From bureaucratic practice to competing policy: examining the durable and redistributive nature of land regularization politics in Bangalore

Abstract

This article examines the politics of land regularization pushed for by lower and middle-income groups across various sites post the expansion of Bangalore in 2006, which has created numerous non-master planned settlements, especially in peri-urban areas. I argue for a rethinking of the debates on urban informality in Global South urbanisms through a focus on this politics. I describe the production of the urban through an ethnography of land’s social and administrative embeddings, which pays close attention to the historical and competing claims on land and the institutional complexity of bureaucracy. I also foreground the interpretative frames of residents, rather than planning codes. This methodological approach reveals how non-plan actors channelize various bureaucratic modalities, including higher state spaces, in order to negotiate and co-produce land policy. In sum, the article reveals how this mode of urbanization arises due to the state’s need to navigate complex rival claims on land and residents’ push for more equitable redistribution. This contests the sweeping diagnosis of land grab, failures of Master Planning, and the reckless extension of free markets on land, which usually frame analyses of urban informality.

Keywords:

• informality
• land regularization
• bureaucracy
• property
• Bangalore
• Southern Urbanism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable contribution in the production of this article. I would like to thank the research assistant team in the research project alongside me, especially Vishwanath Patil who often accompanied me on my field visits. I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for pushing me to deeply engage with the Southern urbanism literature and foreground the nuances of the ethnography. Finally, I would like to thank the Special Feature editors, Indivar Jonnalagadda and Tom Cowan for their careful feedback which has improved the readability of the article immensely.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the article I use the old name of the city, Bangalore. It was renamed as Bengaluru officially in 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Varun Patil

Varun Patil is a Ph.D. Scholar at the Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt.