Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgence and the Idiom of Urbanization

Abstract

The fast-paced growth of the Indian economy and particularly its cities has produced an urban crisis, one that is marked by the lack of adequate infrastructure and growth management as well as by sharp social divisions that are starkly etched in a landscape of bourgeois enclaves and slums. In this context, there are numerous calls for a more decisive and vigorous type of planning that can `future-proof' Indian cities. Yet, such efforts are often unsuccessful and many are fiercely challenged by social movements and forms of insurgence. This article explains this urban crisis by analyzing the structure of urban informality in India. While informality is often seen to be synonymous with poverty, this article makes the case that India's planning regime is itself an informalized entity, one that is a state of deregulation, ambiguity, and exception. This idiom of urbanization makes possible new frontiers of development but also creates the territorial impossibility of governance, justice, and development.

Urban land conflict in the Global South: Towards an analytical framework

“…A final challenge, then, is to interrogate dualistic and hierarchical categories and consider their implications for understanding and addressing urban land conflict. Roy (2009), for example, emphasises the heterogeneous nature of informality, and notes that it cannot be equated with low cost development. As suggested above, there is a great deal of interaction between formal and informal land delivery systems.…”

“…However, in practice informality is more widespread and complex: governments and political actors often use it as a means of exerting power and extracting rents, riding roughshod over residents' rights to land in the name of progress or modernity, or to reinforce patron-client relationships that are instrumental in maintaining political power and legitimacy (for example in India, see Roy, 2009;Shatkin and Vidyarthi, 2014). Similar complex relationships between actors at different levels and the instrumental use of informality in the exercise of power are revealed by McMichael's analysis of Juba and Rigon's of a settlement in Nairobi in this issue (McMichael, 2016;Rigon, 2016).…”

Religious Architecture : Anthropological Perspectives

“…If, following in the footsteps of Gandhi, India's villages were long thought to hold the key to the country's identity, values and future, today India's cities are not only growing phenomenally -fed by migrants and commuters from rural hinterlands across India -but have become sites for cutting-edge global innovation in urban capital extraction, deregulated planning, informal living, insurgent and gated citizenship and fierce contests between an emergent middle class with world-class aspirations and the poor whom many would like to expel in the name of the city beautiful (Roy 2009;Roy 2011b;Benjamin 2008;Weinstein 2008;Holston 2007). Highly dynamic, creative, productive and conflicted, these are cities, as Ananya Roy (2011a) remarks so incisively, in which neither neoliberalism nor justice are guaranteed to be the outcome.…”

Growing ‘Smart’? Urbanization Processes in the Pune Urban Agglomeration

“…Informal occupations come along with a large number of disadvantages like lack of revenue for the state, of security and of binding standards. However, the informal sector also creates income for a majority of the population, it is shaped by highly dynamic, often creative and solution oriented processes and informal institutions contribute to the efficiency of the city's economy [45,46].…”