0
ARCH+ news

Urbanism of Occupation

By Solomon Benjamin, Bhuvaneswari Raman //

Reading a city through its everyday politics shows the fluidity of power relations in urban territories. A lot of urban research, especially in the social sciences, emphasizes the impacts (adverse or otherwise) of mega-projects such as the ongoing programs in India for creating Special Economic Zones. These views obscure the actual contestations that go on in cities by assuming hard, and ever expanding boundaries of international capitalism. Thus, those people left out of global capitalist processes are seen as marginalized victims and their politics are reduced to a survival strategy which, with time, will be taken over.

Such a view of marginality disregards an essence of cities, where terrain constitutes complex social and cultural embeddings in land and economy. We propose a different view – a conception of an urbanism of occupation. Of course, power is centralized with big businesses and the state, but it is not hermetically sealed: There are crevices, which make the workings of power and its contestations much more fluid and unpredictable in the way these play out in various places. City terrain is radically shaped through unplanned growth, encroachments and mixed land use, interfering with the possibilities of the grand plan. This fragility of the map is an intense nightmare to the planner – both for urban designed cities intended to globalize, but also to the progressive activists’ rationalistic master plan designed to equalize.


Assumptions of the Mega City

The mega project map of Bangalore! And this could be any Indian metro city. It is the delight of the neo-liberals seeing economic growth, the investment opportunities in the real estate, arising from India‘s liberalization. Examples of the cities’ various Mega projects are the IT corridor to the South East, the Bangalore–Mysore Expressway project to its West, laced around New Townships to de-congest and arrest it’s growth, and to the North, a huge expanse of its’ International Airport, set in a yet even bigger planning territory (see plan above). For the neo-liberal globalist, the mega set in both the plan as the map is, of course, a reflection of economic development and in it a huge market is to be tapped. The progressive activist, on the other hand, still believes in the grand plan, to ‘balance growth and organize development’ thus making globalization ‘more inclusive’. The points that activist circles make are technically accurate: Huge territories are acquired by the state and allocations are made to big business, enormous public resources are placed at the beck and call of India’s corporate elite, and these acquisitions and allocations to corporate are enforced with harsh measures via violent evictions and demolitions to make way for an urban designed future of malls and IT complexes. A closer inspection however, shows how such a reading inflates it into a ‘Ghost’, and misses out the day to day reality.


Nightmares that disrupt the narrative of Globalized Modernization and Resistance

What you see at closer inspection is the fragility of the map, and punchers in the plan – emerging from unplanned, seemingly messy environments. ‘Property’ is encroached upon in the forms of multiple tenures (e.g. tenants renting out to tenants) and claims that make centralized control and surplus extraction increasingly impossible. For the global neo-liberal, the above forms of urbanism are severely disrupting. It disrupts the flow of capital, a disjuncture in this informational age that forms beyond a technical fix. For the progressive activist it disrupts another dream: the dream of mass resistance, a very specific agenda of civil society and social movements. Large developers and financial institutions do very quickly realize the power of this incremental subversive urbanism and press policy experts to use state power via eminent domain, digitization of land rights, to re-occupy space.


What are the Punctures of the Map?

About 80% of city terrain is being settled over time and not shaped according to a masterplan. Planners, senior government officials and global financiers all see this as slums. But in many of these settlements, the incremental development and diverse tenure regimes allow for an economy built around inter-connected small scale home based factories – a networked urban economy. This view of cities is hardly new – seen by researchers like Madhu Sarin in her study on Chandigarh as the failure of the Plan. But in this frame, these ‘occupations’ were a pre-modern act – one that was ‘marginal’, and by marginalized groups. A different reading shows that the bulk of economic value addition and almost all of employment comes from such economy-urbanism. But more important, the seemingly messy land tenures and lack of planning actually form the basis to valorise land in radical ways to re-constitute property – at the cost of large capital. Look at a typical streetscape in Bombay’s up-market Juhu area (image left). This seems typical of an (exotic?) ‘Third world city’. However, a closer examination shows the multiple tenures that re-configure property in this highly valued real estate. Some as below are temporal as the Christmas stand, funded by the local church ward, others built by existing occupants. As such urbanisms thrives, one can hardly ever locate the ‘original property’ – instead what we have are multiple and porous legalities. Think of Walter Benjamin’s essays on Naples in Reflections – and if you look close enough, standing patiently to peep inside the Christmas stand, on the artefacts surrounding baby Jesus, or the day to day consumerism in the street shops – you will discover how capital itself is occupied. Memories of Benjamin’s descriptions of Parisian arcades arise – their reflective glamour, set now in a sharper tropical light.