates the status quo of social relations.2 To identify the grammar of transformative urbanism already latent in the Global South, we use three types of material as we develop arguments in this concluding chapter: firstly, the conclusions drawn in different chapters in this book, which are synthesized towards our arguments; secondly, contributions from several academics and practitioners of urban-planning practices in the Global South; thirdly, the accounts of urban vision by political leaders and public intellectuals of the Global South. These materials are woven together around the identification of the grammar that builds the transformative model, which is explained across three sections of the chapter. The first of these sections lays out a foundation for the distinctive grammarian approach, and its potential for theorizing Southern praxis. The second section shows how a communicative model (of autopoiesis) would produce space. Here, we propose three processes that could advance transformation processes of cities. In the third section, we attempt to spell out the characteristics of a grammar suitable for transforming Southern cities.

11.2

A Grammar for the Tower of Babel3

In this section, we show how grammar as a model could provide alternative ways of conceptualizing urban praxis compared with the prevailing optimization techniques, which are based on formal rationality. The ability to pick up codes latent in a culture and in societal norms provides

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an edge for the grammar model to be context specific. We will also identify the commonality of experiences of urbanism in the South, which calls for a language and communication for transformation. 11.2.1

Towards a Grammar

Unitary forms of knowledge have long been challenged within the socialscience tradition. The most vocal of these challenges have come from feminism (Oakley, 2000) and subaltern studies (Spivak, 1988).4 The cultural-regional unit as the subject of knowledge construction is also well known (Said, 1978; and see the Asian value debate opposing humanrights hegemony in de Bary, 1998; also worth noting is the topic of indigenous knowledge movement).5 These challenges have now been taken seriously by several scholars of urban planning in order to create alternative spaces of theorization. What is problematic with unitary notion is its claim of universality of knowledge (Connell, 2007), which shapes practice in the areas of urban design, governance, and planning laws. In turn, this universality creates an epistemological framework highly imbalanced in favour of Global North (and English-speaking) territories (Stiftel & Mukhopadhyay, 2007; Yiftachel, 2006). Leisering (2021), attempting to theorize Southern social question, identifies four distinct methods: (a) applying theories or conceptual frameworks developed in a Northern context to the new context—namely, the Global South; (b) designing new theories and concepts in a grounded manner from the South; (c) adapting the Northern theories by respecifying them for Southern conditions and contexts; (d) beginning with Northern theories, but aiming to create a general theory that would suit both South and North. In the process, theory itself becomes respecified. Though Leisering does not say so, it is possible to have a fifth method whereby the process described in the fourth type is reversed (beginning with the South). “Southern-turn” literature in urbanism has attempted all of these approaches—some valiantly, others feebly. The learning gained from such experimentation is what McFarlane (2011) calls “assemblage”.6 We adopt the fifth model in this chapter in order to uncover the transformative grammar that we are trying to illuminate here. Urban development—as an area to which the disciplines of anthropology, geography, political science, urban planning, development studies, law, sociology, and economics have contributed to sustaining Southern

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theorizing—is a challenge inasmuch as these disciplines’ core precepts come from the North-West. Therefore, as Oakley (2000, p. 75) puts it, “‘Scientific’ ways of knowing developed within a set of pre-existing dualisms which generated the conclusion that, so far as the liberation of the less powerful is concerned, science must almost always be an evil impulse”. But urbanism is an experience strongly influenced not by scientists but by the practices of professionals, elected municipal authorities, business houses, courts, and citizens. It is in this sense that doors open for theory building for urban praxis from the South. An objective construction of urban space, or the city as an engineered product, will benefit from a nomothetic approach towards knowledge— i.e. one that aims to generalize. Searching for the perfect, transferrable model is a characteristic of this nomothetic process. On the other hand, ideographic approaches aim to specify. People in the city (and their meaning) matters here, and city is seen as a process.7 It is for this reason that we argue for a moving away from the science of cities to a grammar of cities. A grammar of the cities represents an ideographic approach, as it is a way to understand the urban condition beyond general/generic laws and to incorporate the diversities and simultaneous, conflicting realities that come together in the production of space in the Global South. But is there a system to this approach? Comparable with Euclid’s third century BC systematization of knowledge and the way in which it germinated a Western philosophical system, in the East, similar systematization of knowledge took place under Panini in the area of the Sanskrit language (fourth century BC).8 Panini’s rules are (unlike Euclid’s) derived non-deductively. The emphasis is on parsimonious arrangement (Chakrabarti, 1997). Similar context-specific particularism is observable in Indian philosophy when its scriptures are carefully analysed; Judaeo/Christian ethics of universal principles is not found there. Ramanujan (1989, p. 46) quotes Hegel to drive home this point: “While we say, ‘Bravery is a virtue’, the Hindoos say, on the contrary, ‘Bravery is a virtue of the Cshatriyas’”. Southern theorization should find a grammar to unite these particularistic, context-sensitive rules. In example after example, Scott (1998) has shown how grand projects of planned cities and towns collapsed when the abstract and generalized models of the state and technical agencies failed to incorporate practical knowledge already present in the society and local communities.9 There is a clear, semantic gap between the planner and those who are being

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planned for and our aspiration is to bridge this divide. At the same time, the language thereby created should not be hegemonic. As diverse as the countries in the South, the rules of the language should avoid being artificially systematic in order to bring all diversities under one fold: Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter before those communicating like a disputed object set between them. Thus the world is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another. […] For this reason invented systems of artificial communication are never languages. For artificial languages, such as secret languages or systems of mathematical symbols, have no basis in a community of language or life; they are introduced and applied only as means and tools of communication. For this reason they always presuppose a prior agreement, which is that of language. […] In a real community of language, on the other hand, we do not first decide to agree but are always already in agreement. (Gadamer, 1975/2013, pp. 462–463)

The community referred to here comprises those who experienced epistemic and ontic Southern urbanism. Therefore, a prerequisite for developing a grammar is unravelling that experience. 11.2.2

The Rebel Is from the South

The introductory chapter in this book has argued how the use of the term “South” is not merely a geographical project. In this respect, a foundational text written a century ago (Gramsci, 1926/1978)—The Southern Question—is highly relevant. For Gramsci, the poor peasants of Southern Italy experienced themselves as colony of the country’s North. It is in this sense the “south” transcends geographic categorization by reclaiming status while being pushed to periphery. How a citizen of India situated in Bengaluru responds to Delhi, how a Chinese citizen situated in Hong Kong responds to Beijing, or how a citizen situated in Rio de Janeiro responds to the more populous São Paulo or to the actual Brazilian capital of Brasília are all functions of how “south” is a representation for being away from the centre of power. In other words, geographical proximity could be one of the limitations for exercising the right of “speaking truth to power”. The function of the Southern rebel is prophetic. Their moral courage emanates from the fact that they are located on the periphery rather than

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at the centre. Thus, they can challenge the dominant models. The grammarian model thus challenges the “central-place theory” latent in urban models and aims to decentre (in the next section, we will show how an autopoietic model has no centre). In the words of Sanyal (2007), this is the Foucauldian role reversal of excluded subjects (of the “ship of fools”) carrying out the redemptive function: “The stone which the builders refused has become the head stone of the corner” (Psalm 118: 22). The words of Chinese military leader Lin Piao10 demonstrate this concept: Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called “the cities of the world,” then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute “the rural areas of the world.” Since World War II, the proletarian revolutionary movement has for various reasons been temporarily held back in the North American and West European capitalist countries, while the people’s revolutionary movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America has been growing vigorously. In a sense, the contemporary world revolution also presents a picture of the encirclement of cities by the rural areas. In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples who make up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. (Piao, 1965)

The starting point for rebellion is an awareness of the “wretchedness” of oneself (Fanon, 1961). This dissatisfaction with sub-optimality acts as the driver in a search for an alternative world.11 In the Latin American context, Zea (1953, p. 121) analysed the double movement of first turning to European solutions for the region’s cities and then turning back to itself, away from the “corrupted western culture” and the importance of a shift to a culture that Latin America could call its own: The [Latin] American people had to solve their problems quickly and one of the solutions was offered by the European culture and they adopted this type of solution. Currently, the European culture has become a problem instead of a solution, a burden instead of a support, the ideas that were so familiar to the Latin American people turned into sinister objects, unknown, dark and dangerous. It is in this context that [Latin] America needs a culture of its own, Latin American people have to solve their problems in a different way, it cannot be through imitation but through their own personal creation.

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The expression “urban Naxals” has been popularized in India recently to indicate those individuals who do not fall into line with the ideologies of the ruling state. “Naxalism” historically was associated with rural areas,12 wherein the feudal power of landholding and other agrarian resources was challenged by a conscientized proletariat. By transplanting this category to urban areas, space was designated as ideationally polluted and generated “unwanted” or “ugly” or “dangerous” individuals. Transformation begins with those who rebel against the status quo. Southern experience is looking for this radical change, and not the “Ptolemization” of adding complications in order to effect minor changes (Zizek, 2008, p. vii) to existing urban models. Having outlined the basic tenets of the grammarian approach, and the unique experience of Southern cities that raises a need for the search for such a method, we now turn to the ways in which place-making occurs through communication models.

11.3

The Autopoietic Production of Space

Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space has shown how the Hegelian notion of production was interpreted by Marx as “seeking rationality immanent to production”. Therefore, all productive activity is defined less by invariable or constant factors than by the incessant to-and-fro between temporality (succession, concatenation) and spatiality (simultaneity, synchronicity). This form is inseparable from orientation towards a goal – and thus also from functionality […] and from the structure set in motion […]. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 71)

The vehement influence of this rationality-backed organization and the production of space on planning theory is problematic from a Southern perspective. It pushes into oblivion values of aesthetics, identity, morality, harmony, sociocultural practices, and sustainability—which are of central importance to the South.13 The reductive emphasis towards economism of production of space enables a “narrow definition of the problem at hand”. Such a process helps in turning complex/wicked problems into manageable/solvable particulates (Dunn, 2004). Its use for managing already-created institutions by tweaking here and there cannot be denied; at an ideational level, this approach could also be useful for creating a new set of rules or institutions by keeping reductive economism as a

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benchmark. However, it is neither useful for transforming the space (the already-created institutions), and definitely a roadblock when searching for a Southern model. Are there models, then, in which the underlying rationality claimed by the production of space is challenged? To answer this, we need to look at the constructs that brought the rational model into the field of planning in the first place. Escobar (1992) rightly points out that “urban planning” was a response to the invention of the ideas of economy and population in the eighteenth century. The application of laws of statistics, and the “normalisation” of human behaviour in large aggregates were part of this rationality project14 (Arendt, 1958). Our search for models in which subjects have production capacity (without rationality as immanent, as per Lefebvre’s quote above) led us to the theory of autopoiesis, proposed by Chilean biologists Humbarto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1975, 1980, 1992). Their theory has been expanded as social-system theory by Niklas Luhmann (2002).15 Autopoiesis is basically a communication model16 in which units transform and destruct through self-referentiality. Heavily critical of rationalitybacked European enlightenment processes, Luhmann articulates what is known as “system rationality”—that is, the capability to provide a better understanding of complexity. In our search for a grammarian model, the centrality of communication that autopoiesis offers is invaluable. It is good to be aware of the fact that the autopoietic model could provide an alternative to globalized languages and official planning recipes, which promote norms and regulations that exogenously impact on people’s livelihoods in neglected urban areas (Anguelovski et al., 2019; Schwab, 2018). System rationality, facilitated through the autopoietic communication model, allows us to imagine designing cities that could think and could have moral character. In the remainder of the current section, we outline this model. We do this by expanding and prescribing three key process requirements: (1) insurgent citizenship, already established in the planning literature of the South; (2) planning models to promote urban dialectics; and (3) generative urban designs, which have a three-decade-long history in the planning literature of the North, and which dovetail with the concept of order in philosophies from the Global South.

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Autopoiesis, which is a self-organizational model, could be infused with transformative urbanism if these three processes are used to generate grounded vocabularies (Mohan in the introductory chapter to this volume). 11.3.1

Insurgent Citizenship: From “zombie” Cities to Thinking Cities

Three global instruments operate to globalize cities: (1) financialization17 ; (2) knowledge transfer through consultancy firms18 ; and (3) benchmark making.19 These three processes together produce generic spaces (almost like a mould merely duplicating the master form). This is the technocratic, allopoietic process (the opposite of an autopoietic process) that makes cities look alike. Such places do not respond to the social stimuli of the people living there and become “zombie” cities. To combat this, we consider Holston’s (1995) insurgent citizenship as one of the essential components of the grammar for transformative urbanism. We will not elaborate since the literature on this is evidently clear20 (see summary in Miraftab, 2016; also see Pellissery & Lodemel, 2020). Several case studies presented in this volume show resistance to gravitation to be visible in the planning map. The sheer diversity of the cities of the Global South presents an opposing reality to the usual homogenizing practices and the rigidity of the planning framework. Banerjee (Chapter 3) presents a highly relevant argument regarding the dynamics of globalizing cities that do not include all the diverse and discrepant pieces in the mosaic, that are locked into a relationship of co-dependence, and that struggle to deliver the commons to all citizens: public goods and services, safety and security, the opportunity to grow and prosper. Another chapter in this volume covers the case of Lagos (Lawanson, Chapter 10) and discusses the irrelevance of the Nigerian city’s planning framework in the face of the activities of religious organizations, especially Pentecostal churches, that have been reconfiguring the space without regard for the existing planning regulations. Like in many informal neighbourhoods of the Global South, Pentecostal communities in Nigeria have become major agents in the production of space—even replacing state planning agencies in some cases in order to realize their own futureoriented visions of the urban good (De Boeck, 2013; Hancock & Srinivas, 2008). In this sense, the production of space operates outside formal

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planning mechanisms21 ; however, it uses the logic of homogenized urban reality (invisibilization, imposition, displacement, redevelopment, gentrification, etc.) in order to tailor the city to the religious community’s needs and economic aspirations. In this particular case, religious communities have filled the void left by the state and its lack of control through its regulatory planning framework. In this context of state absence and the irrelevance of planning, Chapter 6 (Calderón) reflects on the global challenge of socio-spatial justice within geographies of conflict, which produces the long-standing urbanization patterns that have accelerated the formation of marginal settlements in the steep hillsides of Medellín—often not officially recognized due to their lack of “formality”. This condition leads the communities of these marginal settlements to processes of mobilization that contest their invisibility. From the urban fringes of Medellín to the Shapira neighbourhood in southern Tel Aviv, communities in impoverished areas living without the state or under the shadow of planned radical change (Yiftachel & Cohen, Chapter 7) are in constant mobilization. They need to be in this state in order to secure recognition and to resist the homogenizing logic that acts as a set of guidelines for rapid development and property speculation, with little regard to their impact on the everyday livelihood and the heterogenous dynamics of production and occupation of the spaces concerned. The authors affirm that in cities of the Global South with constant inflows of newcomers, deprived of much of their security and the means to make the most of the urban space, the pressure on urban administrations to formulate more inclusionary policies is acutely evident. Can urban planning incorporate these inclusionary demands? From the perspective of transformative urbanism, a more challenging question is whether architecture and master plans could generate sublimation or the basic interactive process of transformation. Our view is that elements of order need to be decoded from their cultural contexts in order to understand the prerequisites for coding architecture with the potential for sublimation. We take this theme up after we deal with the form of interaction/dialogue required for urban planning—urban dialectics.

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257

Urban Dialectics

Dialectical urbanism is [the] singular ability to illuminate how the modern city can be both an administratively structured “objective” site or [a] forcefield of planned relations and a reflexively structuring “subjective” space of collective dwelling, improvising, appropriating, dreaming, innovating, struggling and transforming. (Lewandowski, 2005, p. 294)

Our examination of voices in the South in this book has clearly demonstrated a tendency of planning language to be dialectical. We consider this a second process requirement for transformative urbanism. At the foundational moment of the Indian Republic, after the country’s independence in 1947, three Indian leaders held completely different views on urban development. Mahatma Gandhi, celebrated as the father of the nation, thought that India lived in villages and, from a moral point of view, opposed urbanization as a strategy.22 Bhimrao Ambedkar, the leader of India’s historically Untouchable community and chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution thought exactly the opposite: “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrowmindedness and communalism?” For Ambedkar, urbanization was the answer to ending the iniquities of the caste system: in such spaces, inter-caste dining and inter-caste marriage would be plausible. Compared with these two visionaries, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of the country, believed in European-style town planning, and brought in French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier to make master plans for Indian cities. At the same time, Nehru also saw how cities and villages were intimately connected. If India has truly escaped totalitarian planning, it is the dialectic demonstrated above that has made this possible. The three leaders here are not fetishizing the object of urban: they are placing the idea in its historical context. Hundreds of resistance movements against evictions and master plans in India have imbibed their spirit from this process of dialectics. Running counter to urban dialectic is metaphysics, and the Euclidianengineered product called “city”. On the other hand, urban dialectics is able to imagine continuity between universal abstraction and its particular use. This view is most articulately expressed in the statement of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China (1989):

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City planning must suit the specific conditions of our country and embody a correct handling of the relationship between short-term and long-term development. The principle of usefulness and economy and of building the country through thrift and hard work must be adhered to in construction in a planned urban area.23

With this political aspiration, the Chinese planning system finds a synthesis within which to work with market-oriented reforms (Abramson, 2007). McFarlane and Silver (2017) note that dialectics is an everyday experience in resolving contradictions in the city life of Kampala (Uganda). Similarly, Uruguayan writer, academic, and literary critic Rama (1982) finds that cities are places of transculturation that produce syntheses of continental dimensions and the influence of foreign cultures. Rama showed the emergence of a new set of thinking beyond the simple reception of exogenous ideas, and this condition led to a historical connection that fusions of ideas create a new element enriched by diverse sources. To Rama, transculturation is the recovery of Latin American tradition and its singularity. 11.3.3

Generative Urban Designs

The third process that we suggest for facilitating transformative urbanism has been elaborated on by Alexander et al. (1987) in their A New Theory of Urban Design. The authors reject the model of urban planning in which the final form is prescribed. Rather, they suggest sequential steps that will generate designs. Let us first consider a contrasting case presented in this volume, before we delve into what generative designs could offer. The case comprises what Liu and Wang (Chapter 5) present regarding the planning system in China. China’s urban-planning experience is unique among the Global South countries. Its system was created from scratch and it was extensively influenced by the West; however, China’s urban planning does not function as a political process. By institutional design, it functions as a technical process that is embedded in an authoritarian political system. While this planning system has been remarkably successful in serving the needs of rapid economic growth, urbanization, and rising living standards, it has not been fast enough in safeguarding the environment and the interests of people—especially the disadvantaged. The homogenizing practices led by a planning system that serves an authoritarian state’s aspirations of modernity have configured urban

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spaces like “copycat” towns and gated communities, and have promoted the urban-village style of redevelopment with its very weak bottom-up channel. Contrast the Chinese case with Yiftachel’s and Cohen’s (Chapter 7) concept of defensive urban citizenship (DUC). This type of urban membership is shaped through processes embedded in proliferating urban threats that are born of market-led policies, intertwined with identity regimes to cast a shadow of “temporariness” on most residents of the urban frontier. The threat of displaceability produces the self-mobilization of residents in order to defend their imperilled social and material spaces— and, in the case of the Shapira neighborhood—their housing rights and “turf”. These new alliances are created to resist hegemonic attempts to divide and conquer and, instead, promote working together to fend off looming threats. What do these two contrasting cases offer for understanding the grammar of transformative urbanism? A key difference is the notion of centre. In the Chinese case, centre and the legitimacy of its plans are accepted; it is rejected in the Shapira model. Generative designs rebuff the notion of “centre” as a point. Rather, “a field of centers, then, is a nested series of localities that frame one another and variously connect to one another in a pattern of relationships” (Mehaffy, 2008, p. 60). At the core of this concept is the philosophical notion that Alexander (2003) called The Nature of Order—and it is in this idea of order that language meets planning. The main property of linguistic systems is discontinuity, the existence of a series of differential elements without a centre. In such an arrangement, each word has a centrality of its own. At the same time, between each element, there is space that creates discontinuity. We will show how the ideas of order in the South dovetail with Alexander’s ideas of generative designs. “The City has its order and the Village its custom”. This Javanese proverb summarizes the modernist politics of city making described by Scott (1998, Chapters 2 and 4). The fact is that in most of the cities of the Global South, once their veneer of modernity is removed, a deep desire for customs emerges. In other words, Southern urban planning becomes an exercise in antinomies of culture (if we import planning notions from the North), but operating with huge imbalances. In several Asian religions and philosophies, the notion of order overlaps with those of truth and goodness. Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Daoism all conflate fitting behaviour, or harmony, and order in peculiar

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ways. In the Vedic scriptures, rta is placed above the gods, who adhere to cosmic laws; the creative power of the gods emerges from this adherence to rta, and humans can participate in this creative power through the correct performance of rituals. Daoism also speaks of a similar harmony, wherein the individual is able to “understand and forget” distinctions yet maintain a balance (of yin and yang ) of essential unity. There have been attempts to codify these principles into rules. For instance, rta (cosmic changing order) as a concept is opposed to dharma (established moral rules). To reconcile this contradiction, dharma is prescribed differently for different subjects (king, worker, elderly person, young person, etc.). In other words, order should progress in a particular manner; a general manner of order would not convey the meaning required and would defy aesthetics. In Latin America, three pairs of discursively opposing concepts—“indigenist” and “pachamamist” (which prioritizes identity as an objective), “socialist” and “statist” (which prioritizes equity), and “ecologist” and “post-developmentalist”—flow together to constitute the ideals of good living (Hidalgo-Capitán & Cubillo-Guevara, 2017). These ideals have contributed both to the revolutionary movements and the constitutional processes in different countries of the region.24 These are examples of ways in which order exists without a point of centre in the Global South. Such systems require the generating of designs viewed from the perspective of each element. In this section, we have discussed three mediating communication processes (insurgent citizenship, dialectics, and generative designs) required to advance the production of space through system rationality. In the next section, we will discuss micro and meso experiences specific to Southern cities, to which these three processes need to be applied in order to allow transformative cities to emerge.

11.4

Transformative Cities

Latin American thinker and pedagogue Paulo Friere provides the outline for the process of transformation: Thus, it is not the limit-situations in and of themselves which create a climate of hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by women and men at a given historical moment: whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers. As critical perception is embodied in action, a

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climate of hope and confidence develops which leads men to attempt to overcome the limit-situations. This objective can be achieved only through action upon the concrete, historical reality in which limit-situations historically are found. As reality is transformed and these situations are superseded, new ones will appear, which in turn will evoke new limit-acts. (Freire, 1970, p. 99)

In this final section of the paper, we outline how the elements of grammar for transforming cities are connected with each other. Figure 11.1 summarizes this outcome. Three core precepts (decolonize, decommodify, and delegalize) are symbiotically connected in Southern urbanism. The colonial experience is closely linked to state formation in many countries in the Global South that have replaced their indigenous legal systems (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2006) and initiated the commodification of natural resources, labour, and money (Polanyi, 1944). It is not possible to transform cities by addressing only one of the aforementioned

Fig. 11.1 Communication model for transformative urbanism (Source The authors)

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precepts—decolonizing, decommodifying, and delegalizing; all three have to operate simultaneously. The words of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore’s premier 1959–1990) are insightful in this regard: When we were confronted with an enormous problem of bad housing, no development, overcrowding, we decided that unless drastic measures were taken to break the law, break the rules, we would never solve it. We therefore took overriding powers to acquire land at low cost, which was in breach of one of the fundamentals of British constitutional law—the sanctity of property. But that had to be overcome, because the sanctity of the society seeking to preserve itself was greater. (Centre for Liveable Cities, 2016, p. 10)

In different historical, geographical, and knowledge contexts, these precepts have different hermeneutical exhortations. To call for decommodification is to deploy urban resources in such a manner that partnerships between citizens are generated (Squires, 2011): things are not valued over people. To call for decolonization today is to liberate ourselves from the captive minds that fail to usher the resources from within. To call for delegalization is to prevent reified institutions from erecting obstacles to the transformative power of peoples’ collectives. This core is the wellspring from which the three mediating communication processes explained in the previous section emerge. In the context of urban planning, it takes the form of the autopoietic production of space. We consider this to be meso-level modality, connecting microlevel experiences of citizens (such as in-betweenness and suffering) with macro-level urban aspirations (urban sovereignty). In this section, we will elaborate on these micro and macro elements. However, we consider the meso process—which has been explained in the previous section—to be the most important one. 11.4.1

In-Betweenness as a Transformative Moment

One of the most powerful methods of Euclidian systematization was zerosum thinking. Wittgenstein (1958) warns against such substantialization, since both speech and thought are likely to be off the track and unable to specify the particular context. Compared with that system, several philosophical schools in the Global South maintain that the absolute has no

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qualities, and that therefore it is without substance.25 Lefebvre (1991, p. 254) has shown the Christian influence on European urban planning, whereby “absolute space was identified with subterranean space [i.e. the cemetery]”. Unlike the absolute space of the crypt, consider the Hindu practice of cremating the dead body and spreading its ashes in a river: within the philosophical tradition of birth and rebirth, the bodily existence is seen as temporary—and thus as a rejection of the absoluteness of space. Unlike zero-sum thinking, the experience of in-betweenness is transformative. Urbanism provides such “eureka” moments resembling the Platonian Allegory of the Cave: within the limits of given space and time, the subject is able to see another possibility that liberates it from those limits26 —hence, the yearning for the new reality (that is, not just the utopian Garden City), to which one is exposed. A concrete example is provided by circular migration in the cities of the Global South. Breman (1996), through his in-depth observation of the migration patterns in India, has shown that it is circular in nature—i.e. temporary and repetitive movement between host city and home town/village. Escaping from the feudal structures of the village, the migrant experiences the anonymity in the slums of megacities. Going back to the villages, he/she has acquired the courage to challenge those feudal values. Back (again) in the city, the subject experiences transient jobs, employers, and snobs struggling to catch up with an alien culture.27 This condition of simultaneity and complexity in the way in which space is understood and produced in the cities of the Global South allows us to overcome the vision of these geographies as merely problematic or pathological (Schindler, 2017). Banerjee in this volume (Chapter 3) presents the intersection of traditional, sociocultural orders and the modern, urbanized lifestyles alongside which they exist. The case of the urban villages in Delhi is labelled a home-grown modernity, in which traditional village life intermixes and assimilates “order” and “customs” (explained in the previous section here) into a single transformative reality. The introductory chapter to this volume also refers to this experience as an in-betweenness of homogeneity and heterogeneity.

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11.4.2

Suffering and Violence

Upon inviting a European friend to visit India, his honest response was, “I had been to India once, but don’t want to go there again. It takes several weeks to get back to myself after people beg me money on the streets and witnessing terribly distressed lives”. This is same for most of the Global South’s cities, marked by highly visible inequality. Simone expressed it thus: African cities don’t work, or at least their characterizations are conventionally replete with depictions ranging from the valiant, if mostly misguided, struggles of the poor to eke out some minimal livelihood to the more insidious descriptions of bodies engaged in near-constant liminality, decadence, or religious and ethnic conflict. A more generous point of view concedes that African cities are works in progress, at the same time exceedingly creative and extremely stalled. In city after city, one can witness an incessant throbbing produced by the intense proximity of hundreds of activities: cooking, reciting, selling, loading and unloading, fighting, praying, relaxing, pounding. (Simone, 2004, p. 15)

Several Latin American scholars have described this marginality differently.28 Castells developed a significant part of his hypothesis about the “urban question” in Santiago de Chile during the 1960s, in a context of political agitation and people’s claims for urban housing alternatives. Castells talked about “marginality” from the perspective of a high level of social organization (even higher than in other areas of the city). It offered an alternative model opposed to the prevailing urban theories. Castells affirmed that the Latin American city was important in understanding the interdependence between the “marginal” and “modern” urban realities, and how important it was to recognize conflict in order to produce disruptive guidelines as alternatives to the dominant social order (Castells, 1974, p. 89). Violence and suffering have primarily been viewed through a Northern lens. Salahub et al. (2018) have filled this vacuum by looking at cities from a Southern perspective. They find that violence cannot be separated from the questions of both social structure (identity that creates conflicts between communities, or even the patriarchal nature of cities perpetuating crime on women) and urban infrastructure (segregated settlement patterns and class-based discriminated access to city infrastructure such as malls). This is how suffering and violence becomes a foundational experience of urbanism in the Global South.29

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265

Urban Sovereignty

Prior to Westphalia, the city had its own autonomous existence. It was a place sought after because of geographical advantage (e.g. a port, good climate) as well as agglomeration effects—a network economy, in which entrepreneurs enjoyed proximate access and networking of businesses that created knowledge externality (see Mohanty, 2014). Even colonial powers came in order to both take and give cities.30 As Westphalia drew national borders, it was a matter of evolution that cities would be placed within national boundaries. Jacobs puts this process succinctly: Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it does not necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life. […] try looking at the real economic world in its own right rather than as a dependent artifact of politics, we can’t avoid seeing that most nations are composed of collections or grab bags of very different economies, rich regions and poor ones within the same nation. […] We can’t avoid seeing, too, that among all the various types of economies, cities are unique in their abilities to shape and reshape the economies of other settlements, including those far removed from them geographically. (Jacobs, 1984, pp. 31–32)

Cities took a double blow—once through the nationalization project of Westphalia in the seventeenth century, and then again through the globalization project of the twentieth century. Several national leaders viewed the creation and development of cities in the colonial period as being opposed to national objectives, and the policy responses emanating from such an assessment were hugely different from their predecessors. Some polities attempted to completely reverse to the precolonial era; many other polities attempted a balancing of regions through the creation of “rurban” regions; some others wanted cities to prosper, and to redistribute their wealth by remaining connected to villages; yet others viewed cities as the future, and created policies biased towards densification and urbanization. Julius Nyerere (President of Tanzania 1964–1985) thought that urbanization, which had been brought about by European colonialism, was economically driven by wage labour. This had disrupted the traditional, precolonial, rural African society. He believed that it was possible for his government to recreate precolonial traditions in Tanzania and, in turn, re-establish a traditional level of mutual respect and return the people

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to settled, moral ways of life (Boddy-Evans, 2019). Tanzania’s “villagization” movement and establishment of a new capital away from Dar es Salaam need to be seen in this context.31 Disparity between cities and villages was a political question within the nationalization project.32 Simultaneously, inequality within the city limits raised another set of problems. How that inequality had to be dealt was a national question, rather than something to be managed within cities.33 The integration of cities into the nation was a political project.34 The second blow to cities’ sovereignty came through the globalization project. In Khatua’s text (Chapter 2), the suburbs are the spaces where globalizing forces operate, becoming instruments of governance in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area. In this area, the state’s drive to make the city part of the global capital circuit has led to a loss of agricultural and natural resources through the formation of new towns and the re-delineation of municipal borders that are guided by market and state logic, which is disconnected from the communities concerned. In the earlier part of this paper, we have explained three global processes that make “zombie” cities. A transformative city should be able to nurture political participation beyond a formal legal autonomy. In India, Chatterjee speculates that the lack of intellectual engagement with improving urban conditions may have to do with a “perceived lack of agency by the Indian elite in thinking about the city” (Chatterjee, 2004, p. 140). The city was seen as a colonial invention, to which the Indians had adapted; they did not belong there. Even when the urban middle class began asserting its moral influence on the city in the 1950s and 1960s, it did not go so far as acknowledging a position of authority over the “Western” city. The urban sovereign model is a macro space of citizen interaction that is coherent with the autopoietic system of self-referential closure. Without this autonomy, the city could become politically subservient to the actors, ideas, and institutions, which would signal homogenizing tendencies.

11.5

Conclusion

“Beyond the ideas of right and wrong, there is a beautiful garden. I shall meet you there. When the soul lies down in that garden, world is too full to talk about”. Sufi poet Rumi’s words summarize the search for a model beyond the rationalities of planning. A rational model could still be relevant for creating a new city or even to manage the urban

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agglomeration, retaining the optimality principles. Unless the underlying assumption of the rational model of planning changes, however, both creation and management can only multiply the existing problems of Southern urban areas. It is for this reason that we have, in this chapter, argued for the transformative function of planning. The emancipation of urban existence in the Global South requires a recognition that the region’s authenticated social order is essentially problematic. The autopoietic production of space as an interaction between the natural and social orders, left to itself, would not lead to any transformation. This is where rearrangement without an emphasis on the “centre” could initiate a transformative process. Codes latent in societal norms need to be identified, and a process of using these codes to destroy and transform planning is required. We have identified three processes— insurgent citizenship, urban dialectics, and generative designs—which could be used to shape this autopoietic process. These three processes have the potential to move the autopoietic production of space towards emancipation. For those engaged in these situated modernities, the call for action therefore lingers louder than the cry for independence, as the aim is not a “private liberation” but a collective takeover of an urban life based on a grammar of transformative urbanism for and from the South.

Notes 1. Friedmann (1993) proposed five characteristics of non-Euclidian planning: normative, innovative, political, transactive and one based on social learning. 2. Transformation as a concept has its own legacy in social-science literature. A summary, and an account of its philosophical roots in Critical Realism, can be found in Bhaskar (1986). 3. We use this metaphor from Genesis (Chapter 11) to hold this chapter together in the search for an overarching theory for hugely diverse contexts. 4. Feminists points out the ‘masculinisation’ of the character of science; subaltern literature contends that science is distant from the common people. 5. Though there is no scope for a full treatment of the epistemology of this tradition in this paper, a brief overview is useful. The debate between objectivist and relativist understanding lies at the heart of this clash. Khun (1962) and Winch (1958) attacked objectivism, with is strong roots in

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6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

the positivist tradition. Feyerabend’s (1975) epistemological anarchism opened the Pandora’s box of relativism in its fullest sense, leading to a widening gap between objectivism and relativism. This yawning gulf between scientific traditions gave important headway for practitioners. What emerged was the realization of the multiple standards of rationality (Bernstein, 1983). Thus, the paradigm of practice was not dependent on one standard or another but rather on bringing completeness or closure of understanding through many observations and inferences emerging from multiple contexts (Brunner, 2006). In other words, diverging conclusions emerging from many models would enhance understanding rather than pathologizing it. Dependence on a single model by practitioners led to reductionist and context-independent understanding. At the height of such thought, Rorty (1978) rejected representational accounts of knowledge and language; he held that even the best of the scholarship achieves only the holding up of a ‘mirror towards […] nature’. See also empirical evidence of the green-city model of Hanoi as an assemblage (Leducq and Scarwell, 2020). “[…] objects in cities—whether they are buildings, streets, parks, districts, landmarks, or anything else—can have radically different effects, depending upon the circumstances and contexts in which they exist. Thus, for instance, almost nothing useful can be understood or can be done about improving city dwelling if these are considered in the abstract as ‘housing’. City dwelling—either existing or potential—are specific and particularized buildings always involved in differing, specific processes […].” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 440) See the systematic comparison of both methods—of Euclid and Panini— by Staal (1965). Scott used the expression metis, and some other planning scholars (for example, Flyvbjerg, 2001) have used the term phronesis. Lin Piao, as a field commander of the Red Army, contributed to the Communists’ 22-year struggle for power and held many high government and party posts. He played a prominent role in the first few years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Particularly notable is the opinion of one Japanese public intellectual: I’m not satisfied with the fundamental ideas of the Japanese people. Japanese who have travelled to the West think that if they only put into practice the external forms of factories, governments or anything else, then they can make a fine civilization with that alone. If they just bring back the form, then what good is that without the substance? This is Japan’s civilization today. Because we don’t look at the substance of true civilization, because we don’t understand

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it, because we don’t feel it, Japan’s importation of European civilization has truly reached the extremes of unsightliness. […] I think that as long as the Japanese take no notice of the substance of civilization, no matter how they may adorn it with beautiful external forms it will be of no use at all. (Nagai Kafu quoted in Schulz 2011, p. 148) 12. The term “naxal” comes from a village in the eastern part of India— Naxalbari—where a peasant revolt was first staged in 1967. The insurgency movement also has a close connection with the Communist Party in India. 13. Planning literature from the Global South recognizes conflicting rationalities (see Watson, 2003 for the conflict between governmental rationality and survival rationality). Yet, planning experts are challenged to explore alternatives to the rationality project. 14. There is no need to summarize here the various criticisms of the application of human-rationality models in practical problem solving. Sociologists and anthropologists (Max Weber and Mary Douglas, to name but two who have distinguished between rational and rationalizing) who have attempted to understand how rationality operates in human decisions have become sceptical of the endeavour itself. The moral intuitions are more foundational than strategic reasoning (Haidt, 2013). 15. Autopoiesis is one of the ideas marginalized by planning experts (see Assche & Verschraegen, 2008). 16. The opposite of autopoiesis is allopoiesis, similar to how production in a factory takes place—using raw materials, something different is created (a computer, a car, etc.). 17. Caldeira (2006) gives the example of how Brazil became the largest borrower from the World Bank primarily for urban infrastructure, and how this created improvements as well as deterioration in social life— including the proliferation of favelas , the reduction of social mobility, and an increase in violence. In a similar manner, Xaxa’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 4) shows how a yearning for private capital in the form of landed property in the Indian city of Ranchi led to the destruction of a traditional bond between the local communities and homogenizing logics being applied to the Indigenous population. 18. Master-plan creation is a job outsourced by the municipalities of the Global South to international agencies, which often have access to finer data—even to the scale of square metre of a street. 19. Indexes such as the “Roster of World Cities”, “Global Cities Investment Monitor”, and “Innovation Cities” are examples of such benchmarking exercises.

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20. In one of the chapters in this volume, a related concept—defensive urban citizenship—is introduced as an alternative approach to understanding the city and its communities’ engagement in the production and reconfiguration of their space. Through the case of southern Tel Aviv (Yiftachel & Cohen, Chapter 7) shows how self-mobilization led to the integration of different types of populations (immigrants, veterans, foreigners and young people) into a new urban community. This could be seen as a vista point from which to understand the transformation of most contemporary cities of our time. Mendez-Abad (Chapter 8) demonstrates how insurgent urban citizenship is also useful in understanding the process of public-space re-appropriation in Guayaquil, in which, beyond the tensions emerging from diverse interests in the informal neighborhood of El Cisne Dos, the community worked together in order to reclaim and adapt the public space to their needs and everyday practices. 21. The informal economy can be viewed as a highly sophisticated network system based on trust, in which non-state welfare realization is achieved (Davy & Pellissery, 2013)—although “seeing [it] like a planner/state”, it would seem to be merely chaotic and unorganized. The autopoietic model offers an explanation for the informal economy rather than seeing it as something that cannot be understood. Therefore, contrary to Roy’s (2009) argument of informality as an impediment to urban planning, the autopoietic model would argue that it is our failure to understand the codes of informality that leads us to fail to incorporate the same into planning models. 22. Gandhi wrote, in his 1909 book Hind Swaraj, or “Indian Home Rule”, Machinery is like a snake-hole which may contain from one to a hundred snakes. Where there is machinery there are large cities; and where there are large cities, there are tram-cars and railways; and there only does one see electric light. English villages do not boast of any of these things. Honest physicians will tell you that where means of artificial locomotion have increased, the health of the people has suffered. I remember that when in a European town there was a scarcity of money, the receipts of the tramway company, of the lawyers and of the doctors went down and people were less unhealthy. I cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery. 23. As shown in this chapter, the Global South is diverse and totalitarian planning is visible in several parts of the region. China is a good example: Deng Xiaoping, who is credited with leading China towards modernization as well as with developing the city of Shenzhen, noted,

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From the very outset there were different opinions concerning the establishment of special economic zones, fearing whether this meant practicing capitalism. Shenzhen’s construction achievements have answered those having worries of one kind or another, the special zone is “socialist”, not “capitalist” in nature. (“Records of Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s Shenzhen Tour”, published by the People’s Daily) 24. In the African context, too, we could find similar notions of order: African towns and cities were at once utilitarian, ornamental, and humane. They symbolized not only man’s relationship to his fellow man and the cosmos but man’s adaptation to the natural environment. Rather than conquer and destroy nature, the African builder revered and complimented it. Moreover, urban living radiated a spirit of mutual aid and cooperation, of civility and gentility, of good manners and etiquette. There was a sensitive interrelatedness to everything; and it was that quality that made African towns and cities, and the structures within them, works of art. (Hull, 1976, p. 78) 25. See Staal (1965) for evidence of the same in Chinese and Indian philosophy. In the Chinese language, there is no word that corresponds to “to be”. In Sanskrit thinking, the absolute as substance is considered as category confusion with the particular. 26. This experience has been theorized better in the philosophy of art, in the contexts of the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) or Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). 27. Some cities have tried to historicize the in-between experience of the city by presenting the “journey of the city” to its population. Examples include the Migrant Workers’ Library on the outskirts of Beijing and the Labour Museum in Oslo, Norway. 28. Hernando de Sotto’s 2000 Mystery of Capital describes slum dwellers as entrepreneurs. 29. Delhi’s annual murder rate per 100,000 persons is above 500, while that of São Paulo is above 100. These figures are illustrative: across most Southern cities, rates of violence and crime are alarming. 30. Mumbai (then Bombay) was a dowry gift from Portugal to the British Crown in 1661—of course, well after Westphalia (1648), when there was no Indian nation but the Kingdom of Portugal and the British Empire, with their boundaries clearly marked (not just Lisbon or London).

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31. It is also useful to take note of opposing, minoritarian views: “It is above all in these new urban societies that the characteristic institutions and ideas of African nationalism are born and grow to maturity” (Hodgin, 1956, p. 216). 32. Kakuei Tanaka, Japan’s prime minister (1972–1974) articulated this coherently: Public opinion calls for the simultaneous solution of overcrowding and under population to live in comfort in a beautiful land of affluence and security. To achieve these ends, we must boldly reverse this torrential urban concentration and direct our national energy and surplus economic strength to remodelling the entire archipelago. Disparity between urban and rural areas, between the prosperous Pacific coast and the stagnating Japan Sea coast, can surely be eliminated by using levers such as relocating industries, making them more knowledge intensive, constructing super-express railways and trunk expressways throughout the nation, and creating nationwide information and communication networks. (Tanaka, 1973, p. iv) 33. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore said, After independence in 1965, I was troubled by Singapore’s completely urban electorate. I had seen how voters in capital cities always tended to vote against the government of the day and was determined that our householders should become home owners, otherwise we would not have political stability […] I believed this sense of ownership was vital for our new society which had no deep roots in a common historical experience. (Yew, 2000, p. 167) 34. Mao’s speech to Communist Party cadres in 1945 is instructive: From 1927 to the present the centre of gravity of our work has been in the villages—gathering strength in the villages, using the villages in order to surround the cities and then taking the cities. The period for this method of work has now ended. The period of “from the city to the village” and of the city leading the village has now begun. The centre of gravity of the Party’s work has shifted from the village to the city. In the south the People’s Liberation Army will occupy first the cities and then the villages. Attention must be given to both city and village and it is necessary to link closely urban and rural work, workers and peasants, industry and agriculture. Under no circumstances should the village be ignored

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and only the city given attention; such thinking is entirely wrong. Nevertheless, the centre of gravity of the work of the Party and the army must be in the cities; we must do our utmost to learn how to administer and build the cities. (Tse-tung, 1949)

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Correction to: Theorising Urban Development From the Global South Anjali Karol Mohan, Sony Pellissery, and Juliana Gómez Aristizábal

Correction to: A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4 The original version of the book was inadvertently published with incorrect author’s last name in Chapters 1 and 8. The author’s last name is corrected from ‘X. M. Abad’ to ‘X. Méndez Abad’. The book has been updated with the changes.

The updated version of these chapters can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_8 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4_12

C1

Index

A Adivasis, 82, 90 Aggregation and disaggregation, 24 Appropriation, 9, 16, 17, 144, 177–181, 184–187, 190, 192, 193, 211, 224, 225 Architecture, 103–105, 109, 176, 207, 225, 256 Asian, 58–60, 75, 77, 249, 252, 259 Asian cities, 59, 62, 72, 75, 221 Asylum seekers, 150, 152, 154, 160, 161, 163, 168 Athens Charter, 102, 121 Autopoietic, 25, 252, 254, 255, 262, 266, 267, 270 B Bally, 36, 44–47, 49–52 Binaries, 4, 7, 14, 18–20, 22–24, 89, 155 Border, 186, 247, 265, 266 Bottom-up, 17, 21, 22, 112, 183, 197–199, 202, 205, 208, 210–215, 223, 259

Boundaries ‘drawn by’, 3, 5, 14, 19, 24 Boundaries ‘drawn onto’, 3, 5, 14, 18, 24 C Camp, 222, 224, 225, 228, 231–233, 239 Capital city, 58, 64, 84, 202, 272 Centre, 5, 32, 37, 52, 53, 65, 69–71, 85, 136, 198, 202, 227, 233, 236, 251, 252, 259, 260, 267, 272, 273 Charter of Machu Picchu, 107 Chhotanagpur Tenancy (CNT) Act, 1908, 86, 91, 95 Church, 184, 198, 202, 207, 223, 224, 226, 228, 232–240, 255 Citizenship, 16, 25, 153, 154, 170, 178, 254, 255, 260, 267 Colonialism, 10, 199, 200, 214, 265 Colonization, 82, 170, 200, 202 Colony, 63, 65–67, 71, 88, 227, 251 Commodification, 134, 229, 261, 262

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. K. Mohan et al. (eds.), Theorising Urban Development From the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82475-4

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280

INDEX

Communication, 25, 85, 249, 251, 253, 254, 260, 262, 272 Community, 7, 10, 16, 19, 21, 24, 32, 50, 51, 67, 82, 83, 88, 89, 96, 104, 112, 114, 115, 120, 130, 131, 135, 137–144, 149–152, 154, 159, 160, 162–164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 177, 181, 183, 184, 190, 198, 203, 204, 206–208, 211, 213, 222, 225, 227, 230, 233, 237–239, 250, 251, 255–257, 264, 266, 269, 270 Community mapping, 142 Complexity, 3, 5, 13, 20, 21, 23, 32, 140, 211, 254, 263 Conceived space (Representations of Space), 129 Conflicting rationalities, 13, 176, 269 Consolidated areas, 183 Construction permit, 102, 106 Contextual, 2–13, 18, 20–23, 25, 33, 35, 36, 48–50, 53, 58, 59, 62, 64, 76, 84, 93–98, 110, 127, 132, 138, 152, 153, 160, 176, 179, 180, 184, 193, 198–200, 206, 214, 223, 226, 249, 250, 252, 256, 257, 262, 264, 266–268, 271 Contraries and simultaneity, 25 Co-production, 16, 22 Copycat town, 13, 102, 104, 114, 116, 117, 121, 259 Core, 32, 33, 35, 44, 48, 50, 52, 53, 93, 111, 120, 157, 158, 222, 233, 239, 250, 259, 261, 262 D Defensive citizenship, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 150, 162, 170, 259, 270 Delhi, 12, 18, 19, 24, 58–60, 62–69, 72, 74–77, 251, 263, 271

Delineation, 9, 36, 37, 51, 53 Design, 12, 25, 73, 77, 103, 104, 107, 112–117, 144, 176, 177, 180, 185, 238, 249, 254, 258–260, 267 Detailed construction plan, 107, 117 Detailed development-control plan, 107, 114 Detailed plan, 102, 114 Development, 3, 8, 10, 11, 13, 19, 22, 23, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, 46–48, 51, 57–60, 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74–77, 83, 85, 88, 89, 95, 96, 98, 102–113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 130, 132, 134, 152, 155, 157–162, 166, 169–171, 176, 181, 183, 184, 198, 199, 202–204, 206, 207, 211–213, 224, 226–231, 234, 235, 239, 240, 249, 256, 258, 262, 265 Dialectic, 25, 254, 256–258, 260, 267 Displaceability, 16, 20, 22, 151, 161, 166, 167, 170, 259 Displacement, 11, 53, 93, 127–130, 133, 139–141, 144, 151, 175, 185, 256 Diversity, 5, 18, 58, 107, 161, 209, 250, 251, 255 E Ecological consideration, 97 Ecuador, 2, 177, 180, 181, 188 El Cisne Dos, 16, 20, 21, 24, 177, 180, 182–186, 188, 191–193, 270 Embedded knowledge, 5, 7, 15, 19, 21 Emergent, 16, 214, 215, 222 Enclave, 60, 76, 102, 155, 223 Epistemology, 8, 153, 267

INDEX

281

“Escuela de Barrios de Ladera” (“Hillside Neighbourhood School”), 137 Estuary, 183, 185, 188 Euclid, 248, 250, 268 Everyday, 3, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 19–21, 24, 59, 73, 98, 129, 151, 154, 163, 167, 169, 176–180, 185, 190–193, 222, 256, 258, 270 Everyday city, 67 exclusionary city planning, 58

Governance, 6, 10–14, 17, 19, 33–36, 39, 44, 45, 48, 50–53, 59, 60, 77, 88, 89, 97, 110, 202, 204, 205, 238, 239, 247, 249, 266 Grammar, 248–251, 255, 259, 261, 267 Greater Ranchi, 84, 88–90, 93, 95 Grounded vocabularies, 24, 255 Guayaquil, 16, 20, 177, 180–182, 184–186, 270 Guayaquil Ecológico, 182, 184, 185, 191

F Farmland preservation, 108, 110 Favelas , 132, 269 Fifth Schedule, 88, 90, 95, 97 Finance, 106, 108, 111, 112, 119, 210 Five-year economic and social development planning, 108 Freire, Paulo, 198, 201, 206, 207, 215, 261 Frontier neighborhoods, 161

H HaTikva (Neighborhood), 158 Heterogeneous modes of space production, 15, 22–24 Heterogenous, 3, 4, 9, 12, 14, 24, 256 High-density, 61, 67, 70, 72, 143 High-speed rail (HSR), 111, 112, 121 Home-grown modernity, 57, 73, 263 Homogenous, 53, 162 Homogeneous modes of space production, 22–24 Housing, 10, 17, 19–21, 40, 46, 58, 60–64, 66, 70–73, 75, 76, 102, 106, 113, 118–120, 129, 130, 134, 138–140, 142, 144, 157–159, 161, 167, 171, 182, 183, 198, 202–207, 209, 210, 212, 215, 227, 259, 262, 264, 268 Howrah, 36, 37, 44–46, 49, 50, 52

G Gated community, 102, 115, 116, 227, 232, 238, 259 Generative, 25, 254, 258–260, 267 Geographies of conflict, 128, 129, 142, 256 Globalization, 10, 178, 224, 226, 265, 266 Global south, 1, 3, 8, 9, 15, 18, 23, 25, 31–36, 39, 44, 48, 49, 51–53, 58, 73, 101, 103, 109, 110, 121, 122, 128, 132–135, 138, 142, 145, 170, 175, 178, 179, 191, 199, 215, 248–250, 254–256, 258–264, 267, 269, 270

I Ideographic, 250 In-betweenness, 8, 22, 25, 262, 263 Inclusion, 46, 59, 66, 132, 137, 176, 193, 205 Incremental development, 75

282

INDEX

Indigenous peoples, 82, 83, 95, 96, 98 Industrial park, 106 Inequality, 2, 14, 135, 136, 223, 264, 266 Influence, 48, 64, 90, 102, 103, 105, 129, 177, 185, 206, 207, 222, 239, 240, 253, 258, 263, 266 Informality, 2, 7, 14, 77, 118, 122, 131, 170, 175–179, 193, 223, 270 Informal settlements, 21, 22, 136, 141, 176, 182, 206–208 Inhabitants, 11, 12, 14–16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 82, 127, 129, 134, 144, 177–186, 188–193, 198, 201, 203, 206–215 Insurgent, 16, 25, 154, 178, 254, 255, 260, 267, 270 Integration, 14, 60–62, 69, 132, 266, 270 Intention, 5, 18, 19, 21, 22, 138 Interim space, 17, 225, 235 Internally displaced people (IDPs), 127, 133, 136, 137, 139–141 Invisible territories, 15, 23, 128, 130–132, 135, 140, 146

J Justice, 13, 110, 113, 120, 121, 135, 256

K Knowledge, 2–4, 6–10, 12, 13, 15–17, 21, 32, 83, 103, 109, 110, 112, 121, 122, 137, 177, 192, 199, 200, 206, 211, 249, 250, 255, 262, 265, 268, 272 Kolkata, 11, 19, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 48, 52

Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA), 36–38, 40, 44, 45, 48, 266 Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA), 37–40, 45, 51, 52 L Labor migrants, 150, 158, 160–163 Land, 10, 12, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41–43, 48–52, 59–65, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75–77, 83, 85, 86, 88–96, 98, 107, 110–113, 115, 118, 119, 132, 136, 137, 140, 143, 157, 166, 167, 183, 184, 200–207, 209–215, 222, 224–226, 230–234, 238, 239, 262, 272 Land administration, 89 Land Administration Law, 111, 112 Land-based finance, 111 Land expropriation, 62, 64 Land governance, 222, 224 Land leasing fee, 111 Land use, 69, 75, 88, 104, 106, 107, 121, 122, 150, 169, 210, 222, 225, 230, 233 Land-use planning, 74, 108, 221, 223, 224 Language, 12, 19, 32, 75, 81, 97, 249–251, 259, 268 Language of planning, 74–76, 176, 254, 257 Latin America, 10, 15, 23, 152, 252, 260 Law, 2, 14, 68, 69, 72, 85, 90–93, 96–98, 132, 136, 167, 230, 249, 250, 254, 260, 262 Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 129, 133, 139, 179, 253, 254, 263 Legal pluralism, 89, 90 Liberation, 201, 250 Limit-situations, 260, 261

INDEX

Lived space (Representational Spaces ), 129 Livelihood, 10, 12, 14, 16, 41, 42, 50, 62, 64, 68, 83, 94, 96, 136, 176, 177, 182, 186, 191, 193, 254, 256, 264 Local, 2, 13, 16, 21, 35, 36, 39, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50–53, 60, 67–69, 71, 73, 75–77, 86, 88, 90, 95, 96, 102–104, 106, 107, 110–112, 117, 121, 127, 130, 135–138, 140, 142, 144, 150–152, 154, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169–171, 176, 178, 179, 181–186, 190, 192, 193, 201, 202, 204, 207, 210, 211, 214, 227, 234, 235, 250, 269 Local practices, 193 M Marginality, 7, 132, 135, 178, 264 Master plan, 6, 10, 60, 61, 64–69, 73–76, 88, 89, 95, 102, 106, 114, 143, 155, 233, 238, 256, 257 Medellín, 15, 20, 22, 23, 127, 128, 130–132, 135–144, 146, 256 Metropolitan, 31–37, 39, 41, 48–53, 157, 158, 228 Migrant workers, 60, 62, 118–120 Migration, 20, 128, 142, 154, 155, 166, 168, 170, 181, 182, 263 Mixed use, 60, 67, 74, 233 Mizrahim (Oriental Jews), 163 Modalities, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17–24, 201, 213, 262 Modern and traditional, 14, 20, 23 Modernity, 6, 8, 10, 73, 74, 179, 197, 199–202, 213–215, 258, 259 Multiculturalism, 137, 140

283

Municipal, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41–44, 46–52, 59, 67–69, 72, 84, 89, 106–108, 111, 112, 114–117, 119, 122, 150, 155, 157, 160, 169, 203, 204, 211, 250, 266 Municipalities Extension to Scheduled Areas (MESA), 2001, 97 Mutual learning across contexts, 9 Mutual learning within contexts, 9 N Namibia, 2, 16, 20, 197–205, 207–211, 214, 215 Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG), 205, 207–209 Neighborhood, 105, 109, 151, 161–167, 169, 170, 177, 180, 183, 185, 186, 188–192, 270 Neoliberal, 11, 32, 33, 35, 48, 130, 134, 151, 154, 158, 162, 201, 237, 239 Neoliberal planning, 15 Neve-She’anan (Neighborhood), 158, 160, 169 Newcomers, 152, 183, 256 New town, 17, 34, 38, 43, 48, 53, 116, 225, 231, 266 Nomothetic, 250 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 167, 204, 205, 207–209, 211, 214 O One size fits all housing, 139 Ontology, 3, 130, 133 Order, 6, 10, 19, 22, 23, 25, 58, 60, 70, 71, 83, 90, 96, 136, 154, 168, 179, 225, 226, 235, 256, 259, 260, 263, 267, 271 Ordinary, 2, 16, 32, 34, 81, 178, 179, 190, 191

284

INDEX

P Participation, 114, 137, 140, 141, 145, 159, 177, 181, 184, 185, 192, 266 Pentecostalism, 221, 225, 226, 228, 239, 240 Perceived space (Spatial Practice), 129 Periphery, 11, 15, 24, 33–35, 37, 41, 44, 51–53, 65, 67, 76, 128, 131, 135, 143, 153, 179, 181, 185, 251 Personalization, 16, 190–192 (Petit) Gentrification, 150, 154, 160, 162, 163, 169 Place, 9, 10, 18, 25, 32, 33, 35, 41, 43, 44, 50, 53, 58, 60, 61, 64, 70, 75, 76, 83, 84, 88, 94–96, 102, 105, 120, 132, 133, 135, 142, 150, 160, 164, 178, 179, 185, 186, 190, 198, 201, 202, 204, 206, 211–214, 222, 254, 265, 269 Planned and unplanned city, 63, 155 Planning, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9–14, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 33, 35–37, 39, 48, 51, 58–64, 66, 67, 69, 72–76, 88, 96, 102–110, 112–114, 117, 120–122, 138, 139, 145, 150–152, 154, 158–160, 162, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 176, 180, 198, 199, 201–204, 210, 222–224, 226, 227, 229–232, 234, 235, 237–240, 248, 254–259, 266–270 Planning laws, 249 Planning permit, 106 Policy, 15, 16, 32–34, 40, 61–64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 77, 96–98, 106, 112, 113, 130, 137, 138, 140, 145, 150–152, 163, 164, 166, 167,

169, 170, 177, 181, 201, 209, 230, 256, 259, 265 Political, 11, 15, 19, 20, 32, 33, 35, 39, 42, 48–51, 53, 59, 68, 71, 74, 81, 93, 95, 103, 109, 110, 112, 113, 120, 121, 129, 131, 132, 134–140, 145, 151, 163, 179, 181, 183, 184, 222, 223, 225, 226, 238, 240, 247–249, 258, 264–266 Power, 5–7, 15, 18, 20, 22, 36, 39–45, 49, 51, 52, 70, 85, 88–90, 103, 111–113, 117, 120, 121, 131–133, 154, 199, 201, 202, 206, 226, 232, 251, 253, 260, 262, 265, 268 Practice, 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10–13, 15–22, 24, 59, 63, 69, 83, 94, 103–105, 109–111, 113, 120, 129, 130, 132, 136, 137, 139, 145, 162, 167, 176–180, 182, 186, 191–193, 198, 199, 202, 206–208, 214, 222, 224–227, 229, 231, 239, 248–250, 253, 255, 258, 263, 268, 270 Praxis, 2, 6–9, 11–14, 18, 19, 21–23, 138, 237, 247, 248, 250 Primary functional area planning, 108 Private sector, 68, 157, 211, 214 Process of elicitation, 24 Process of recognition, 23 Processual, 2, 23, 25 Professionals, 9, 89, 90, 109, 114, 143, 159, 163, 198, 200, 202–205, 207, 209, 211, 214, 215, 233, 234, 250 Protest, 40, 41, 49, 52, 61, 76, 92, 135 Provisions of Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (P-PESA), 90, 97

INDEX

Public space, 13, 20–22, 102, 104, 114, 116, 119, 121, 131, 142–144, 160, 164, 176, 177, 180–184, 186, 188, 190–192, 270 Pujali, 36, 39, 42, 43, 49–52

R Rational, 6, 7, 14, 22, 96, 254, 266, 269 Rationality(ies), 6, 8, 11, 19, 22, 53, 120, 133, 139, 180, 248, 253, 254, 260, 266, 268, 269 Re-appropriation, 16, 20–22, 177, 180, 186, 188–193, 270 Re-casting urban planning in the South, 59 Recognition, 1, 15, 16, 69, 90, 128, 131, 138, 176, 205, 208, 211, 213, 256, 267 Recreation, 16, 64, 65, 70, 144, 182, 184, 185, 188, 191, 233 Recursive, 4, 5, 22, 24 Re-delineation, 36, 44, 51, 53, 266 Redevelopment, 60–62, 64, 67, 68, 102, 104, 117–119, 121, 149, 150, 165, 182, 256, 259 Relational, 2, 3, 8, 17, 18, 21, 25, 179 Religion, 17, 184, 221–224, 226–228, 231, 259 Resistance, 6, 41, 48, 50, 52, 53, 86, 92, 95, 159–162, 178, 255, 257 Rural, 12, 14, 20, 23, 32–35, 37, 44, 46, 48, 51, 52, 57–62, 70, 71, 77, 84, 97, 98, 105, 107, 108, 111, 117, 118, 121, 128, 134, 136, 137, 139, 152, 184, 225, 252, 253, 265, 272

285

S Sacred, 235 Services, 10, 19, 38, 46–49, 51, 52, 61, 65, 67–72, 75–77, 94, 107, 110–114, 118, 131, 136, 144, 145, 154, 161, 163, 182–184, 211, 214, 233, 255 Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN), 205, 207–210, 213 Shack Dwellers International (SDI), 207 Shapira (Neighborhood), 150, 151, 155, 158, 161, 162, 169, 256, 259 Simultaneity, 18, 253, 263 Singularity, 258 Singular script, 5, 25 Situated, 31, 39, 44, 179, 237, 241, 251 Situated modernities, 17, 21, 214–216, 267 Slums, 3, 7, 14, 65, 66, 69, 102, 155, 263, 271 Small city, 12 Sociospatial alienation, 131 Sociospatial justice, 128 Socio-spatial signifier, 7, 15 Sociospatial theory, 130, 139 Socio-territorial mosaics, 58 Southeastern approach, 153 Southeastern Tel-Aviv, 15 Sovereign, 10, 90, 91, 266 Space, 2–7, 9, 12–21, 24, 25, 32–37, 44, 48, 50, 52, 53, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 74, 85, 105, 106, 108, 114, 116, 118, 120, 129, 130, 133, 134, 139, 144, 151, 152, 154, 155, 158, 162, 164, 170, 175–180, 182, 184–193, 199, 200, 208, 212, 221, 224–226, 230, 233, 235, 237, 239,

286

INDEX

248–250, 253–257, 259, 260, 262, 263, 266, 267, 270 Spatial intervention, 176, 177, 182, 183, 185, 193 Spatial planning system, 108 Spatial Triad, 129, 130 Sponge city, 104 Standardised urban planning policies, 137 State, 2, 7, 10–15, 17–22, 24, 34–36, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47–53, 59, 60, 62, 68, 70, 73, 76, 84, 85, 87–92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 105, 110, 111, 130, 132, 135, 136, 140, 151, 159, 166–168, 170, 179, 198–199, 201, 202, 204, 206, 208, 213–215, 224, 226, 230, 233, 238, 250, 253, 255, 256, 258, 261, 266, 270 Statutory, 34, 44, 76, 91, 102, 106, 197, 199, 210–215, 233 Statutory land-use zoning map, 107 Statutory urban planning, 106 Suburban, 3, 11, 14, 19, 22, 32–39, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50–53, 112, 159 Suffering, 262, 264 Sustainable urban development, 95, 96

T Tactics, 178, 192, 226, 237 Tax-sharing system, 106 Technocratic, 8, 19, 201, 255 Tel Aviv, 20, 149–151, 154, 155, 158–162, 167–170, 256, 270 Tel Aviv 5000 (Outline plan), 150, 158–160, 162, 166, 167, 169 Temporal multi-use of space, 71, 73 Temporary, 139, 167, 179, 180, 185, 186, 188, 189, 192, 222, 225, 263

Theory, 1–5, 8, 9, 23, 25, 33, 74, 133, 134, 214, 249, 250, 253, 254, 267 Transformation of villages, 58, 59, 72 Transformative, 145, 248, 249, 255–260, 262, 263, 266, 267 Transformative urban development, 25 Tribal region, 12, 89, 97 Tribes, 81–83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91, 95–98 Turner, John, 176, 198, 207 U Unidades De Vida Articulada (UVAs), 142, 144 Upgrading, 16, 19, 24, 61, 62, 69, 176, 177, 181, 183, 186, 192, 193, 207, 208, 211 Urban, 1–6, 8–16, 18, 20, 23, 24, 31–36, 43, 44, 48, 53, 57–61, 65, 68, 71, 84, 97, 102, 104–108, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121, 122, 128, 134, 135, 137, 138, 144, 150–152, 154, 155, 157, 159–161, 170, 176–179, 183–186, 192, 201, 203, 210, 213, 216, 221, 223, 225, 226, 228, 238, 239, 248, 250, 252–257, 259, 264, 266, 267, 272 Urban and Rural Planning Act, 107, 112 Urban citizenship, 151–154, 161, 167, 270 Urban development, 12, 17, 25, 58, 60, 62, 65, 75, 84, 85, 88, 95, 96, 98, 102, 105–107, 111–113, 115, 116, 118, 159, 197, 198, 200–202, 204–206, 210, 214, 231, 240, 249, 257 Urban expansion, 60, 102, 108, 110

INDEX

Urbanisation, 31, 33, 34, 37, 49, 59, 69, 128, 130–133, 145, 146, 200 Urbanisation of villages, 68 Urbanism, 2, 6, 10, 13, 14, 23–25, 109, 134, 170, 229, 248–251, 255, 257–259, 261, 264, 267 urban development, 12, 17, 25, 58, 60, 62, 65, 75, 84, 85, 88, 95, 98, 102, 105–107, 111–113, 115, 116, 118, 159, 162, 197, 198, 200–202, 204–206, 210, 214, 231, 240, 249, 257 urban planning, 3, 4, 9–11, 58, 60, 62, 69, 73, 75, 76, 102, 103, 105–110, 113, 120, 121, 138, 145, 151, 153, 154, 166, 222–224, 226, 227, 230, 233, 239, 240, 247–249, 254, 256, 258, 259, 262, 263, 270 Urban master plan, 60, 89, 106, 114 Urban-morphology, 141 Urban periphery, 143, 161 Urban planning, 3–6, 9–12, 58, 60, 62, 69, 73, 75, 76, 102–110, 112, 113, 117, 120, 121, 138, 145, 151, 153, 154, 158, 166, 222–224, 226, 227, 230, 233, 239, 240, 247–249, 254, 256, 258, 259, 262, 263, 270

287

Urban Planning Act, 105, 107 Urban space, 11, 32, 37, 48, 105, 154, 166, 178–181, 193, 222, 223, 225, 226, 248, 250, 256, 259 Urban threats, 151, 162, 170, 259 Urban village, 7, 12–14, 18, 19, 22–24, 57–77, 102, 104, 114, 117–122, 259, 263

V Values, 62, 65, 72, 91, 97, 112–116, 118, 154, 161, 166, 167, 169, 176, 180, 200, 210, 232, 234, 249, 253, 263 Veterans, 150, 163, 165–167, 171, 270 Violence, 95, 130, 133, 135, 142, 143, 145, 264, 269, 271

W Waterfront, 182, 184–190

Y Yad Eliyahu (Neighborhood), 159, 162