Some Thoughts on the De–Commoning of Bengaluru

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(from Vocabulary of Commons, article 43)

by Solomon Benjamin

Commoning contests Urban Commons
Some thoughts on the de–commoning of Bengaluru

When we think of ‘commons’ in the context of the Indian city, what comes to mind are places like bazaars, ‘open’ grounds where youth and others can congregate and play football. In and especially in Bengaluru, a city developed around and on wetlands (kere), we would also think of water bodies that compliment public gardens. At the back of our minds, the term ‘commons’ evokes a sense of not just ‘public’ use, but also of a ‘pristine’ character (especially when considering wetlands). This chapter argues that thinking the ‘pristine’ can lead to a conceptual slippage in turn, emphasise the centrality of singular forms of property to result in ‘un-commoning’. In this narrative to ‘preserve the pristine’, there lies a notion of ‘fixity’ around the idea to define such territorilisation via fenced off boundaries., With this, there is an underlying desire and anxiety that the city’s growth will undermine this ideal. In this form of thinking, the main progressive agenda would be to ensure, via the ‘plan’ and the ‘rule of law’, that city management and policy—driven by progressive technical rationales—ensure ‘urban commons’. Here lies a conceptual catch. While we could consider the above mentioned places as having a significant ‘commons’ to them, ironically it is this very same anxiety to protect and manage them via city management policy, planning instruments and institutions and ‘the law’ that ‘un-commons’ such places into exclusive spaces.

For instance, the heart of South Bengaluru’s exclusive Koramangala had, till recently, a huge open space that was intensively used by the larger neighbourhood district’s youth of mostly lower income and of castes / ethnic groups that contrast the surrounding 3 rd Block. This also included school children from the nearby—again mostly of the lower income groups. Over the last couple of years, persistent efforts by the 3 rd Block Resident Welfare Association (RWA) to lobby theBBMP administration1 (pressured in turn by high level political and administrative circuits) paid off. The ground was divided into half by a chain link fence, with one section converted into a ‘park’ for mostly senior citizens to walk dutifully along the paved part that encircles a ‘touch me not’ landscaped green.

The remaining ground, the size of a football field, witnesses every Sunday, even in the rain, between nine and twelve teams playing an adaptive form of cricket and occasionally football all together. Smaller children remain pushed out, due to the severe pressure on space. If this was not enough, the last couple of months, has witnessed the RWAs moving towards landscaping the remaining part too. The neat architectural plans show this to include a swimming pool, tennis and badminton courts. As per the current fetish over ‘security’, uniformed guards are likely to chase out children who don’t seem well dressed—as witnessed in other such ‘pristine makeovers’.

Not too long ago the same RWA was responsible in getting the BBMP’s administration to evict the few remaining hawkers. If landscaped neighbourhood parks are the latest desire of elite RWAs to evoke pristine nature, it is then hardly surprising that both the 3 rd and adjoining 4 th Block RWAs in Koramangala move their sights towards what they see as a dangerous wild: The Maistrypalya wetland ‘kere’ that was associated with it’s village. This territory too is sought to be framed as a ‘urban common’—projectified as a ‘natural lake’. And just as the 3 rd Block open ground was converted via a plan, the plan here includes a ‘public private partnership’ (PPP) with the Bangalore Development Authority (the city’s de-politisized planning authority), the ‘Lake Development Authority’, and of course a range of technical experts and lawyers. Interestingly, in this ‘public process’ the documentation mobilised include a map from the Geological Survey of India whose representational categories hide earlier histories of land claims and especially those of the Maistrypalya village. This survey map, like many colonial projects, is convenient to morph into a modern zoning plan that includes a lake, an ‘eco’ zone, a sunbird corner. When instrumentalised via a PPP governance model, these zones are in effect the first steps towards a ‘public private commons’. Such trends towards landscaping, are evident in other parts of Koramangala, and shaped by anxieties, as a key member of First Block RWA voiced, ‘to keep out the ‘riff raff ’.

At a more literal level, one can view the above cases as the issue of creating exclusive boundaries. That is useful but not enough. If we only considered the issue in that narrower sense, it would point to a techno-managerial solution—a PPP that allows for diverse groups to enter, and use perhaps, a space that is created by another on their behalf. Instead, it is more important to consider the core of the above mentioned ‘public private commons’ is the notion of ‘property’ that underpins most of such ‘un-commoning’ as Bandyopadhyay in this volume theorises on. One of the key issues of concern in the politics of commoning (un-commoning) is that of property. Consider for instance, a quote from a recent news report:2

The operational guidelines for the implementation of World Heritage Convention states as follows: ‘World Heritage properties may support a variety of ongoing and proposed uses that are ecologically and culturally sustainable. The State Party and partners must ensure that such sustainable use does not adversely impact the outstanding universal value, integrity and/or authenticity of the property. Furthermore, any uses should be ecologically and culturally sustainable. For some properties, human use would not be appropriate... Such sites would lose the heritage spot tag if they fail to meet the standards,’ Excerpt from ‘A storm brews in the Coffee Cup’ by Shivaram Kodagu, (emphasis by author).

The above quote highlights the central argument of this chapter. This considers the politics of a fracture between the mobilisation and usage of the term ‘urban commons’ whose rational and materialisation is predicated and reinforces the concept of property, and processes of ‘city commoning’3 mobilised by ‘popular’ groups that disrupt singular forms of property.

Somewhat paradoxically most of the city spaces we refer to, as having some ‘commons’, are also places of city commoning. These are not techo-managerial in genealogy. Rather they are deeply politicised via day-to-day actions that disrupt singular forms of property. In that sense, we could see, that our efforts towards a utopia is not ‘fixed’ in the pristine landscapes we seek in our minds eye. Rather city commoning lies in what looks like the fluidity, ‘messiness’ of bazaars, the non- master planned settlements that senior administration planners and the elite term as ‘slums’, the complicated terrain of wetlands which include small time fishing, ‘traditional’ rituals, and areas of intense contestations. If we consider these as evidences of city commoning then we could also consider their political realms that materialise these as places, as also a form of commoning. If so, then we have to take municipal politics more seriously—not in the context of it’s legal and constitutional mandates, but rather as a level of government that is embedded in such ‘popular’ forms of commoning. The chapter by Raman is a case in point, but also some critically useful theoretical entries. This becomes even more central as an argument when the spaces of city commoning have a genealogy located in ‘master plans’, development schemes or programmes. The latter set of institutions falsely essentialise municipal government disciplined within an administrative apparatus rather than view it as a fluid political and administrative realm—something that is transformed by processes, and as a result, also plays a transformative part.

The problem with the narrative of the ‘urban commons’

These concerns come from problems with the conventional ‘progressive’ way of writing on the issue of Bengaluru’s ‘urban commons’. At first glance, this seems well intentioned. Much of this writing would frame the issue around the loss of ‘community’ spaces such as the city’s greens, and moan the loss of the erstwhile village commons swallowed by the city’s rapid expansion. Perhaps, this would underline the need for the globally connected IT culture to include more space for ‘participatory planning’, discussion and debate. It could also pose the decline of the ‘urban commons’ to the lack of planning which allows ‘land sharks’ supported by ‘patron—client politics’ to encroach on land, and promote speculative development. The intent of such a narrative would be to list elements to make policy ‘more progressive’. In specific, this would aim for: the city’s wetlands framed as ‘eco-sensitive zones’ designated as protected ecologically sensitive greens for ‘public use’.

One could, from this rationale, extend this argument to the city’s economy. If for instance, the city’s bazaar’s are seen as a form of economy common, than from the conceptual logic of this argument, these should be materially shaped into ‘hawking zones’. Here, following a progressive vision, beneficiaries can avail of not just rightful places but other benefits such as insurance, credit via self help groups—saving them from corrupt police constables and exploitative moneylenders alike.4 In line with such argumentation, it would fall very much in that logic, that the ‘urban commons’ could include ‘heritage’ commons. Just as commoning the bazaar would be framed around ‘hawking zones’, a heritage commons policy and plan would designate these as professionally certified ‘heritage districts’ emphasising these as ‘properties’.5 With such tagging comes a ‘projectification’ and in this logic, instruments such as ‘public private partnerships’ (PPPs).6

One could develop such a perspective of the ‘urban commons’ to it’s ‘governance’—a subset of a larger agenda of constitutionally mandated ‘ward committees’, and following recent trends of even greater decentralisation, citizen managed ‘area sabhas’ who would be empowered to manage wetlands and other public parks. Such a ‘good governance’ approach that would include for instance, an informed citizen’s ‘eco-committee, under an international donor funded programme of ‘community policing’ to ‘protect the urban commons.’ This could also be seen as part of efforts over the last decade to bring local bodies under new forms of disciplinary governmentalities. Changes, since November 2010, have been new ‘project management units’ and a citizen’s ‘Bengaluru patrol’ co-funded by a ‘civil society’ organisation and India’s most important English newspaper and media house. Such ‘eco-governance’, following such argumentation, would oversee the functioning of the now super large municipal body, the BBMP,7 and to ensure that this elected body works in a ‘transparent and accountable’ way, in particular to rid the system of patron client ‘vote bank’ politics that is viewed as disruptive to policy and facilitating the entry of mafia elements that encroach public land especially in the city’s periphery. This extension of argument is not totally speculative. Since 1998, in efforts to make Bengaluru a Singapore, a vigilant ‘urban reforms agenda’ has been promoted that disciplines elected councils.8 (Benjamin 2010). One would not be surprised if several of the recently established urban educational and policy institutes and centres, following the spurge in interest in ‘India’s urban’, would include quite centrally as part of their programmes on ‘sustainable’ urban management, courses on the application of ‘Public Private Partnerships’ for the ‘the urban commons’—funded under a rapidly expanding anxiety of climate change. All of these efforts, including the last, would compliment Bengaluru’s global standing as India’s Silicon Valley—a showcase where economic productivity goes hand in hand with a ‘rights based’ protection of public spaces. Indeed, a smart management graduate could advice the senior-most administrators on how the IT can in fact fund the commons, and as a ‘best practice’ also win international acclaim if not further funds.

The above paragraphs materialise the narrative of ‘urban commons’ to consider the politics of its opposition with ‘city commoning’. Consider the conceptual and material aspects of City Commoning. These processes fall outside and at times appropriate and subvert what Blomley (2003) refers as to the ‘grid and survey’ and it’s associated ‘geography of violence’.9 At the core, while shaping most of the territorial production of Indian cities, city commoning unsettles singular forms of private property that form the foundation of planning practice, their associated institutions—like Bengaluru’s Development Authority (BDA) and newer forms of mega institutions such as the Bangalore Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (BMRDA), Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL), Bangalore–Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) and associated regulation like the recently proposed Bengaluru Metro Planning Authority, the land titling bill at the national level—that form key elements of the ‘grid and survey’.

City commoning then, disrupts ‘urban commons’. In doing so, this chapter also places on line well meaning progressive academics and activists mobilising around the notion of ‘progressive policy’ framed within a ‘rights based’ discourse. It points to the contradictions, for instance, when these activists lay faith to restore ‘the commons’ by actions initiated from high level policy makers who are also pressured by the elite posed as ‘civil society’. But the issue is not just of access to decision making. What a careful consideration of city commoning also does is that exposes it’s tacit acceptance of private property—a slippage from the seemingly progressive term ‘public property’ as Bandyopadhyay argues (see Ritajothi B. this volume).

Perhaps this ‘slippage’ spurs an evangelical rescue of space from ‘the market’, ‘urban commons’—a situation where efforts towards the ‘urban commons’ are sought to be instrumentalised via the vision of participatory planning to organise ‘neighbourhoods zoning’ and include ‘natural pristine places’. This logic could be linked to policy interventions projectified around ‘hawking zones’ intended to discipline city economies viewed as unplanned and exploitative of the poor. It could also be extended to elite’s fear of ‘vote bank’ politics resulting in their visions of electoral reform, mobilisation of ‘middle class’ into civic politics, but also institutional disciplining of the lower level municipal elected and bureaucratic realms via the ‘urban reforms agenda’. Much of city development policy of ‘urban commons’ is mobilised via ‘participatory planning’, ‘transparency and accountability,’ and ‘debate and dissent’. Not surprising, these also fall within a development agenda of being made ‘slum free’. These efforts falls within the grid of ‘The Plan’, ‘The Law’ that forms the basis for a deceptive vision of ‘inclusive’ cities.

Dennis makes another useful observation that framing the ‘commons’ is not a façade to hide the intention of exclusive property.10 Rather, it is the possibility of a disciplined ‘common’ that enhances the value of its spatially and otherwise associated private property. The posh houses of Koramangala’s 3rd Block, have enhanced value by being locationally close to the created private public of the Maistripalya now constructed as a ‘natural lake’. This value enhancement is especially if the management of the resource allows for particular forms of access to a specific ‘community’. One could also argue that hawking zones, when created out of a lobby of relatively large shopkeepers to influence the allocation of hawking spaces to sub-retailers who are disciplined via being their direct sub-contractors or via credit arrangements, they would in fact be enhancing their own surpluses. But here, it is useful to consider the counter which may lie not in opposition but rather on a political plane that is posed very differently. To understand this 301more effectively, we look towards a literature that moves beyond just being framed in opposition to the grid and the survey—reducing our discussion to that of ‘alternatives’ via the evangelism of ‘participatory planning’. The fear to private property and it’s creation of the market in it’s own image, may not be in the creation of an anti-market that enhances the former. Rather, it’s fearful disruption, more hydralike, may lie in framing politics within the market in a logic that refuses the categories that manufacture private property. If for instance, the vision of Mastripalya as a ‘lake’ witnesses a perhaps not so unexpected erosion by existing occupants, Tamil Thigalas.11 Possibly located on the kere’s southeast border and operating a nursery, we could visualise a situation where they retain their claims via growing flowers and plants, and also mobilising karaga rituals around the waterbody.12 With this, and over time, to enlarge their territory via their lower and midlevel bureaucratic and political contacts. The logic of ritual here escapes the discipline of the plan, and it’s easy counter, participatory planning seeking to demarcate, like a hawking zone, a narrower politics. Such acts are also not necessarily ‘resistance’ but rather a politics of being and, if so, move and materialise in very different planes.

Some theoretical starting points

There is a useful literature to consider if we have to move away from such evangelism. Blomley’s critique of the assumption of the hegemony of the ‘grid’, finds an extension of a much older literature from legal anthropology—looking at the formative processes of law as a ‘semi-autonomous social field’ in works by Moore (1972). Moore’s argumentation suggests the way conventions of claiming space to rework regulations happens not in a binary of a grassroots upward transformation, or top down via constitutional declarations. Instead, these are outcomes of collisions, which is amplified in works by Razzaz13 researching the issue of ‘non-compliance’ and contestations over politicised administrations around territorial occupation. Elsewhere, Rao (forthcoming) historicises this politics in looking at colonial planning regimes set out to ‘plan’ Bombay’s suburbs, and the way these collide with an increasing politicisation of authority via the city municipal body, who contest the plan. Both Razzaz and Rao’s work are significant as these, much in the line of 302Santos (2001), reveal multiple registers of claiming that fall beyond the ‘grid’ and the ‘survey’ and in fact posed as legal porosities around contested territory created during the processes of urbanisation.

An important point to note is that city commoning is not a ‘normative’ and thus represents uneven and conflictual spaces with unexpected turns. However, as Ranchiere (2007) has argued, it is such spaces that open up political possibilities, and one can argue, that defy/bypass/ contest the grid and survey.14 Here we find work on the complexity and construction of legal spaces drawing on legal pluralism particularly useful—as argued by several authors in the issue of Law Text Culture15 (Manderson 2005:2). Actions create law and also disrupt existing readings of it. The important issue here, in the context of the counter argumentation of urban commons, is that the logic defies that of ‘grid and survey’ (Johns F E, Law Text Culture 2005: 60). Thus, we are interested in the possibility of multiple rationalities that contest those posed by city planning (Butler 2005:20–21), including logics that defy Cartesian logics (Butler 2005:20–21). A vivid illustration of the latter is found in Anker’s ‘The truth in painting’ (2005:91) which poses Australian native groups mobilise not a map but rather elements, which collide with rationalities of a colonial genealogy. The issue is not to essentialise these possibilities within the narrow confines of the ‘aboriginal’ tribal society contesting mainstream western foundations. Rather, the opening of political possibility represented here applies equally to Omar Razzaz’s detailed description of the ‘Hujja’ documents that contest official Jordanian land law, and in effect, transform it. Not all is ‘transparent’ but, as Ho illustrates in the context of China, the political has uses of this deliberate institutional ambiguity.16 A much clearer expressing of the fluidity of ambiguity is found in Von Benda-Beckmanns’s analysis of conflicts involving NGOs, government agencies, and village chiefs over natural resources in Western Sumatra.17 These authors and others like Hann (1998) discuss at length how property is embedded to take forward concepts of it being a ‘bundle of rights’. To this, we also focus on how this ‘bundle of rights’ is mobilised. Rather than go the liberal way, shaped by ‘rational choice’ we prefer to consider actions by groups whose actions may be kept illegible, and dynamic.

Drawing from Laclau18 it is more accurate to consider ‘demands’ that binds particular groups. As Laclau argues, this avoids the problem of assuming a hegemonic structure that irreversibly shapes identity. Thus he argues:

..the impossibility of fixing the unity of a social formation in any conceptually graspable object leads to the centrality of naming in constituting that unity, while the need for a social cement to assemble the heterogeneous elements once their logic of articulation (functionalist or structuralist) no longer gives this affect its centrality in social explanation. (2005:Pg.x; Emphasis in original)

Thus, we are interested in a politics that may be necessarily opaque and dynamic. If so, the point here is to reject the inevitability of ‘city commoning’ being disciplined by the ‘grid’ instituted by planning institutions and processes.

Looking beyond the ‘grid’ and into the ‘present’

‘..For most contemporary thinkers on the Left, democracy is anticipated or lost, but never present. When one looks at the present, all one sees is a gap, perhaps manifest by multiple attempts to fill it—as in the various definitions of democracy as resistance, governance, or ambient milieu. There can be past democratic ideals—nostalgic fantasies of Athens, town meetings, our days in the resistance—or there can be hope for the future, justification of present acts in terms of this future; but there isn’t responsibility now. Or so it seems in contemporary Left fantasies of democracy, fantasies that inspire Left rejections of law, regulation, and the state...’ J. Ranciere in Disagreement

In the literature we have listed above, most illustrations of the urban setting of ‘the commons’ fall within a context of ‘native’ claims of Australia, Africa, or in parts of Canada, but in a rather tempered way, when located in ‘western’ cities of Vancouver or Toronto.19 The argument is that of ‘history’ set within a possible future. Also, there seems a particular focused territoriality to the arguments—particular locations where native groups stake claims, or as in the Australian Mabo case, a particular ‘landmark’ judicial ruling. In contrast, we could consider that the property issue is far less ‘settled’ in cities that we are familiar with—Bengaluru, Delhi or Mumbai. What may be very specific territorial 304issues in the Global North (say for example, raised in contestation in the context of native/ aboriginal claims), are mainstream here in Indian cities. Finally, we are not just discussing ‘customary’ practices revealed as remnants, but rather co-existing, contesting the Grid of Master Planning, and in fact expanding political space.

To fully appreciate this, there are a various forms of territorialisation beyond the structure of the master plan––whose specific spacialisation lies in the context of Bengaluru’s metro area, between 3 to 6% of its metro territory.20 (Benjamin 2008). At first glance, one may assume that the master plan territorialisation are characterised by a ‘settling’ of property. However, this is hardly true. Apart from squatter settlements and other forms of (urban villages) private land subdivisions21 (Benjamin 2004), even master planned areas confront an ‘occupancy urbanism’. Rather than view diverse land settings from the frame of the ‘grid’, relatively more open ended political categories would draw from the literature around legal pluralism, specifically Moore (1973) and Razzaz (1998) drawing on Moore (1973) providing the concept of ‘non-compliant semi-autonomous social fields’.

City commoning intertwines groups of people bound in fluid ways via a variety of issues and concerns, and whose actions disrupt singular forms of singular property. These actions are not beyond the market, as shown below. Rather, it suggests an inherent crisis in capitalism whose underpinning element of property is constantly reconstructed.

Looking closely at Bengaluru as context for ‘city commoning’, three spaces can be considered.

First, spaces of territorialisation that is inherently beyond the discipline set by the master plan. These spaces are constituted around the settlement of land, shelter consolidation and infrastructure development. Part of the argument lies in the way ambiguous land titles allow for political autonomy and also an economy that is deeply threatening to centralised authorities—that of the national government, transnational corporations and their legal consultants, and also institutions like the World Bank and the IMF.22 Another way to view this ‘distortion’ is as a reflection of the multiple tenures that subvert the official land price planning 305rationale. If the ‘occupants’ of these settlements—not as individuals but as village collectives—materially benefit from what Tian (2008: 296)23 terms as the ‘incompleteness’ of legal property rights even when notional and locational economic values are identical to planned areas, then, in effect, this is revenue drawn away from higher level government planners. This is also not very different from the case of East Delhi’s industrialised neighbourhoods. In those areas, residents play the municipal system to access higher electricity loads via diverse procedures around ‘non-conforming uses’ to be ‘regularised’ evolved outside policy (Benjamin 2004). Delhi’s ‘urban villages’, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially in the industrial expansion times of the mid 1980s, negotiated a non-applicability of by-laws and regulation— this spurred extensive small scale industrialisation (Benjamin 1996).

The second realm, linked to the above, pertains to institutional politics embeddings beyond the givens of rational institutional ‘design’ and organisational layouts shaped around technocratic managerial concerns. ‘Group actions’ pressure local government into a politicised ‘porous’ bureaucracy whose institutional politics embed social practices around the settlement and regulation of land. Such an ‘everyday state’ as an institutional realm of mostly (though not exclusively) municipal and lower-middle bureaucratic politicised interface between administrative procedures and real estate markets disrupt singular forms of property reflected in diverse tenure regimes. Of course, other societal groups, large industrial, commercial lobbies, and very large real estate developers also re-work administrative structures mobilising political clout. My pointer is to the working of popular society (sometimes referred to as ‘the poor’) as being active agents re-working institutional territories.

The third is the space of economy—materialised in the numerous bazaars, wholesale markets, hawkers, but also vast territories dominated by small firms industrialised settings. Many of these are interspaced with residential uses—clouding conventional narratives of rigid zoning and planned development. While such complexities of land use shape the politics of territorialisation, there is another key factor. Economy here is usually constituted via interconnected small firms of manufacturing and trades rather than atomised individuals. This material world of 306the mainstream products defy the term ‘commodity’—that faceless item replicated endlessly by docile servitudes. It is this interconnectedness that bridges categories of workers and management to make possible extensive ‘reengineering’ and in effect, to disrupt singular forms of property that underpin notions of patents and brands.

The world of the reengineered (inaccurately termed pirate in opposition to the original), now witnesses material reworking across borders set up by the nation state to rework concepts such as ‘original-pirate/ piracy’ and reject such oppositions for instance, the material world of smart phones, and my earlier work on cables and conductors (Benjamin 2006). What is significant, is the political space that is very different from the common narrative of economy (trajectory) in the city: The decline of mass manufacturing into small firms, the narrative of loss, not just of worker organised politics but also culture, and in effect, the possibility of a reconciliation project that accepts as dominant, an economy of property. Instead, the commoning narratives of economy are unruly—of city spaces where they locate, of the singular forms of property sought to be imposed on them, on the credit and finance that seek their surpluses, and incorporation into the grid and the law. This disruption of property is implied in political spaces that engage not with an emancipatory history, or a projected future, but rather within the ongoing dynamic of land tenure and its’ associated space of city politics introduced previously.

Thus, a key issue of ‘city commoning’, while disrupting property (and rejecting the binary of ‘private—public’ is that this does not fit into the utopian of rejecting ‘the market’. Instead, it points to a politicised embedding in a ‘locality’ that creates and unsettles capitalism in its very core element of property. Such a locality is not one posed as (an ‘anthropological’ bind of) assuming the binary of local-global. Rather, the politicised embedding in territorial formation where land settings are not a docile plane for societal forces to play out, forms a locality, which can include very global forces. For instance, a previous ethnographic research on East Bengaluru’s IT dominated locality revealed how the intensity of local politics of the ‘Singapore Technology Park’ implicated trans-global funds and associated institutions.

Approaches that visualise ‘the commons’, within a binary of a market-commodity process set in opposition to the need for a ‘community’ controlled space that lies beyond the market—economic logic. The intent is to counter a liberal argumentation of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. This progressive politics, at the heart of many progressive academics and activists, is materialised within several realms: of social movements to help raise the consciousness and organise the masses, press for policy that includes a space for ‘participation’ via spaces for ‘debate and dissent’, to effect ‘transparency and accountability’. Broadly, the idea is to illuminate a conflictual territory to be able to effect a ‘rights based development. In effect, what is set out in real terms is not a rejection per se of the dominant mode of the market in, say, land, infrastructure, economy, but rather via policy (backed by ‘organised’ political constituencies to press for this) to also maintain a space beyond the market.

The other issue is that ‘the city’ remains a passive backdrop—a location with passive and predictable social groups. In effect, this effort is to create a utopia with the developmental project. But there are several questions that we could raise:

  1. Is this utopia then bounded by the ‘uncommon’?
  2. Is this anxiety implicated in the frame in what Blomley has usefully termed as the violence of ‘the grid and law’, that it lies ‘projectified’ and hence symbolic?
  3. Does the very act of ‘community organisation/consciousness building/ participation’, run the risk of cooption, of disciplining an unruly democracy into ‘agency of the poor’ within the programme and project mode?
  4. Is the project of ‘transparency and accountability’ an entry to, for example, the land titling programmes envisioned by Hernando Desoto, the darling of the World Bank and now large financial institutions, to rework their instrumentisation into micro-credit and more?
  5. Is ‘transparency and accountability’ an agenda of the elite who fear democracy and in forms that necessarily question, if not disrupt, singular forms of property?
  6. Is the political realm that allows for, and manufactures, debate and dissent only one of the many realms, and one where, as Ranchier24 and Dikec25 argue, policy is in effect a form of policing?
  7. The politics within which dissent and debate is being framed today within progressive activists and academic circles, seems much like Zizek’s argument about ‘short circuit’.26 Particularly relevant here is his argument (referring to Oscar Wilde) about the contradiction of private property used to alleviate the evils that result from the institution of private property (6:53) and ‘lets make the evil work for the good’ (7:26). Dissent and debate is important but, in the way of David Harvey’s call for new categories of analysis, with notions of politics and power at the center of analysis.27
  8. Does the kind of city politics and realms where the notion of debate and dissent fit into remain one of ‘illuminating’ the city, suffering from the anxiety to make the ‘poor and marginalised’ aware—but set within a wider ‘policy imperative’ to make cities ‘inclusive’.

Perhaps the emancipatory possibility of ‘city commoning’ may lie precisely in its politics that rejects the logic of grid, resists easy surveys, subverts and reformulates/ politicises law, shows the complicity of ‘dissent–debate’ in reinforcing (private) property and the disconnect of it’s proponents with the everyday materiality of the city. Mainstream city processes need to be viewed beyond the confines of the survey and the grid, and ways in which law is socialised and politicised to unsettle property. It is hardly surprising that the urban elite, including progressive activists and some academics, feel deeply threatened by mainstream urbanisms that show contesting political realms to those of ‘manufactured debate and dissent’. In rejecting such disciplining set within the logic of ‘the plan and the grid’, an approach to city commoning the embeddedness of market in a radical perspective around the disruption / reconfiguration of singular forms of property is suggested: land as real estate evolved around diverse and necessarily fluid tenure forms, economy beyond the property of patents and ‘the brand’, and finally administrative and political realms that operate in different planes to organised party politics.

Endnotes

1 What is referred here is the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (Greater Bengaluru Metropolitan Council), but also specifically it’s senior administration rather than it’s elected council—a distinction that is central to understand the politics.

2 Nov 14 Deccan Herald (Bengaluru edition) http://www.deccanherald.com/content/112881/a-storm-brews-coffee-cup.html

3 I use this term inspired from a discussion around practices of ‘commoning’ discussed in a workshop on urban commons recently held in Bengaluru.

4 Indeed, if not in Bengaluru, but the work of some vigilant NGOs, with almost an evangelist zeal, make a similar argumentation in the context of Delhi with controversial impacts See: a) Madhu Kishwar, the MCD, the ‘mafia’ and the media http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2008-May/012772.html b) Social activist beaten for helping street vendors http://ibnlive.in.com/news/social-activist-beaten-for-helping-streetvendors/55721-3.html ; (See video at: http://in.news.yahoo.com/080105/211/6p9wk.html)

5 Also see: Planters picket international team in Madikeri Madikeri(KTK), Oct 19 http://www.deccanherald.com/content/105912/planters-picket-international-teammadikeri.html

6 See for instance: a) Supporting Sustainable Development in Historic Cities and Cultural Heritage Sites The World Bank http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/heritage/ehd/ 3eforum/PresentationGuidoLicciardi_E_Forum2010.pdf b) The investments of the Pécs World Heritage and the Reconstruction of PMMK http://www.ineer.org/Events/ICEE2007/papers/658.pdf

7 Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (Greater Bengaluru Metropolitan Council).

8 Benjamin 2010 Manufacturing Neoliberalism: Lifestyling Indian Urbanity Chapter4 in Accumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order Edited by Swapna Banerjee-Guha Sage, New Delhi, India.

9 Blomley N. 2003 ‘Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 93, No.1, March pp 121-141.

10 Personal communication with Eric Dennis, Nov.20th 2010.

11 Smriti Srinivas: Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-Tech City. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 Pg.45: 642-642 Cambridge University Press.

12 See for instance, An example of communal amity http://www.hindu.com/2005/04/23/stories/2005042315950300.htm

13 Razzaz Omar (1994) ‘Contestation and Mutual Adjustment: The Process of Controlling Land in Yajouz, Jordan’ Law & Society Review, Vol.28, No.1 (pp.740).

14 “..In Disagreement (2007), Ranciere considers the beginnings of politics in terms of “an original twist that short-circuits the natural logic of ‘properties’” (Pg.13). This twist, torsion, or interrupted current, he argues, is the wrong of a fundamental dispute that causes politics to occur. Politics comes about through interruption. The smooth space of the natural order confronts a gap or hole. So there is not a natural order but a twisted one. There is a not a smooth flow or set of natural relations and identities; there is a hole distorting the whole, belying the fiction or fantasy of the whole thing or order. Ranciere J. (1998) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy University of Minnesota Press, Also see an essay by (Jodi Dean on March 24, 2008 in http://ranciere.blogspot.com/2008/03/zizek-rancire-democracy.html )

15 See Manderson Law Text 2005:2 & Johns F E, 2005: 60.

16 Ho however, sees such ambiguous creation in opposition to ‘Nation State derived structures. In our argumentation, although we contest the notion of the ‘Urban Commons’, the mobilisation of ambiguity is not necessarily disciplined by the ‘grid’. See Ho P ‘Who Owns China’s Land? Property Rights and Deliberate Institutional Ambiguity’ The China Quarterly (2001) 166: 394-421 Cambridge University Press

17 von Benda-Beckmann F, & von Benda-Beckmann K., Multiple Embeddedness and Systemic Implications: struggles over Natural Resources in Minangkabau since the Reformasi’ Asian Journal of Social Sciences 38 (2010) 172-186.

18 Laclau Ernesto On Popular Reason Verso Books London, New York 2005.

19 For a vivid illustration of the collision of planned grids and those posed by popular ‘community’ actions in Vancouver, see Blomley N., 2004 ‘Property And The Landscapes of Gentrification’ Ch.3 (29-74) In Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property’ Routledge NY & London. For the case of Toronto, see Valverde M., 2005 ‘Taking ‘land use’ seriously: towards an ontology of municipal law’ in Law Text Culture Vol. Also see Blomley 2008 for an extension of the arguments in this chapter. 9, (34-59).

20 Benjamin S. 2008 ‘Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs’ Int. Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) Vol.32, Issue 3 September 2008.

21 Benjamin S. 2004 ‘Urban land transformation for pro-poor economies’ Geoforum, Volume 35, Issue 2, March (pp.177-187) 2004.

22 For instance, the case of Pearl River New Town, the master planned township demarcated with clear property rights, that has, after 14 years since the plan, only 30% of the planned new construction (Tian 2008: Fig. 6 on Pg.293,294). Tian points to multiple reasons, including the 1997 Asian financial crises, but notes that Guangzhou planners point to the ‘distorted’ price mechanism as one of the main reasons for the failure of planning implementation.

23 Tian L. The Chengzhongcun Land Market in China: Boon or Bane?—A Perspective on Property Rights International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol.32.2, June 2008: 282-304.

24 Ranciere Jacques Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy Univ of Minnesota Press1998.

25 Dikec Mustafa ‘Voices into Noises: Revolts as unarticulated Justice Movements’ Ch.7 (152-169) in Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy Blackwell Publishing 2007.

26 Zizek (4:43) “..But you know, it makes you feel warm: that I am doing something for mother earth..” (in RSA Animate—First as Tragedy, Then as Farce). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g&feature=channel

27 RSA Animate—Crises of Capitalism David Harvey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0&feature=player_embedded