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27OCCUPANCY URBANISM AS

POLITICAL PRACTICE Solomon Benjamin

Introduction1

As a framing device, occupancy urbanism disrupts the notion that master planning could be the sole defining reference locating forms of territoriality, demarcating illegal non-conforming development or conf lating the history of the city with ‘modernity’ (Holston 1989; Sarin 1982; Sundaram 2010). Such perspectives name territorial processes beyond the plan as externalities: as ‘slums’, ‘the informal sector’, or as ‘piracy’; their underlying politics is viewed as a perversion, for instance a ‘vote banks’ and ‘patron clientelism’, and a criminalized ‘Urban Infra Power’ (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009) all driven by the ‘land mafia’. As deeply politicizing processes, the working of land embeds a range of diverse and often conf licting actors into urban administration, such as: settler groups, municipal councillors, firms, but also higher levels of the state and its associated agents. Challenging conventional assumptions about the politics of urban land in southern cities, occupancy urbanism draws attention to the complexities of political practice and helps us think about how states govern through law and regulation formed and directed in a world of practice.

The substantial impact of everyday practices on the politics of land shapes the territoriality of urban economies as well. Just as we should revisit given categories of land and bureaucracy, I argue here for reconsidering our assumptions and conceptualizations of economy. Modernist and developmental narratives pose the realm of small-scale firms and trading as ‘the informal sector’ (Portes et al. 1989, Hart 1973), locating such actors within a frame of exploitation, following ‘high and low roads to modernization’ (Holmstrom and Cardene 1994) and a modernist Fordist to post-Fordist linearity. Yet the majority of southern urban economies emerge from a different history, one far from the ‘disintegration’ of mass production. Narratives of hawking and informal economic zones, and of small firms posed in a narrow history of Fordist genealogy, miss out the actual terrain of power that lies within the firm and its engagement with an economy of land in southern cities. Drawing on occupancy urbanism, such territorial positioning opens space for us to examine the relationship between small firm trade and manufacturing economies dominating southern city terrain, for instance: the setting of the firm, its connection to the development of land and linked to this, a political consciousness located within and beyond a classical ‘labour-management’ frame (see Das 2005; Sanyal 1991).

At the outset, however, it’s useful to clarify that this is not to disregard Master Planning, constitutional provisions for decentralized governance, or global capitalism but rather an attempt to see these as one of the many realms that can operate to shape territoriality and associated political and institutional

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spaces. As a way to re-theorize cities, this chapter makes two inter-related arguments: First that the substance of urban land can be understood as ‘porous bureaucracy’ (Benjamin 2004; Das 2012), predicated as f luid, often opaque, operating in ways that allow territoriality to happen on different, competing and conf licting, logics. Second, I consider the ways in which territory and economy are ‘co-produced’ in everyday social and political practice in southern cities (Tang 2012). Rather than rigidly bounded, firms operate in ways that show an economy deeply embedded in occupants of territory and formed through politicized bureaucracy. This sense of open-ended f luidity, and the possibility of reconstituting property in land and economy as an approach, helps reject the political confinement associated with the view that territoriality is the subject of meta-capital. Instead, it reveals the complex constitution of occupancy urbanism at the scale of plot, factory, neighbourhood, city; the logics that operate in practice, intermixed with (trans)national capital.

Through this argument, I draw on the world of practice to nuance notions of how urban economies operate and how in these contexts land is territorialized; both processes underpin political claim making in cities across the south. I explore first the ways in which land politicizes urban administration beyond policy and plan; then I turn to how this shapes and is shaped by small firm economies. Neither submission to the ‘plan’ or complete ‘resistance’, this focus emphasizes more open-ended conceptual categories to explore various realms of politics that constitute the urban. Illustrated in two contexts in Delhi, India − Nehru Place and a contestation between small businesses, hawkers, and home-based industrial areas in East Delhi − a focus on political practice depicts occupancy urbanism as central to territorial and economic urban strategies.

Occupancy urbanism beyond policy and ‘plan’

Occupancy urbanism explores the project of re-theorizing economy, territory and politics and builds an agenda specific to ‘southern’ cities (Roy 2009), contexts characterized by ‘unsettled’ property in land. O’Donnell (2008) and Massey (2005) direct our attention to the embedding of land settlement into politicizing municipal administration. While attempts at constitutionally mandated decentralization do shape urban spaces, in the contexts in which I am interested, political pressures have their genesis in more material processes − those of lobbying for improvements in basic infrastructure and services. The urban territory impacted by this politics is large, often 70−85 per cent of all urban territory, much beyond designated ‘master planned’ zones. Practices of socially embedded ‘working the administration’ have spanned more than one generation, a cumulative set of experiences central to ‘making things happen’. In practice in such contexts, many mainstream land-uses and economic activities fall outside strict town planning norms or practices. While some acts ‘work’ the land by mobilizing ‘loopholes’, many are mainstreamed, normal bureaucratic and administrative processes. This mix is a critical element in this chapter. Political opposition in the realm beyond the plan is more complicated, diffused and opaque. Furthermore, opposing or stalling an intervention happens in parallel with occupying that space, with settling in, and mobilizing public interventions to shore up counter-claims.

Menon (2012) locates political possibility in considering practices. She suggests we imagine these as a ‘thicket of contestation’ to emphasize a deep sense of autonomous possibility. Located in the living of myriad everyday practices in economy, of territorializing land, such possibilities require us to rework categories and take seriously other logics. Similarly, my own work looking at practices of land titles and the opacity of city realms (see Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari 2011; Benjamin 2012), and Shetty’s (2012) and Gupte’s (2012) rich ethnographic accounts of city life, critique the assumption of the coherence of city planning, a theme also evident in Raman’s careful ethnography of street traders in central Bangalore (Raman 2010). These ideas and approaches resonate closely with critical geographers Allen and Cochrane’s (2007) and Massey’s (2005) concerns with the openness of space, the construction of territory, and anthropologists such as Hull (2012) and Singerman (1995) with the world of practice.

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In contrast, much of the literature on land development assumes a hierarchy of regulatory spheres that create a situation of de facto tenures (set in opposition to de jure frames). This attention builds on a liberal ideal of policy and administration to be ‘reformed’ and made ‘transparent and accountable’. The world of practices rejects a framework built around the ‘rule of law’ and a ‘rights’ based approach to policy. Here I adopt the more useful frame of legal pluralism to explore the set of overlapping practices that shape land development. Following Webber (2009), a perspective that ‘all law is customary’ helps us view such spaces with the substance they command formed in a wealth of deeply embedded political practices.

Drawing on Webber (2009) and Dupret (2007) helps to problematize the way ‘law’ is prescribed; and, to reject the idea of static legalistic boundaries mediated if not formed by the state. Webber’s (2009: 581−2) rejection of the conceptual split between ‘custom’ and ‘law’, with the latter conceived in positivist if not entirely state-centric terms, and an understanding of legal order as complex arrays of practices, conceives territorialization via actions shaped by a disaggregated ‘everyday’ state (Fuller and Harriss 2001; Mitchell 1991). Furthermore, by moving beyond a functionalist or pragmatist (Webber 2009: 581−3; Dupret 2007) explanation of law shaped by a range of practices (including those that contest each other), and rejecting practice being ‘acted upon’ under exogenous norms, allows us to consider various logics under which such territorialization happens in a dynamic transformative sense. These key points stress an understanding of law that allows for diverse realms and logics to operate at the same time.

The substance of why the settling of land politicizes occupant groups can be construed from an intersection of land and economy and the real (material) possibility to disrupt singular forms of property in ways that radically rework surpluses. The variety of tenure forms dynamically reworks and often unsettles singular forms of property in land.. Various constellations of occupying groups mobilize claims via, for instance, tax, electricity, or water receipts, development charges to municipal authorities, address proofs for school certificates, for instance − actions that implicate various parts of the city administration to strengthen claims to locations, but also lobby for higher levels of services (Bawa 2011). These claims also set in motion spaces for economies (see Anjaria 2011; Benjamin 2004).

Taking the everyday practice of the state more seriously (Harris and Fuller 1990; Mitchell 1991), I draw here on work in the ‘South Asian’ urban context that illustrates the complexity of local administration and its shaping by popular politics (Hull 2012; Björkman 2013). In my own writing I have termed this ‘porous bureaucracy’ (2004, 2005; and Hull 2012: 170, 245), reframed as counter-politics: a ‘politics of stealth’ (Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari 2001). Hull (2012: 162−6, endnote 14 on p. 70) examines bureaucratic politics in Islamabad, the new capital of Pakistan. On the one hand, within planned zones or sectors, much land politics confronts a highly disciplined regulatory system; on the other, outside these planning zones, political spaces witness more fragile control by the planning authority, allowing bureaucratic politics to be f luid and significantly less disciplined by the plan. Bernstein’s ethnography in Taipei’s City Hall presents another detailed illustration of such popular engagement with bureaucracy, where ‘Even seemingly straightforward implementations of regulation turned out to position the city government principally not within a web of laws but as part of a network of interdependent social actors.’ She emphasizes that while ‘[t]heories often emphasize the role of the bureaucracy in categorizing and defining the objects under its purview. The administrators I worked with, in contrast, emphasized the structural impossibility of clear-cut categorization’ (2008: 938, 946−7).

The ‘unsettling’ of property happens in close relation to a range of practices that constitute the property market, blurring and interchanging conventional lines between landlord, tenant, sub-tenant, and commission agent. Increases in real estate value are valorized across the spectrum of these practices. Here I would like to make two points. First such unsettling is constituted not just by individual actions, or outside of the state, but deeply implicates and requires a disaggregated view of the state. This is an embedded politics that blurs the line between society and the state via the politicization of bureaucracy,

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practices that fall outside the structure and logic of party politics, and the conventionally neat divide between ‘civil’ and ‘political society’. Moreover, the territorial aspects of this politics are located mostly outside the logic of master planning. Operative within contested realms, these practices are not usually framed or instigated as ‘resistance’, or even as explicitly ‘political acts’ as Menon’s (2012) discussion of ‘escaping intelligibility’ suggests (see also Singerman 1995). Here occupancy urbanism forms an important lens to conceptualize this process of land settlement and the politicizing of particular administrative realms. Moreover, in the discussion below, I demonstrate how, characterized by diverse land tenures, this politicized realm opens up space for a particular form of economy − that of mostly small manufacturing and trade firms interconnecting their production.

Territory, economy and politics

At a time of severe crisis in how job-oriented growth is conceived, it is critical that we engage the form economic value addition and employment take and their interplay in an urban politics of land and bureaucracy. Practices of land tenure unpin a central contest in the economy: While mega projects are set in place via singular tenure categories, small firm manufacturing and trade economies within mixed land use settlements (spaces where most of the population live and work, and find political and economic space) operate in and are shaped by diverse tenure regimes. Real estate surpluses are distributed and reconfigured via particular forms of tenure regimes − in both small firm settings and in the largest of big business ventures (Benjamin 2007, 2008).

Of course how and to whom, and where these surpluses move is an issue of a larger financial architecture. In the larger firms, like Bangalore’s hi-tech economies in the early 2000s, these circuits included investments sought from large international donors and the global financial market. The securitization of such funds was facilitated even when large land parcels allocated remained, in part, occupied by smaller territorial configurations. Similarly, small firm locations, what I call ‘neighborhoods as factories’ (Benjamin 2004,, 2005), are predicated on diverse tenure regimes that allow small firms to interconnect production and locate in close proximity. These tenures are political constructs, outcomes of the porous bureaucracy: an illustration of this is seen in internal administrative notes and orders made on ‘green sheets’ that mention ‘community’ contribution of both land and funds to extend an electrical trunk power line and its associated step-down transformer. A letter written by an association general secretary to pressure the municipal administration for street lighting, mentions the local politicians, tender details for the work procured via the ‘porous bureaucracy’, and a hint of the ‘stealth like’ negotiations carried backed by the Ex-Chairman of the Municipal Corporation.

In these contexts, occupancy urbanism as an approach helps explore the critical interplay of economy and land tenure regimes and their constitution in multiple logics across diverse city spaces. It is informed by at least three distinct but often overlapping issues that shape political opportunities, framing processes and organizational networks: territorial contestations, contesting local economies and local histories. Subsuming these elements erases the complexity of city processes, nuances of how economy operates and land is territorialized, both central to political claim making. Elden’s (2013: 15) argument is relevant here:

…offering an account of the emergence of a concept out of a complicated and multi-layer set of chronologies, fragments and aporias. Territory is a concept, as all concepts, with a history. It is also one with geography. Both the concept and the project are political: this historical work is part of a wider project that aspires to be a history of the present.

Such an approach avoids posing ‘territoriality’ as a prisoner of historicism, imposing an unrealistic linearity that fractures the city into disassociated spaces of ‘slums’ set in opposition to ‘gated complexes’, ‘piracy’, or the ‘informal sector’ (see Peattie 1987; Varley 2013).

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Nehru Place: Intermeshing territories and economies

The complexity of political practice and the intermeshing of territory and economy are well illustrated in an encounter with traders, or ‘hawkers’ in the urban economy in Nehru Place, one of Delhi’s major commercial shopping centres made famous for electronic hardware and software. While the offices planned in the main buildings are used primarily as electronic shops, smaller traders or ‘hawkers’ occupy the wide pavements and plazas below. On a bright sunny afternoon in early 2012, accompanied by participants of an artist in residence programme ‘City as Studio’, I noticed the banner shown in the accompanying image, Figure 27.1.2 At first glance it could pass off as evidence of ‘social movement’ organizing around the issue of livelihood. A closer inspection revealed quite another story: the high end traders in the main office buildings had organized a public meeting to push the city planning agency to act against what they saw as unregulated hawking and the retail of pirated products.

Talking to a few of the small traders located on the pavements quickly attracted a group of 30 to 40 people and what unfolded was a complicated narrative of contested claims involving the large traders in the shops and smaller ones in the corridors below, who with an NGO, petitioned the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court to prevent their eviction from this space.

The NGO’s main focus was a survey that intended to fix the locations of ‘legally sanctioned hawking stands’ (in this instance 240 were surveyed but more than 3,000−5,000 small traders, many claim, are at work in the city and have not been documented). Asserting there was no space for all, the administration of the survey in effect gave the NGO huge powers to define legitimacy, particularly the ‘legitimate 68 hawkers’. It also moved the politics of claim making to the attention of city officials and politicians, increasing its visibility, while drawing the NGO centrally into this power struggle.

This visibility was double-sided: while the survey provided some claims to have hawking stands, it also allowed the public planning agency to move others at will to locations outside the Nehru Place complex (see the Delhi High Court order LPA No. 766/2008). It is the fixity of place that defined land tenure type and, in turn, disciplined the political space. The court order specified:

The appellant-NGO, by way of their letter dated 13th May 2005 submitted a list of street vendors/hawkers after carrying out a survey. It was stated that the list was verified in several meetings. It was also stated that the appellant-NGO shall undertake responsibility and ensure that the street vending was regulated and monitored as per the code of conduct. Placement patterns/locations were earmarked. The said list gives names of 68 vendors along with goods being dealt with by them. (DDA and the NGO make a joint inspection about the feasibility/installation of stalls by vendors)… the DDA would provide a list of markets where space was reserved for informal sector (sic).3

Placement on the grid of both ‘hawking zones’ and under the scrutiny of the law severely narrowed the political space within which the ‘hawkers’ operated. The legalities of the process also destabilized the 240 hawkers with petitions in the lower district courts, and also brought into the public eye, the approximate 3,000−5,000 small traders who now would have to be alert to inspections. Arguably, this also politically split them, increasing in particular bribery and the associated costs to retain their more favourable locations in the bazaar. Prior to the court cases, claims to economic spaces were implicated in a range of practices that circulated mostly within the licensing authority of the municipal corporation and via the petty ‘bribery’ circuits of the lower police inspectors. The NGO, and its partner university researchers, who produced maps of ‘hawkers and their territories’, were inserted through these materials into the court petition.

Yet even with this changed power equation, one cannot assume that Nehru Place would be cleared of small-scale hawkers − what larger businesses aimed for in their ‘cleanness drive’. The larger and more

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Figure 27.1 High-end traders organizing against hawkersPhoto: Solomon Benjamin

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‘amorphous’ group’s deep and necessarily opaque connections within the municipal agency and also the planning agency would in most probability subvert the surveys, bypass the inspections as is usually the case. For these groups, middle level public administration could be used as a political relationship to open substantive space for negotiation − for extending market opportunities and territorial access, for negotiating the law in practice (Anjaria 2011). While one part of the law engaged the NGO, the documentation from the university researchers, the English media, the high-end judiciary, and high-level policy planning and administrative circuits, this was only one space in which it was possible to rework territory.4

Rather than a language of ‘rights’, this narrative suggests realms of contesting claims to territory which could be seen as a metaphor for Nehru Place itself. Built in the 1970s as one of Delhi’s f irst commercial centres, it was set out to ‘organize’ retail trade. There was no initial ‘f lat’ unoccupied territory. Rather this ‘modernist’ building complex was constructed on the basis of occupation: including squatter settlements and other groups such as ‘gujjars’ who worked in dairies alongside other small f irm economies (Chakravarty-Kaul 1996). Settled in diverse tenure forms, these occupants were later moved, sometimes evicted, by the Delhi Development Authority’s (DDA) commercial centre. Subsumed under an attempt ‘to decongest the city core’, these acts ref lected a modernist narrative steeped in memory and nostalgia, in which the construction of the new commercial complex in effect reduced past diverse tenure forms into distinctive lease-based ones. By the early 1990s, however, this single leasehold tenure had not only expanded into a range of sub-lets, but also multiplied as other forms of occupancies in the corridors and the wide plazas around Nehru Place.

The more recent NGO interventions towards ‘hawking stands’ can be read as a counter to the ‘emergence’ of these diverse tenure forms. Even if the hawking platforms are successfully built, they will most likely be one more form of occupancy materialized through parts of the state, intersecting and also lying separate to those that other occupants mobilize to maintain their claims. Nehru Place will most likely remain a site of multiple occupancies, of trade that involves an extensive re-working of the brand in electronics, and its dynamic appropriation and re-appropriations.

It is important not to frame this as simply micro-politics, hamstrung by an NGO politics with poorly conceived vision. Rather, multiple logics lie at the heart of these contestations. For instance, one important political realm in framing of ‘hawking zones’ is linked to large internationally connected business interests entering India’s retail sector. The international group KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as USAid, have played an active part in promoting research on regulating hawking. A report by the Urban Institute, a notoriously conservative private corporate-funded think tank, poses the crises of economy in how regulatory spheres constrain ‘growth’. When read closely, their analysis seeks to remove competition to formal businesses posed by unorganized traders.5 A language of addressing ‘marginality’ and building ‘rights’ through ‘training’ all reinforce a disciplinary grid that effectively marks small vendors and traders to shift them out of remunerative central locations (Blomley 2003). The relationship here between global competitiveness and planned territory, and its construction via the rule of law, is central. Here, an important, usually implicit, causality is posed as economy, shaping its waste or pre-history as informal and marginal. It is reworked as territory, part of formal planning, linked into organized party politics and shaped by explicit agendas of policy.

Land shapes the politicization of administration and vice versa, but both also open up space for forms of economy whose locations for innovation disrupt conventional views of the inevitable separation of, for instance, ‘hi-tech’ zones as clean demarcated territories, separate and distinct from the normal informalities of the city. In the following discussion, I explore small firm economies and issues of territoriality.

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‘Fuzzy’ property as the basis of an inter-connected small firm economy

Evolving land markets on the rapidly developing city periphery provide the highest rate of returns. Congregations of firms with shared production evolve financial mechanisms that draw real estate surpluses into manufacturing, generating a self-reinforcing cycle (Benjamin 2004). At its face value, this causality of clustering firms, tapping real estate surpluses to fund further economic upgrading, would pose technological ‘progress’ as a linear cycle. Furthermore, the emphasis on municipal politics would emphasize elections that facilitate political lobbying, fuelling this process and liberal democracy. The fact that real estate−manufacturing funds found their way into funding public and much private upgrading of infrastructure via this form of ‘public participation’ could suggest the importance of a type of conservative ‘housing/economy by people’ policy, one that in Latin America had from the 1960s to the 1980s been the mainstay of slum upgrading and ‘site and services’ with attempts at ‘full cost recovery’. What then would complicate such a ‘reading’ of a congruence of land markets, economy and politics?

The emergence of small firms interspaced in these evolving land settings broadens the spectrum of practices to involve complex tenancies and also partnerships between land occupants and small manufacturers. To sharpen this point, let us consider another trajectory: a territory of small firms interspaced with residential tenancies is acquired under public domain, and allocated to a single large developer who under a policy promoting ‘public−private partnership’ can sell the consolidated territory to an internationally invested hi-tech conglomerate. Effectively, this constitutes a rearrangement, possibly even a reversal and centralization of land surpluses, ref lective in successfully developed special economic zones (SEZs). Yet, such hegemonic control is difficult to sustain in practice.

If property is necessarily ‘fuzzy’ (Verdery 1998) then its ‘customary’ construction (Webber 2009) is central in two inter-relating realms − that of a co-produced economy via the ‘Neighbourhood as Factory’ (as we can see in East Delhi’s Viswas Nagar in the discussion in the next section) and the politics of the ‘porous bureaucracy’ − the latter extending into various forms of ‘politics by stealth’. Webber’s writings on the construction of legal orders help explain the political embeddedness of these phenomena in lower and middle administration rather than in an assumed rationality of the market. Here, as a critique of how public policy is constituted, it is important to consider the importance of ‘specification of norms’ without a totalizing anxiety of ‘coordination’ underlying the practice of legal orders (Webber 2009: 585−7, 589, 603). This allows us to consider how within public administration, techno-administrative procedures evolved cumulatively, where popular engagement underpins public practice just as more widely recognized ‘public policy’. As Webber writes:

practices provide a nexus of interaction, from which norms to govern those practices can be identified … Participants may economize in reasoning, accepting rules of thumb developed in past deliberations so that they do not continually have to deliberate from the ground up ... and that a skillful application of rules depend on a sense of propriety of the fit between rules and their social roles, a normative sensibility, grounded in familiarity with the practices of a particular society.

(Webber 2009: 587)

As a way of conceptualizing legal orders, this account does not dilute or make redundant the realm of legislation; rather as Webber (2009: 589−90) discusses at length, it is the broader applicability and its political consequences across asymmetries of power that ground the legislative process in practices. Politics, thus, is at the heart of the process. In building on Webber’s account and in rejecting coordination of legal orders for economy (2009: 294), there is not one ‘coordinating sphere’, a critical set of ideas to consider East Delhi’s Viswas Nager in the discussion that follows.

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East Delhi’s Viswas Nager

A home-based industrial area, East Delhi’s Viswas Nager emerged in the mid-1990s as India’s biggest cluster of cable and conductor manufacturing. Here, technological change was not the result of one firm ‘inventing’ but rather constant re-engineering. This was inf luenced from outside the neighbourhood precinct (other industrial clusters and trade markets, and trade fairs held in Delhi via a ‘copy’ culture-turned re-engineering). As important, it was within the close proximity of firms whose practices included stealing workers, and also collaborative relationships on receiving orders sub-contracted on a commission basis, due to production capacity or lack of specific skills. The lines between firms was made further complicated by the need to re-engineer capital machinery.

Yet, a vital aspect of fuzziness of property boundaries and complex tenures, their social and political underpinning came from the interaction of how firms related to each other, and also, the forms of partnerships with occupants to land who had settled earlier, but did not have the technical skills to directly engage in the manufacturing process. These groups partnered with ex-foremen and market agents (who lacked capital) and with second-hand machinery often re-engineered to initiate production. The foreman and worker’s prior firms invested because they were not keen to break off relationships with a potential new and ‘known’ sub-contractor. Thus, complex socially constructed tenures were key to shape financing via real estate for these small-scale inter-related economies.

In a similar fashion, and in fact accentuated by the opportunity to invest in this attractive combination of real estate and factory, there evolved extensive relationships between the small firm economy and lower and middle level administration of various government departments. The usual way of viewing these complex connections is through an overly simplistic lens and language of ‘bribery’. Many of these relationships were part of political circuits of city councillors and members of legislative committees (both sitting and past) who had extensive, vocal, well-heeled and responsive constituencies. Many invested their own funds, incomes, including payments made to them, back into the neighbourhood economy via the ‘committee and lucky draw’ financing circuits. Both political and personal, as well as financial, daily contact made councillors and higher level legislative politicians deeply connected and in touch with these neighbourhood realities to shape law, and more importantly, to open up administrative space to allow for extensions of infrastructure and basic services and to initiate forms of ‘regularization’. This also included ways to counter ‘opposing laws and procedures’ that were initiated by an elite fearful of ‘slum growth’ and ‘non-conforming uses’ as a cancer on society.

Their regulation beyond ‘market’ reason ref lect instead specificities of small firms and ‘neighbourhood as factory’ and their diverse and complex tenure forms. As Webber suggests, competing and complex property regimes produce ambiguity to allow for numerous undefined uses (Webber 2009: 598). Furthermore, the latitude of social−legal orders suggests that economic efficiency plays merely a conditioning role, with structure being determined by other considerations (Webber 2009: 601−2). Certainly, an understanding of this complex mix of practice as simply (un)procedural, (un)regulated, or (in)formal is insufficient.

Thinking beyond ‘neighbourhood as factory’

Focusing on the constitution of economy and the logics of small f irms in both trade and manufacturing that dominate city territory, occupancy urbanism as a political practice refuses to f latten institutional and embedded histories. Certainly in this f ield, poor ethnography poses the state as a homogenized entity either constrained to rework territory into being globally competitive, or by future locales of terrorism, or mobilizing digital panoptical technologies of mass control. Political possibility and economy lie outside of ‘local’ or city society so severely de-politicized. Part of the problem in this conventional analysis is that land is assumed to be a passive setting −

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objectif ied in its transformation, as per a larger plan whose stage is set for actors with futures scripted elsewhere. Circumscribed functionally as ‘local’, municipal administrations are acted on by laws and regulations framed by higher authorities, and political disciplining by party systems, narrowing their roles as managerial or as mere representative politics. Yet, because much of the city territory in which most of the city’s population live and work falls outside of master planning-designated zones, neighbourhood and city-scale processes shape and are shaped by deeper transformative politics embedded in the multiple publics that are energized to lobby municipal, but, also other realms of government administration.

Land as real estate fuels such politicization. In arguing for a distinction between ‘capital and its logic of accumulation’ and ‘the market and other forms of property’ Nigam (2011: 92, 94) draws our attention to how we conceptualize economy and its embeddedness, and second, its legibility. I draw on his formulation to emphasize a common place and, in a sense, a radical everyday economy around small f irms that underpins almost all city economy. Considering land in its diverse tenures as capital disrupts singular property forms, what Nigam calls the ‘language of bourgeois private property’. Circulated via diverse and complex tenure forms, land as capital shapes surpluses and fuels trade, especially manufacturing. This serves as a very different pointer than the classical and assumed standard of a large project, singularly controlled SEZs, aimed at homogenized markets. Instead, this radical terrain is made so by another aspect − its social and institutional embedding. Here too the complication lies in diverse forms of occupancies that shape access to its valorized surpluses in diverse forms and practices. In effect, both land and the politicization of administration are co-constituted, as Tang argues (2011, 2012).

These ‘gaps’ and ‘fuzzy spaces’ are essential constructive spaces that open up possibilities of practice in which there is no one inventor, actor, or author but a realm of co-constituting practices, which include multiple agents, people, historical events, accidents and disruptions. Here, the lens of occupancy urbanism disrupts any assumption of characterizing processes of territory and politics as being ‘local’ in opposition to global capital. Further, co-constitution complicates singular property in land and also small-scale firms. These realms, deeply embedded in complex and unpredicable ways, form the setting of a co-constituted economy whose logic remains mostly outside programmes promoting urban employment or ‘local economic development’.

Conclusion

Occupancy urbanism as political practice frames land and its historicity in its multiple logics. Moreover, the materialities of working land as capital (Nigam 2011) shape institutional and economic politics. The political openings they produce in reworking the rigidity of ‘the law’ disrupt and bypass the potential violence of the master plan grid. The city in these constituting realms takes on an exciting uncertainty, one of political possibility rather than closure and doom. A ‘layering’ of production, tenure and occupancy histories, rather than linearity, substantially complicates both an understanding of urban economy and politics. It rejects conceptually and empirically problematic terms such as modernity, informal production (as a residual ‘low-tech’ waste of proper ‘Economic Development’), and small-scale manufacturing as piracy, and highlights what is politically disempowering, the risk found in a range of false panoptical perspectives.

In its emphasis on ‘grounded’ understanding of the openness of political space, occupancy urbanism helps rethink urban economies and territorialities. Following Massey (2005), we move beyond perspectives that make hierarchical spatial practices relational to those of plan, policy, and programme. When writing city realms, our efforts at representation will not necessarily be complete and resolved, but will remain patchy (see Rancière 1999), where gaps and the ‘noise of unplanned’ may reveal openness and political possibility (Simone 2006).

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In recognizing a range of contesting claims, and conceptualizing city territorialization beyond the frame of the master plan, we can explore the complexity of narratives encountered in quiet observation of practice (Benjamin 2012). These realms of material practice embed in and disrupt what are too easily distinctly divided notions of economy, territoriality, and politics. The politics of this project lies paradoxically in rejecting the fixity of narratives about cities, entering instead into realms of illegibility and opacity. Perhaps cities are inherently un-knowable and un-resolvable and perhaps this character underpins political possibility. If the contemporary was a sense of complete control by capital, the city beyond lies in the openness of political possibility. Hence, researching the city in this political project remains a matter of engagement, of seeking the substance of varied realms of material and relational practice.

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Notes 1 I remain indebted to conversations with Jeebesh Bagchi, Bhuvana Raman, Prasad Shetty, Rupali Gupte,

Shevta Sarda, Prasad Khanolkar, other colleagues at the Cyber Moholla / Sarai’s ‘City as Studio’, and Eric

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