In your dissertation you review how land use violations have been theorized as (i) informality, illegality, and irregularity; (ii) implementation failure, or (iii) corruption. You found each of these conceptual categories incapable of explaining land use violations in the middle-class neighborhoods of Bangalore. Can you tell us when and how you realized that existing literature simply could not respond adequately to your research question?
The real transactions that shaped the urban geography of Bangalore which was uncovering in front of me during my field work made these theoretical lenses helpless in front of incredible complexity. It was a difficult process forced by material from my ethnography. I found that violations are ubiquitous in Bangalore across class and social groups. Moreover government deviates from their own plan. The more I studied violations, the more I realized that violations are produced and sustained through a dynamic relationship between what I call plan violations and planning for violations. Planning for violation is a planning practice that legitimizes violations and therefore continues to sustain the process. For example, large areas that were violations became legal after routine regularization of many kinds – individual cases based change of land use approvals, en-mass regularization act, and reclassifying the areas of violations as mixed land use zones in the new Master Plan. The idea that planning and the reality are entirely separate in India is simply incorrect; they rather shape each other. This led me to study the practice of planning closely from the perspective of violations – i.e how the actors, institutions instruments, process, acts, and so on produce the practice of planning through their interaction. Cracking open the shell of the state to these elements revealed to me that complex networks of actors inside and outside government in various associational relationships are involved in the actual practice of governing. This challenged the underlying assumptions about the state and the formal process of governing that enables the above-mentioned literature to arrive at their conclusions. Those studies usually either theorized violations or theorized the shell of the state. They fail to take into account the actual practice of governing.
As you note in your work informality as a concept was developed primarily in reference to material conditions of the poor in the relation to the state in the “global South”. Your research deals with violations of planning norms in “non-poor” neighborhoods and developments. While there has been some research into informalities of the elite and middle class, would you ague that in conversations about housing and urban planning informality is class-bound?
I think so. Informality as I mentioned before was understood broadly within the framework of analysis of class inequalities and agency of the poor. This was the case for a long time until recently. I remember while in an important full day conference in London, the entire audience of urbanists seemed to have shared a common understanding of the word ‘informality’ as urban poor. This I guess owes itself to the developmental scholarship – the genesis of which owes itself to the research programs that focused mostly on the poor people – either to enable states to provide better services to the poor people by studying either state side or the urban poor’s side, or the critique of that scholarship by staying within that framing to show how state and other allied classes and other agencies are disempowering the urban poor. With my limited knowledge I think this is the result of extending to global south the frameworks of analysis that was used in the countries like UK and US during the complex 1960’s.
What, if anything, does “vernacular governance” in relation to planning and land use violations have to say back to research on poor “informal” housing settlements? Perhaps particularly about planning interventions in those self-built settlements?
Vernacular governance is less of a theory, but more of a discovery that all abstract frameworks – weather of rule or of knowledge – acquires their reality only through the geographies and epistemologies of the vernacular. So I suggest that this is useful as a new language for a conceptualization that enables an analyst – weather practitioner, resident, activist or theorist – to move beyond theorizing the proxy abstract shells towards identifying the real interests and networks that is involved in their condition.
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