815792 EAU Environment & Urbanization

Notes on a Southern urban practice

Gautam Bhan

Abstract  Writing alongside Southern urban theorists, this essay argues that
the emerging body of “theory from the South” must be simultaneously tied to
the production of forms and theories of practice. It must ask: How can a new
body of thought give us ways of moving and modes of practice? Drawing from
Gautam Bhan teaches
the experience of Indian cities, three such modes of Southern practice are offered:
at the Indian Institute squat as a practice not just of subaltern urbanization but of the state; repair in
for Human Settlements, contradistinction to construct, build and even upgrade; and consolidate rather
Bengaluru. than focus on the building of a singular, universal network within services and
Address: Indian Institute
infrastructure. The essay then offers a first set of shared characteristics that may
for Human Settlements, enable us to think of a practice as “Southern”, and urges the expansion of a
No 197/36, 2nd Main Road, vocabulary of Southern urban practice.
Sadashivanagar, Bengaluru
560 080, India; email:
Keywords  global South / India / Southern theory / theory / upgrading /
[email protected]
urbanism / urban practice / urban vocabulary

I. Introduction

Philip Harrison, in a wonderfully reflective piece, thinks back to his

transition from being a university-based academic to working with the
1. Harrison, P (2014), “Making city of Johannesburg.(1) He argues that while “planning theory may have
planning theory real”,  Planning
Theory Vol 13, No 1, pages 65–81.
honed [his] conscience and improved [his] capacity to deliberate in a complex
environment … it did not provide [him] with guidance, or even an orientation,
2. See reference 1, page 68.
on substantive matters”.(2) Harrison’s lament is neither new(3) nor specific
3. Notable is one set of
responses in the North that to planning. The implicit questions – how one knows what is to be done,
emerged after Bish Sanyal and what one needs to know to actually do that – are fundamental to any
responded to a survey showing understanding of the role of knowledge in shaping human societies.
that planning practitioners
found planning theory of little
These questions are intimately familiar to anyone who has sought
to no use in their practice. See to respond to the cities they reside in. Activists in social movements,
Sanyal, B (2002), “Globalization, researchers in think tanks, engineers in utilities and other companies,
ethical compromise and
citizens trying to survive everyday life, residents building their own
planning theory”, Planning
Theory Vol 1, No 2, pages housing, or anyone trying to figure out where to get water, a job, an
116–123. escape, or an opportunity: All claim the difficulty of finding articulations
of knowledge that help address their particular forms of practice.
Some of this difficulty lies in the multiple disconnects between
“theory” and “practice”. In this essay, I look at three particular kinds of
disconnection. The first is when theory remains arguably “unrooted” in
context and thus seems impossible to translate, apply or use to influence
practice in particular places. I will argue that recent work on Southern
urban theory reveals partially this challenge of “unrootedness”. The
second is a narrow reading of “practice” that restricts it to professional,

Environment & Urbanization Copyright © 2019 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). 639
Vol 31(2): 639–654. DOI: 10.1177/0956247818815792  www.sagepublications.com
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E N V I RO N M E N T & URB A N I Z A T I O N Vol 31 No 2 October 2019

formal or institutional modes rather than a more expansive sense of

different ways of moving by differently situated and motivated actors and
institutions. Such narrowing shapes the kinds of theories we generate and
value, and creates a “common sense” that particular modes of practice
can be neatly mapped onto particular kinds of practitioners: A “planner”
makes spatial plans, and does not need to know about modes of political
activism; an “activist” organizes public protests and is exempt from being
technically sound on zoning and land-use regulations.
Across theory and practice, this common sense sits nicely within
our hierarchically segmented worlds of sectors, disciplines and domains,
which then bring the third form of disconnect: where things that are
known (“open secrets”) are not present in authoritative disciplinary
canons or dominant forms of practice.
To engage with these three forms of the theory-practice “disconnect”, I
borrow from both sides of the hyphen. From “practice”, I claim a form that
is propositive and polemical – it “calls for things even if all of the evidence is not
yet in and often hard to come by”.(4) From “theory,” I align myself with a view 4. Simone, A and E Pieterse
of theory-building that is, as Graham once phrased it, “as much a discursive (2017), New Urban Worlds:
Inhabiting Dissonant Times,
intervention as a task of accurate representation”.(5) I do so through an attempt to John Wiley & Sons, page x.
offer terms that could be part of the vocabulary of Southern urban practice. 5. Graham, J (1990), “Theory
Section II of this essay reflects on the construction of vocabulary and essentialism in Marxist
as a mode of theorizing and practice, and explains the choices behind geography”, Antipode Vol 21,
No 1, pages 53–66.
the particular terms that this essay offers. Section III briefly marks my
understanding of “Southern” as a context within, as well as a position from
which, I write. The most substantive part of the essay, Section IV, then
introduces three terms for our vocabulary: squat, repair and consolidate. In
conclusion, I reflect on what is shared across these terms to offer possible
ways that others may propose terms of their own so that we may collectively
build a theoretical framework of something called Southern urban practice.

II. On Vocabularies

A vocabulary is a specific kind of knowledge assemblage and intervention.

Its etymological roots lie in the act of giving a name to things, just as
its contemporary meaning underscores the need to expand the “range
of words” available to us. Both are means to make a range of realities
intelligible, visible and relevant. Vocabularies, in one sense, are maps of
different life-worlds of knowledge, including their hierarchies. As a mode
of theory-building, choosing to expand a vocabulary then can be an
argument for the need for new words, or new meanings of older words,
precisely to enable an expansion of the life-worlds under consideration.
Equally, however, vocabulary-building can be more straightforwardly
political than epistemological. Words – known and new, ordinary and
conceptual – can be wielded and presented to amplify particular issues,
places, and forms of knowledge at a particular time. Indeed, the histories
of practice are not just about the consistent generation of new ideas but
also about the sudden rise and fall of different ideas at different political
and historical conjunctures. Seen like this, a vocabulary is dynamic and
located, its construction a strategic call to mobilize around its terms so they
become salient in particular places and times. Vocabularies of something
called urban practice must take this role even more seriously than those
addressing, say, the reconsideration of a theoretical or disciplinary canon.

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The terms this essay offers have been chosen for both of these
ends. Theoretically, they come from a relationship with work that can
loosely be called “Southern urban theory”. Over the past decade, many
authors have argued that place matters in shaping geographies of urban
theory as well as those of authoritative knowledge. Their work, described
below in more detail, rethinks urban theory “from the South”, using the
experiences of a different set of locations – Johannesburg, Lagos, Cairo,
Mumbai, Jakarta – to think about all cities. I write within this emergent
6. Bhan, G (2016), In the Public’s tradition(6) but also challenge it, arguing that the project to think from
Interest: Evictions, Citizenship place must be simultaneously tied to the production of first the forms and
and Inequality in Millennial Delhi,
Orient Blackswan/University of
subsequently the theories of practice. This too must be part of the ethos of
Georgia Press, Delhi/Athens; Southern inquiry. We must ask: How can a new body of thought give us
also Bhan, G, S Srinivas and ways of moving and modes of practice as well as theoretical formulations?
V Watson (editors), (2018), I contend that building a vocabulary is a way to begin such work.
Companion to Planning in the
Global South, Routledge/Orient My choice of these specific terms – and not the many others that could
Blackswan, London/Delhi. have been offered – is thus not just a challenge to what some scholars
7. Sheppard, E, H Leitner have called “mainstream global urbanisms” within urban theory.(7) It is
and A Maringanti (2013), invested in my own reading of what a vocabulary rooted in a specific
“Provincializing global
urbanism: a manifesto”, Urban
empirical context – the contemporary Indian city – should be speaking
Geography Vol 34, No 7, pages about and allowing us to speak about. Each term asserts the political
893–900. importance of viewing a set of key urban issues facing Indian cities in
a particular way. They are not just reflections of a grand theoretical
coherence or apparatus of either “Southern” or “Northern” urban theory.
My own practice within policymaking, teaching and activism in India
convinces me that they are the ideas that require amplification in this
8. In doing so, I am following context to challenge conventional thinking.(8) In particular, I believe they
a generation of scholarship are the terms that institutions of authority – the state, universities, city
on feminist epistemologies.
Very useful is Kate Derickson’s utilities, public officials – need to consider. In some way, my choice of
review of this argument within terms is a response to Philip Harrison’s provocation.
urban theory, which is a telling The choice to speak specifically from and about Indian cities is
reminder that producing
knowledge and assigning it
deliberate. I believe that speaking of practice requires rooting oneself in
legitimacy is a deeply political an empirical specificity. It is open to debate whether a set of cities within
act that is a lens through which a nation-state is the correct scale or form of this specificity. For example,
to see current configurations I could look collectively at megacities across the South. For now, I choose
of power. Derickson, K (2015),
“Urban geography 1: locating to rely – as we often do in polemical and exploratory writing – on contexts
urban theory in the ‘urban where my knowledge is more intimate and reliable. I do not believe that
age’”, Progress in Human vocabularies of practice can be created other than incrementally from
Geography Vol 39, No 5, pages
647–657.
multiple locations, so that they may then begin to speak to each other to
see if shared theoretical frames can emerge across these locations. Such
work then holds the possibilities to generate and imagine both localized
forms of practice and more generalized forms of theory.

III. On “Southernness”

Over the past decade, a set of scholars – let us loosely call their distinct
but shared work “Southern urban theory” – have persistently argued
that place matters in shaping urban thought. Thus far, they argue, urban
“T”heory has been considered placeless – a set of principles, to use
9. Mitchell, T (2002), Rule of Timothy Mitchell’s phrase, that are true in every country.(9) In contrast,
Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, writing on “other” cities has been historically treated as testimony rather
Modernity, University of
California Press.
than theory. The urbanism of these cities has been read, described and
understood largely in terms of theory built elsewhere. Analyses are

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measures of deviation against an unspoken norm, a placeless universal

unmarked by historical difference.(10) 10. The recent debate between
This had two critical consequences. First, we simply do not know Scott & Storper and Ananya
Roy encapsulates much of this
enough about the everyday realities of many parts of the world. Second, discussion. See Roy, A (2016),
even with what we know, we do not generate the inquiries, concepts, “Who’s afraid of postcolonial
ethico-political locations, or theoretical and technical languages that theory?”, International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research
shape urban thought and practice from “here”.
Vol 40, No 1, pages 200–209;
Work that has sought to write from these places rather than just and Scott, A J and M Storper
about them has grown.(11) My task here is not to assess these theoretical (2015), “The nature of cities:
formulations directly, but to return to two founding impulses of Southern the scope and limits of urban
theory”, International Journal of
inquiry. The first is to look from a set of places, paying particular attention Urban and Regional Research
about the contexts from which they speak, acknowledging that this is Vol 39, No 1, pages 1–15.
a challenge to the current geographies of authoritative knowledge. The 11. See, for example: Teresa
second is to think of the South not just as a set of places but as a set of Caldeira’s idea of peripheral
urbanization and Ananya
moving peripheries, a loci of “ex-centric locations” as the Comaroffs have
Roy’s reframing of informality
termed it.(12) In this sense, the South is as much a project as a place, a as modes of urbanization in
relational geography that insists on calling out hegemonies of knowledge their own right and not as end-
and dominant forms of practice no matter where they emerge. states of urban development;
AbdouMaliq Simone’s framing
I write alongside both of these understandings of Southernness. In of “people as infrastructure” as
one sense, I follow Maringanti, Leitner and Shepherd, who once described both network and system along
“Southern” residents as “those, everywhere, whose livelihoods have been with Sylvy Jaglin’s challenge
to the network itself; Vanessa
made precarious by geohistorical processes of colonialism and globalizing Watson and Oren Yiftachel’s
capitalism”.(13) This certainly allows the concept of Southernness to tackle assertions of “deep difference”
relational and moving peripheries, reminding us that Southern questions and “urban ethnocracies” that
can well be asked from the peripheries of all cities, no matter where they challenge self-evident notions
of a shared public or the
are. Yet in this historical conjuncture, there are also empirical similarities ubiquity of liberal democracy
that mark a “Southern” location. These are not limited to a geohistorical as a mode of organizing
“global South” and not all cities in the global South hold them in the urban life; James Ferguson’s
investigation of “declarations
same way, but they are very much contexts that thinking from the South of dependence” rather than
forces us to confront. The “South” then is a relational project, yet also a freedom, empowerment or
currently discernible and defensible empirical geography. emancipation; and Vinay
Gidwani’s insistence on reading
Let us take the production of space as an illustration of this empirical
capital through waste rather
geography. Writing about “peripheral urbanization”, Teresa Caldeira than rent. Caldeira, T P (2017),
describes modes of the production of space that “(a) operate with a specific “Peripheral urbanization:
temporality and agency, (b) engage transversally with official logics [of law, autoconstruction, transversal
logics, and politics in cities of
property, and labour], (c) generate new modes of politics, and (d) create highly the global south”, Environment
unequal and heterogeneous cities”.(14) Drawing on examples from São Paulo, and Planning D: Society
Istanbul, Santiago, Mexico City and New Delhi, she argues that writing and Space Vol 35, No 1,
pages 3–20; also Roy, A
from all these locations reminds us that “that peripheral urbanization is (2005), “Urban informality:
remarkably pervasive, occurring in many cities of the south, regardless of their towards an epistemology
different histories of urbanization and political specificities”.(15) This does not of planning”, Journal of
mean that it plays out the same way in these cities, or that the forms of the American Planning
Association Vol 71, No 2, pages
“unequal and heterogenous cities” look the same, or that all cities in a 147–158; Simone, A (2004),
geographical “South” exhibit it. What it tells us is that looking from a “People as infrastructure:
certain set of cities provokes particular lines of inquiry because of the intersecting fragments in
Johannesburg”, Public Culture
particular nature of their urbanism. Vol 16, No 3, pages 407–429;
Other writers – sometimes boldly, sometimes hesitantly – also refer to Jaglin, S (2014), “Regulating
such shared empirical contexts. If for Caldeira it is the mode of production service delivery in Southern
cities: rethinking urban
of space, for Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse it is the shared fates of “large,
heterogeneity”, in S Parnell and
fairly well-resourced places that nevertheless have very large concentrations of S Oldfield (editors), Routledge
chronically poor people who are institutionally excluded from the government Handbook of Cities in the Global
support structures that are necessary for their well-being”.(16) This amorphous South, Routledge, London;
Watson, V (2006), “Deep
set of cities become more specific in their shared historical geographies.
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difference: diversity, planning They are “embryonic post-colonial local state structures”(17) or “post-colonial
and ethics”, Planning Theory Vol
contexts where local and provincial governments are rather belated constructions,
5, No 1, pages 31–50; Yiftachel,
Oren (2006), “‘Re-engaging with limited fiscal and human capacity and with incomplete administrative
planning theory?: Towards systems at their disposal”.(18) It is thus that AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar
“South-Eastern” perspectives”, Pieterse offer what I consider the most convincing definition of an
Planning Theory Vol 5, No 3,
pages 211–212; Ferguson, empirical configuration of the “South”: cities where the majority holds
J (2013), “Declarations political, economic, spatial and ecological vulnerability.(19)
of dependence: labour, One way to conceptualize a vocabulary of Southern urban practice,
personhood, and welfare in
Southern Africa”, Journal of the
then, is to start from particular empirical configurations of core urban
Royal Anthropological Institute systems – land, infrastructure, economy, governance and cultural
Vol 19, No 2, pages 223–242; systems(20) – in a particular set of cities. Each of the terms offered in the
and Gidwani, V and R N Reddy next section of this essay thus draws upon and locates itself in a particular
(2011), “The afterlives of ‘waste’:
notes from India for a minor empirical configuration of urbanism that Southern urban theorists have
history of capitalist surplus”, described. They do so in the contemporary Indian city, recognizing
Antipode Vol 43, No 5, pages that practice requires specificity, especially if particular empirical
1625–1658.
configurations are its starting point. I now turn to the three terms.
12. Comaroff, J and J L
Comaroff (2015), Theory from
the South: Or, How Euro-
America Is Evolving toward IV. The Terms
Africa, Routledge.
13. Sheppard, E, H Leitner a. Squat
and A Maringanti (2013),
“Provincializing global It is now well established that squatting – the process of occupying and
urbanism: a manifesto”, Urban
Geography Vol 34, No 7, pages
incrementally building urban inhabitation on land or in structures to
893–900. which residents do not hold legal title – is the mainstay of how auto-
14. See reference 11, Caldeira constructed cities are inhabited. The literature speaks of squatting mostly
(2017), page 3. as, in Alexander Vasudevan’s words, a “response to and an expression of
15. See reference 11, Caldeira housing precarity”.(21) The housing that results from squatting – often
(2017), page 4. mistakenly reduced to a catch-all category of “slum”– is perhaps the
16. Parnell, S and E Pieterse single most recognizable marker of the landscapes of Southern cities and
(2010), “The ‘right to the city’:
institutional imperatives
of writing on them. This remains empirically true of all contemporary
of a developmental Indian cities – and, indeed, for many of these cities, Simone and Pieterse’s
state”, International Journal of description of the vulnerable urban majority is both apt and accurate.
Urban and Regional Research Recent scholarship has usefully shifted the focus from the materiality
Vol 34, No 1, pages 146–162,
page 147. of the dwellings that squatting creates to the mode of producing and
17. See reference 16, page 148. inhabiting urban space. Vasudevan reframes squatting as a set of practices,
18. See reference 16, page 150.
arguing that we need to better understand the dynamics of a “makeshift
19. See reference 4.
urbanism” that results from the juxtaposition of both structural exclusion
but also the possibilities of “endurance and social transformation”.(22)
20. I take these as a useful
frame from Simone and Scholarship from practice – particularly the work of organizers, residents
Pieterse; see reference 4. and activist federations – has shown and rallied behind in-situ upgrading,
21. Vasudevan, A (2015), for example, as opposed to either eviction or redevelopment as modes of
“The makeshift city: towards practice that begin from and affirm squatting as a core form of producing
a global geography of
squatting”, Progress in Human
urban space.(23)
Geography Vol 39, No 3, pages Yet even here, squatting remains a mode of practice associated with
338–359, page 352. the marginalized, another weapon of the weak.(24) Just as, for so long,
22. See reference 21, page 355. informality remained discursively the domain of otherness, vulnerability
23. See particularly the and exclusion until several scholars pointed out the empirical reality of
extensive body of work in this elite informality, and argued that informality had to be understood as a
journal from SDI (formerly
Slum/Shack Dwellers regime of rule.(25) What would a reframing of squatting as a practice more
International) that has crafted widely deployed look like?
arguments for housing policy Photo 1 shows a mohalla (neighbourhood) clinic. These clinics,
and practice based precisely
a state intervention in the delivery of public health, are the brainchild

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Photo 1
A mohalla clinic in Delhi

© Gautam Bhan

of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led government of the National Capital on this foundation of in-situ
Territory of New Delhi. Over a hundred have been established all over the upgrading. For example:
Patel, S (2013), “Upgrade,
city, providing consultations, diagnostic tests, and medicines at minimal rehouse or resettle? An
cost. The clinics are built simply, cheaply and quickly, usually with assessment of the Indian
prefabricated materials. In both process and form, they hold more than a government’s Basic Services
for the Urban Poor (BSUP)
passing resemblance to the auto-constructed, incrementally built homes programme”, Environment
that dominate the low-income neighbourhoods they serve. and Urbanization Vol 25, No
The mohalla clinic scheme’s ambitions are grand – over a thousand 1, pages 177–188. For recent
were planned by March 2017,(26) although only about 110 are in operation. work on housing policy in
India specifically, see Burra,
The delay isn’t due to a lack of resources or will, but the inability to S, D Mitlin and G Menon
find adequate land in dense neighbourhoods. Here is the dilemma of a with I Agarwal, P Banarse, S
Southern megacity: geographies of auto-construction overlap with those Gimonkar, M Lobo, S Patel,
V Rao and M Waghmare
of formal ownership to make land scarce. How then does one move (2018), “Understanding the
forward? A decision to use public resources to expand access to healthcare contribution of the BSUP
for the poor is precisely within Vasudevan’s twin hopes for squatting: the (JNNURM) to inclusive cities
in India”, Effective States
enabling of endurance and social transformation. Yet how should the
and Inclusive Development
government of a city-region proceed against the challenges? (ESID) Working Paper No 97,
Many clinics moved forward any way they could. The one in Photo University of Manchester,
1 occupies the sidewalk, sharing space with a street vendor. Two uses of Manchester, available at
http://www.effective-states.
sidewalk space are thus juxtaposed: one that we recognize immediately org/working-paper-97/. See
as “informal,” while the other is, in fact, a formal and public health also Bhan, G (2018), “Housing,
dispensary. Inevitably, this has landed the clinics in the middle of a common sense and urban
policy in India”, in H Bhurte
tenure security battle. The North Delhi Municipal Corporation – ruled and A Bhide (editors), Urban

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Parallax Policy and the City by the AAP’s rival Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), also the ruling party at
in Contemporary India, Yoda
the centre – has argued that mohalla clinics are unauthorized structures
Press, New Delhi. 
and continually threatens to demolish them. In response, the AAP health
24. Scott, J C (2008), Weapons
of the Weak: Everyday Forms minister’s response is that the structures are, in fact, not “structures” at
of Peasant Resistance, Yale all. Being “temporary”, he argued, they needed no permission.(27)
University Press. Consider this set of practices: building a “temporary” structure; using
25. See reference 11, Roy a particular set of materials and construction techniques that reflect an
(2005).
uncertain temporality; building knowingly in tension with regimes of law,
26. Press Trust of India (2016a),
property and planning (the health minister did not deny that one could
“AAP government will set
up 1,000 mohalla clinics by not build on a sidewalk); proceeding without resolving these tensions or
March 2017”, Indian Express, 2 knowing if a resolution is possible; and simultaneously defending one’s
December, available at http:// occupation on moral and ethical grounds (this is, after all, a public clinic)
indianexpress.com/article/
india/aap-government-will- as well as technicalities (this is a “temporary” structure). This is a familiar
set-up-1000-mohalla-clinics- set of claims and processes. The government of Delhi is, to put it bluntly,
by-march-2017-cm-arvind- squatting on the land of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation. It is
kejriwal-4406863/.
entirely possible, reading the health minister’s response, to argue that they
27. Press Trust of India (2016b),
know precisely that they are squatting. In responding as they did, one can
“Makeshift mohalla clinics In
North Delhi face ‘demolition’”, argue that the AAP government is challenging the central government
NDTV, 8 March, available to demolish – in public space and public view – what is, after all, not
at https://www.ndtv.com/ a form of private appropriation, but a public health centre. Legally, the
delhi-news/makeshift-mohalla-
clinics-in-north-delhi-face- municipal corporation is right. Yet the clinic draws its staying power more
demolition-1454191. through a claim to legitimacy than to legality.(28)
28. See reference 6, Bhan Why has this situation come about? To build the number of clinics
(2016). that the AAP government wants, and within its timeframe, squatting
is their only option. As with income-poor urban residents who cannot
afford to buy or rent legal housing, squatting is the only mode though
which the government can move forward at scale. In doing so, it is using
a mode of practice that fits with squatting and its uncertainties: build
quickly in a material form that can come down as quickly as it goes up,
and in the interim, survive as long as possible, knowing that the longer
you survive, the more legitimacy you gain.
My intention here is not to debate which government is “right”, nor
to draw a simplistic equivalence between a mohalla clinic and a pavement
dwelling. It is to show that squatting as a practice has a set of logics that
make it both effective and necessary for reaching certain outcomes in the
specific historical and spatial contexts of Southern urbanization. Taking
Southern practice seriously means seeing squatting not just in its tensions
with formal logics of law and planning, nor merely in the material forms
of housing, but as mode of practice that embraces uncertainty, measures
itself against limited temporalities, and operates to move forward
incrementally in any way it can. This mode of practice is claimed here as
an equal possibility for state action – for policies, programmes and plans
– and not just for subaltern urban residents. To use Solomon Benjamin’s
conceptualization, squatting is a practice that can allow even planners
29. Benjamin, S (2008), within state structures to become occupancy urbanists.(29) This results in
“Occupancy urbanism: new forms of planning practice from within the state apparatus.
radicalizing politics and
economy beyond policy and
programs”, International
Journal of Urban and Regional b. Repair
Research Vol 32, No 3, pages
719–729. It is established that, for a large number of urban residents in Indian
cities, a house is something one builds while living in it. You inhabit
and build both incrementally and simultaneously: brick by brick, one

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layer at a time, moving forward but sometimes also falling behind. This is
Caldeira’s “specific temporality” of auto-construction described earlier in
this essay, echoing older arguments that told us to think about housing as
time, as a verb, as a process.(30) What, then, is an appropriate vocabulary 30. In the North and the South,
there is a long tradition of
to describe this practice of house-making?
speaking of incrementality
Formally, in the labour market and in our education systems, in house-making though it
we continue to speak of house-making through the vocabulary and rarely has impacted, as the
imaginations of construction, building and/or design. In Indian rest of this essay argues, the
formal practice or education of
architectural education, certainly, these remain the way professionals house-making itself. See Turner,
are taught. Yet what if we used repair? If one lives in one’s house while J F and R Fichter (editors)
incrementally building it, the distinction between these terms is difficult (1972), Freedom to Build:
Dweller Control of the Housing
to maintain. Repair is clearly foundational to incremental and auto- Process, Macmillan.
constructed materialities, yet is arguably still seen as distinct from – and
chronologically subsequent to – something called “construction”.
I argue that there is also a distinction between repair and its closest
referent: upgrading. Within Indian cities, those who practice upgrading
have, as the work of many scholars and practitioners has shown, battled
to define it as incremental improvement rather than transformative
redevelopment.(31) Yet its own success within policy discourse presents a 31. See reference 24.
challenge. Upgrading is now often seen as something linked to settlement-
level environmental services and infrastructure, an action taken by
the state through policy rather than through everyday incremental
auto-construction, and moving between the scales of households and
communities with greater ease. Choosing repair instead of upgrading as a
vocabulary term thus reflects a slight conceptual shift but also a claim that
repair is better suited, in this moment, to reframe the current common
sense of housing policy, as well as to challenge, as I will argue later, the
current modes of architectural training, education and practice.
What does looking at repair allow us to see? Repair suggests a
particular assemblage of practices. First, repair emphasizes the need
to restore immediate function over the need for substantive material
improvement. Second, it is located in an immediate material life-world
where what can be quickly accessed and easily used is more likely to be
chosen as the “right” material for the job. Third, it does not presuppose
any actors. Everyone can, should, and generally does, repair in some
form – there are no particular professionals whose “sector”, “domain”
or “practice” is repair. Those practitioners with reputation or experience
have knowledge that can be accessed – it is not seen as distant, formal or
external expertise. Fourth, repair can hence be seen as a mode of practice
that draws upon forms of public and proximate knowledge. This does
not mean that this knowledge is not complex, but that it is available in
a variety of contexts and can be accessed from a variety of people. Put
simply: One can quickly find out what needs to be done, and someone
who knows how to do it. Fifth, repair suggests not just actions but a
sensibility, one that sees materials in a constant cycle of use and reuse
by the same actors and in the same setting over a long time period. The
distinction between “repaired” and “new” then itself is diffused, allowing
repair to hold a sense of endurance but also one of aspiration and renewal.
Many possibilities open up when we shift from construction, building
and design to repair. Let me briefly allude to two. The first is the way that
starting with repair challenges India’s housing policy frameworks. The
second is that repair insists on a reimagining of the pedagogy of formal
and technical practice in architecture.
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When we speak of housing policy in India, the vocabulary is that

32. MoHUPA (2015), Pradhan of “shortage”. There are not enough homes, the story goes, and hence
Mantri Awas Yojana: Scheme policies have empirical estimations of how many homes are needed
Guidelines, Ministry of Housing
and Urban Poverty Alleviation,
and what is to be built. The target for just 2018-19 to meet the current
New Delhi. government’s “Housing for All by 2022”(32) scheme, for example, is 1.2
33. Press Trust of India (2017), million homes.(33) An ideal flat for income-poor families has been devised:
“Govt sets ambitious target of 25 square metres, including a bedroom, hall and kitchen. The “slum” is to
1.2 million houses under PMAY be replaced by vertical buildings of such units.
scheme in FY18”, Business
Standard, 22 May, available at My intention is not to detail or debate this policy.(34) It is instead to
http://www.business-standard. think about the idea of “shortage” in itself. Housing data make it clear that
com/article/current-affairs/ these 1.2 million Indian households that need new homes do not all lack
govt-sets-ambitious-target-
of-1-2-million-houses-
homes. Homelessness as a proportion of shortage is miniscule. The question
under-pmay-scheme-in- in India is of existing but inadequate homes – homes auto-constructed
fy18-117052200860_1.html. by residents that remain legally, materially or spatially insecure. The
34. For that debate, see government’s own technical committee suggests that “affordable homes
reference 24; also Bhan, G are not adequate, and adequate homes are not affordable”.(35) If empirically
(2017), “From the basti to
the ‘house’: socio-spatial we must begin with housing that already exists but is inadequate, then it
readings of housing policy in is not construction we need but repair, enhancement, improvement and
India”, Current Sociology Vol 65, even expansion: homes that can become materially more adequate, or
No 4, pages 587–602.
grow to reduce congestion. Shortage suggests construction; improvement
35. Ministry of Housing and
Urban Poverty Alleviation
and upgrading suggest repair.
(2012), Report of the Technical A housing policy built on repair has an entirely different imagination
Group on Urban Housing of practice: its financial models, questions of capacity, institutional design,
Shortage (TG-12), Government standards and norms, as well as delivery models, all profoundly change. I do
of India, New Delhi, available at
http://nbo.nic.in/Images/PDF/ not mean by this necessarily that one replaces the current practices of repair
urban-housing-shortage.pdf. with more “professional” or “formal” practices. Taking repair seriously within
policy means examining different modes of enhancing, securing and scaling
repair as an already existing mode of housing practice – asking also, for example,
how it fits into current understandings of settlement-scaled upgrading.
We are far from being able to grapple with repair as a key term of
urban practice in Indian cities. How far is evident when we acknowledge
a peculiarly Southern phenomenon: what we teach in our universities
echoes curricula written elsewhere that rarely reflect – let alone engage
with – the conditions in which we live. In a country where a majority live
in auto-constructed housing, standard syllabi for architectural education
have no courses on repair, which is taken seriously only in heritage and
conservation. While core training on materials and construction is part of
the mandated syllabi prescribed by the Council of Architecture, formally
trained architects in India claim they are not trained to work on existing
buildings or structures. This is linked in large part to the imaginations of
the professional practice of architecture, which Southern urban practice
must challenge. Working with materials from first principles is core to
architectural practice. Why then limit the range of materials one is trained
on to exclude, say, tarpaulin, which so many urban residents rely on?
There are two challenges, then. The first is to expand, support and
remunerate the work of the actors who undertake repair – informal contractors,
local workers – without necessarily seeking to formalize it. The second is to
expand the notion of architectural practice so that state-sponsored “slum”
upgrading programmes, for example, can draw upon a wider range of
practitioners who engage with self-built environments. The absence of these
practices is precisely the kind of disconnect that Southern theory points out,
and thinking about repair as both practice and pedagogy gives us a way to
start responding to the theoretical disjunctures as we unearth them.
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Full Cycle of Urban Sanitation in India | A Schematic

F ig u r e 1

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c. Consolidate

For historical reasons, Sylvy Jaglin argues, the network – a “set of interconnected
structures, centrally planned and managed by a single monopoly-based public
utility offering a uniform service in a given area according to an egalitarian access
standard” – has been perceived as the “most efficient way to provide urban
36. See reference 11, Jaglin services to concentrations of population and activities in northern cities”.(36) Much
(2014), page 434. of our practice, according to her, is geared to bringing urban service delivery
as close as possible to this ideal. This has often meant foreclosing other ways
to reach the same outcomes – ways that look or seem neither desirable nor
technically correct.
As a further example of Southern urban thought, Jaglin argues for a
37. See reference 11, Jaglin “radical shift in perspective”.(37) Southern cities, she points out, have never
(2014), page 434. been characterized by a network, and perhaps, they need not be at all.
Following Olivier de Sardan, she proposes a focus instead on delivery
configurations, the “totality of actors and institutions, and of equipment and
resources, which contribute to the delivery of its various components, under
some form or other of co-production: collaboration (direct or indirect, episodic or
38. de Sardan, J-P O, A permanent), substitution, competition, complementarity, etc.”(38) Each form of
Abdoulkader, A Diarra, Y such access, she argues, is a sociotechnical system that should challenge the
Issa, H Moussa, A Oumarou
and M T Alou (2010), Local
way we reach just service delivery outcomes.
Governance and Public Goods Indian cities fit Jaglin’s descriptions perfectly. To take one example,
in Niger, Africa Power and Figure 1 shows the cycle of sanitation for urban Indian households,
Politics Programme (APPP) understood here as the safe and effective management and disposal of
Working Paper No 10, Overseas
Development Institute, London. human waste. The “network” here (effective and safe disposal through a
piped sewer system) processes 12 per cent of human waste. The reality of
sanitation in India is a range of sociotechnical systems, a complex delivery
configuration rather than a network. Different modes – soak pits, septic
tanks, pit latrines, and open defecation – spatially and structurally match
different kinds of households, often because of their socioeconomic status.
These then are applied to different housing forms marked not just by
different material conditions, but tenure security that further shapes the
infrastructure they have or lack.
The presence or absence of a piped sewer system is thus Southern and
sociotechnical in multiple ways: in urban form that was built without being
preceded by planning or the laying of trunk infrastructure; in the perceived
as well as real financial and technical limitations of public utilities; in
the reality of an urban majority with an uncertain ability to pay either
sufficiently or regularly or both; and in the presence of auto-constructed
neighbourhoods able to pay for infrastructure but unable to get it due to
their spatial illegality.
There are two challenges to practice here. The first is to reframe our
question. If 88 per cent of disposal occurs through modes outside the
network ideal, must we not begin from “here”, from the dominant modes
of access, regardless of their distance from an ideal? Can outcomes not be
reached in newer, different modes than the exemplars from elsewhere? I
am not setting aside the notion of the network as incorrect. Indeed, there
are good technical, financial and social reasons to want universal networks.
I contend, rather, that we must begin from existing practices of service
delivery on their own terms, recognize the contexts that they come from,
understand why they have emerged, and then reassess whether the network
is the most feasible (and not just the most theoretically desirable) mode
through which to reach the outcomes we want.

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For our vocabulary, therefore, the key word I offer is not build or
engineer, but consolidate. One of the key challenges of multiple sociotechnical
systems is how one leverages the fact that they are empirically dominant
while also engaging with their inadequacies and vulnerabilities. Thinking
about consolidation makes us focus our practice away from, say, such purely
technical responses as building better soak pits, or changing the technology
of the toilet, or designing an appropriately lined septic tank. I am arguing
for a different emphasis in practice: focusing on the governance of multiple
sociotechnical systems rather than simply improving their engineering. What
are the governance arrangements – institutions, processes and regulatory
instruments – that can bring together these diverse existing systems to deliver
the desired outcomes of universal access that the network was intended for?
Thinking about appropriate institutional forms and regulatory frames
that can consolidate across a diversity of sociotechnical, spatial and legal
contexts is precisely the challenge of Southern urban practice. Doing so at
the scale that urban service delivery requires implies that such consolidation
must be both vertical and horizontal, both bringing together and scaling
up. What institutions can hold these systems: community organizations?
Public utilities? Private companies? Worker cooperatives? What forms
of public regulation can enable these institutions to succeed given their
particular strengths and weaknesses? What instruments – licences, contracts,
incentives – are best suited to bind a diverse range of actors that wield such
power and represent such different institutional forms?
Existing practice in India has been experimenting with such forms
when it comes to solid waste management. Dry waste collection and sorting
centres in Bengaluru (Bangalore), for example, are now regulated to be
managed and run by workers identified as waste pickers in the informal
sector.(39) Slowly, the scale of this practice has grown – 180 of the city’s 39. For details, see Chandran,
198 wards have sorting centres, and the capacity of these centres is rising. P, N Shekar, M Abubaker
and A Yadav (2014), “Waste
The establishment of the centres is a new form of consolidation. The land management & resource
and physical structure are provided by the municipal corporation, Bruhat utilisation”, Waste Management
Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). The BBMP pays for the door-to-door & Resource Utilisation.
collection of waste, but not for the running and management of the waste
collection centre. Instead, the centre has the right to retain profits from the
sale of all waste that is brought to it. This is an assemblage of regulatory
forms that consolidates municipal function with private enterprise; retains
an employment link among waste gatherers, sorters and traders; structures
and yet relies on an existing market for waste; and, importantly, differentiates
which actors – the corporation, the waste collectors, the entrepreneurs
running the collection sectors – can take what risk.
The BBMP has had to come up with these new forms of regulation. As with
the mohalla clinic, this was the only way the objective could be achieved at
scale. Recognition of the delivery configuration prompted a different modality
of practice and a different set of governance arrangements. This is precisely the
opportunity that the government of India did not take in sanitation. The new
central scheme, one of the flagship urban missions called the Swachh Bharat
Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), chose to fund solely the construction of toilets,
rather than investing in the much more difficult task of recognizing, working
with and consolidating the sanitation arrangements shown above.
Consolidation raises one of the most trenchant difficulties facing Southern
practices. If a certain distance from regulation, visibility and formality enables
new solutions to emerge – dry waste collection in Bangalore grew from
informal waste worker collectives, and new regulations on street vending from
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organized vendor networks – then how does consolidation not risk losing that
flexibility while addressing scale and lowering vulnerability? How does one
“formalize” what has succeeded but also remained vulnerable precisely due
to its “informal” nature? This question is as true of the “slum” as of the street
vendor, and of infrastructure and services as well as organic forms of governance
like street committees and associations. The recurrence of this question is not
incidental. It is exactly the question that Southern contexts raise repeatedly:
How does one consolidate across this diversity of institutional forms, situated
40. Particularly relevant to this in structures of entrenched and deeply unequal power relations?(40)
question is the work of Women
in Informal Employment:
Globalizing and Organizing
(WIEGO). See WIEGO’s V. Notes on A Theory of Southern Practice
recent conceptualization of
formalization of informal work, The intent of this essay has been to offer the beginnings of a vocabulary of
asking very similar questions to
those posed here: http://www.
urban practice rooted in the traditions of Southern inquiry. In conclusion, I
wiego.org/informal-economy/ attempt to outline broader theoretical formulations of, and from, Southern
rethinking-formalization-wiego- urban practice. How should we build such theory? The three modes of
perspective. practice on offer – squat, repair and consolidate – share certain characteristics.
We begin there, with four observations.
One: Each mode of practice is rooted in the specific spatial, historical and
socio-political context of a particular urbanism. It exists already as a mode
of practice that has emerged within and because of this particular urbanism.
Had auto-construction not been the most common mode of urbanization
in the Indian city, for example, then neither squatting nor repair would
have emerged as widespread modes of practice. This also implies that, over
time, they may recede: as one generation of auto-construction consolidates,
squatting and repair may give way to other praxes or change their own
forms. Modes of practice, in other words, are rooted in space and time, and
we must begin by looking, listening and paying attention to the current
instantiations of practice and their relationship to place.
The terms I have chosen, however, also perform one additional function.
They highlight certain modes of existing practice within Indian cities that are
under-recognized and under-valued precisely because of their distance from
formal sectors and domains of professional practice, and the formal registers of
law and planning. I used the examples of repair (not part of formal architectural
training) and squatting (not imagined as a best practice of a state government)
in order to highlight that different modes of practice are associated not just
with certain practitioners, but with registers of value, power and importance.
Such highlighting – perhaps it is better to think of it as amplification – is an
important part of the ethos of Southern inquiry that must seek to constantly
41. See reference 8. make explicit and challenge registers of value and power.(41)
Two: Each of these modes can hold uncertainty. These are modes of
practice that challenge the notion of “evidence-based policymaking”, whose
implicit assumption is that specific actions will lead to specific impacts
in a time-defined horizon, when those actions are chosen on the basis of
evidence. The modes highlighted here do not reject the idea of evidence –
indeed, they offer data, rigour and logics of their own. What they challenge
are the certainties that evidence-based policymaking takes for granted:
that systems will work as they should, that people will act predictably, that
the rules of the game are fair, known or stable. Whether such uncertainty
makes the practice “weak” or “fragile” often depends on the actor and
the context. When one arm of the state squats, as it does in building the
mohalla clinic, it can manage the uncertainty in very different ways than an

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auto-constructing squatter on public land. Yet, despite these differences in power,

both actors are, in their own way, acting despite, within, and because of the
sustained presence of uncertainty. Thinking about squatting practised by these
very differently located actors also reminds us that squatting as a mode of practice
then must be freed from being seen only as a necessity.(42) Doing so will open up 42. I owe this argument to
its possibilities, not just within the state but within the “informal settlement”. AbdouMaliq Simone’s insightful
reading of drafts of this piece.
Three: These are modes of practice that measure themselves – and thus
evaluate “success,” “outcome” and “impact” – often (though not always)
on limited and non-linear temporalities. They are incremental by design,
and expect to adapt frequently rather than rarely. This is not the practice
that seeks the “long term”, unless that can be reached through a series of
incremental “what nexts”. A focus on not “going backwards”, whether in
time, space or status, is a key Southern practice. This does not mean that
these modes of practice cannot seek structural change – the making of new
laws and fundamental rights, for example – but the way they do so will
reflect the incremental nature of shorter-term praxis. The recently won
Rights to Information and Education in India, for example, were not acts
of legislative fiat or enlightened leadership and constitutionalism. They
were the result of long-term mobilizations where a series of incremental and
spatially specific struggles culminated in structural and legal change.
Four: These are modes that emphasize the need to act, to move, because
the contexts they emerge from demand, require and already exhibit an almost
constant movement. Iterative and incremental, yet also scalar, these are modes
that see “best practice” as pragmatic, possible and feasible, just as much as
ideal, technical and appropriate. This urgency is familiar to anyone who has
practised in a Southern context. Its roots lie in the fact that these practices
must locate themselves in contexts of entrenched inequality, destitution and
vulnerability that are held – to return again to our definition of Southernness –
by the urban majority.(43) Acknowledging the imperative to “do something” is 43. See reference 6, Bhan
not just to imply action that seeks to fix or make better; it can equally suggest a (2016) and Bhan et al. (2018).
constant moving to stay in place, to maintain status, to consolidate the ground
beneath one’s feet for a little while longer. It also indicates that the ethos of
such practice is more forgiving of imperfect, uncertain moves – they are often
indistinguishable, in fact, from ones that appear otherwise.
Putting these four characteristics together is one way to begin to think
about certain characteristics of urban practice as “Southern”: incremental,
uncertain, temporally fluid, speculative, transversal and rooted. Choosing
a different set of entry points, a different set of terms for our vocabulary,
would offer further shared characteristics, or challenge these. Consolidate,
for example, could refer to different modes of land aggregation that allow
a bringing together of large holdings. Squatting could be applied to describe
certain modes of rural and peri-urban land conversion, but could also well
speak of prevalent modes of elite land-grabbing. Repair could be read as a
refusal to accumulate and grow, for a variety of reasons, rather than a choice
based on efficiency or constraint. What is important for us at this stage is
precisely to do this work: to add terms, to experiment further, to pay attention
in particular ways, and to generate vocabularies from different positionalities
– normative and analytical priorities – as well as multiple geographies.
It is particularly important to remind ourselves of the choices we have
made in our approach to Southern inquiry. I acknowledge, for example,
that the geohistorical “South” that I have stood behind empirically, as a
relational location, is as much a space of emergence and growth as it is of
vulnerability. Empirically, it is undeniable that across Asia, Africa and Latin
America, the most significant shifts in poverty have occurred in the last
century alongside the most dynamic forms of growth. These have changed

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the geographies of power both within the “South” and globally – think of
the economic and resource footprint of China in Africa, for example, or the
rise of the BRICS as a new geopolitical formation. While the set of terms
offered in this essay continues to grapple with Southern questions focusing
on inequality and vulnerability, this reflects the normative preference of
its author, not the conceptual bounds of the argument. It is my hope that,
as this vocabulary expands, others will speak “from the South” equally
to understand new configurations of power and, indeed, new forms of
urbanization, globalization, capitalism and even economic imperialism.
My concluding note then is a call for more work that builds upon the
theoretical work of Southern urban theory and it extends to grappling with
forms and theories of Southern urban practice. I urge that this work hold on to
both forms of Southernness that I have tried to describe: a project of speaking
from moving and relational peripheries to challenge dominant forms of
knowledge and practice, and a commitment to remaining rooted in the
specific geographies of these peripheries at different historical conjunctures.
Such work must continue to be careful to keep dislodging the link between a
particular kind of practitioner and a particular kind of practice. In this essay,
I have deliberately sought to maintain this “disconnect”, precisely to allow
experimentation with unlikely practices from unlikely locations, where we
can see, for example, the government of Delhi be a squatter in its own city.
Our emphasis, in other words, must be on modes of practice and not kinds of
practitioners. This reminds us that we must imagine different ways in which
these modes of practice can be mobilized, by whom this can and will be
done, and with what consequences for different desired urban outcomes.
The provocation to articulate Southern urban practice comes, in the
words of Simone and Pieterse, from the need “to explore grounded and speculative
alternatives that can animate and stitch together a plethora of diverse and molecular
44. See reference 4, page 56. experiments”.(44) A vocabulary of Southern practice must make apparent forms
of doing, moving and acting. It must do so continuously and dynamically,
churning along with transforming urban landscapes. This will allow new
formulations and frameworks to both emerge from it and sustain it. As
Southern urban theory has pushed us to reimagine geographies of authoritative
knowledge, we must equally listen to what the theory is telling us about our
modes of practice, and hopefully create new vocabularies to be able to do so.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A version of this article was delivered as a keynote lecture at the African
Centre for Cities’ International Urban Conference in Cape Town in January
2018. My participation was partly made possible by support from the IJURR
Foundation and is gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to acknowledge
the insightful and deeply helpful comments of Diana Mitlin, AbdouMaliq
Simone, Prasad Shetty, Hussain Indorewala and Ricardo Cardoso.

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