City drafting: property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia

Abstract

This Special Feature explores the negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia. City drafting refers to the flexible and contextual practices, procedures and policies required to haul diverse property regimes into order and provisionally render urban land clear and settled. The drafted city, we argue, is necessarily provisional and uneven, left open to politicised remapping, redrafting and resettlement by a host of institutionally embedded brokers, bureaucrats, clerks and surveyors each wielding their own political and socio-technical vision of land. These drafting practices, not only shape a politics of uneven urbanisation in South Asian cities, but also help to explain the persistent fractal morphology of urban property in South Asia; spanning categories of public, private, non-private, commons, unauthorised, regularised, agrarian, urban and so on. While the South Asian city is commonly understood through the high-resolution imagery of masterplanners, policymakers and investors, city drafting methodologically focuses on the grounded bureaucratic struggles of the map, plot, record and title, through which claims to property rights, exclusions and access are shaped.

Keywords:

• Southern urbanism
• bureaucracy
• brokers
• planning
• property
• real estate
• South Asia
• unsettlement

Acknowledgements

The papers were first presented at a workshop organised with sponsorship from the Centre for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) and logistical support and additional funding from the South Asia Center (SAC) at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2022. The papers benefited from comments by Akhil Gupta, Nikhil Anand, Asher Ghertner, Malini Ranganathan, Llerena Searle. We also thank our other participants who presented at the workshop: Sophia Abbas, Andrew Haxby, and Sushmita Pati.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Indivar Jonnalagadda

Indivar Jonalagadda is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Email: [email protected]

Thomas Cowan

Tom Cowan is Associate Professor in the School of Geography at Nottingham University. Email: [email protected]