IN 1993, 1639 unauthorized colonies applied for regularization in Delhi in response to a government scheme. In doing so, they sought to make a familiar move within southern urbanism. Years after having ‘illegally’ converted rural land into urban residential neighbourhoods, these colonies (as they are colloquially and officially called) sought to enter the master plan post-facto. Conversion fees were levied, applications accepted, and in two waves of regularization in 2009 and 2013, almost all of the colonies were made legal. They found their way onto the master plan; titles found their way to the registries. Yet, in Delhi’s planning system, these colonies still belong to a particular category. They are termed as ‘Regularized-Unauthorized Colonies’. In their name, they are forever reminded that their journey into legality was via, shall we say, a detour.

Trying to ‘explain’ housing in Delhi to someone unfamiliar with the city usually sets off a hunt for logics that are not easily apparent. Yet they also represent opportunities to unsettle familiar terms; to, as Foucault would say, ‘make them strange’ or problematize them.¹ Dilliwallas have a long list of such terms when it comes to housing – from bastis to unauthorized colonies; urban villages to planned colonies, regularized-unauthorized colonies to JJ clusters. These categories are used with an increasing familiarity by residents, planners and lawmakers alike in order to describe and understand how different urban residents live and produce space in the city. This essay seeks to unsettle these terms. It asks: what does their use and proliferation tell us about contemporary urban politics?

In attempting to explain housing, I have often turned to a particular table, presented below. In an environment where data is hard to get and even harder to verify, this Table appears and reappears with remarkable consistency across the policy landscape in Delhi.² The Economic Survey of Delhi (2008-09) shares it, for example, with the City Development Plan, the Master Plan of Delhi 2021, as well as the Delhi Urban Environment and Infrastructure Improvement Report 2021. Though its data dates back to 2000, the Table is still the most (and indeed the only) cited set of statistics on the types and relative quantum of housing in the city. It is then both an empiric and artifact and is used as much as for its representation and categories of enumeration as for its numerics. Indeed, it is the categories that interest me today.

These categories are the terms used to speak about housing in the city – by the judiciary, planners within the Delhi Development Authority, the city and central governments, the municipal authorities, the media, and by city residents themselves. Within the courtroom, they are spaces within which judges map the intersections of law and planning as they shape interventions in the city ranging from evictions to the ‘sealing’ of illegal shops, from decisions on waste management to those on shutting down industries within city limits.³ Within governance and planning, these categories represent the dominant understanding of how settlements are understood within different policy paradigms. Through their presence in the various policy documents cited above, they determine how the city is made legible to planners and policy makers, thereby determining access to services, political participation and resources. The delivery of public services, for example, historically was allowed in one but not the other. Over the past decade these categories have also become part of an everyday discourse that through its pervasive presence and use has become ‘an ordinary archive’⁴ of the city, used by diverse city residents to describe their own and other neighbourhoods.

Elsewhere, I have argued that these settlement typologies are based principally on a measure of legality as mapped by an adherence to the master plan. I have traced the actual construction of housing within each category in the city since independence that questions the framing of their ‘illegal’ and ‘unplanned’ nature.⁵ In this essay, I write alongside that work but with a different focus. I focus not on what these categories are meant to represent, but instead on what work they do. I argue, in other words, that these categories are not just descriptive but generative. They shape each of the three parts of Roy’s useful framing⁶ of urbanism – they intervene in the production of space; they are a direct part of the state apparatus of planning; and they influence contestations over the meanings and values associated with different spaces in the city.

 

It is this final terrain – social struggles over meanings and values associated with different spaces – that is the focus of this essay. In what follows, I illustrate some ways in which categories of housing help naturalize a socio-spatial hierarchy of settlements through naming practices and their discursive circulation in the city. The first section shows how the system of categorization itself polices and protects the ideal type of the ‘planned colony’ – often violating its own rules and criteria – thereby producing layers of difference into which all the other forms must fit on differentiated terms. This differentiated status impacts what I have described elsewhere as the legitimacy associated with different settlements – an estimation of the de facto or de jure ability to reach desired ends (for example, secure tenure, or better services) regardless of legality.⁷ In so doing, however, a differentiated status affects not just the legitimacy of particular settlements but of residents within them, shaping the horizon of political subjectivities and practices that are open to them in complex ways.

 

First, however, a brief digression on ways of thinking in and through categories that can provide a framework for our analysis. How do we think about categories? Two aspects of a vast and interdisciplinary literature are relevant for our analysis. First, for categories to have meaning and be effective, they must create boundaries that are then defined and policed. Modern statecraft, argues James Scott, works in part through such simplification – the reduction of ‘an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons and aggregation.’ These ‘forms of knowledge and manipulation’ are particularly characteristic, he says, ‘of powerful institutions with sharply defined interests’ of which state bureaucracies and institutions are emblematic.⁸ Effective categories, Scott warns, must ‘collapse or ignore distinctions that might otherwise be relevant.’⁹

It is not just that ‘other distinctions’ between categories are ignored, argues Amartya Sen, but that they are deemed less important, marginalized and deprioritized. Writing about (in) equality, Sen argues that different frameworks prioritize a different ‘primary variable’ that they use to then compare and construct categories. The need ‘for ensuring basal equality’ in the primary variable, argues Sen, then ‘necessitates the tolerance of inequality in what are seen as "outlying perspectives".’¹⁰

They do so, argues Mary Douglas, to keep ‘the dirt at bay.’ In her seminal study of ideas of pollution and dirt, she argues that dirt is essentially ‘disorder’ – it is ‘matter out of place.’¹¹ What are order and disorder? Order implies ‘restriction,’ says Douglas, because ‘from all possible relations a limited set has been used.’ Disorder, in contrast, ‘is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite… disorder symbolizes both danger and power.’¹² Categories and the order they are meant to represent must then guard against what Douglas calls anomalies and ambiguities. In culture and through ritual then, ‘ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions’ play this role, a continuous and fragile attempt ‘to impose system on an inherently untidy experience.’¹³

 

The second element we must consider is that categories create and reproduce, albeit imperfectly and incompletely, what they describe or narrate. For James Scott, descriptive categories become ‘categories that organize people’s daily experience precisely because they are embedded in state-created institutions that structure that experience.’ They are the ‘authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance’ because they can be given ‘the force of law.’¹⁴ Douglas argues, however, that cultural categories frame experiences just as powerfully. She says that, ‘public, standardized values of a community, mediate the experience of individuals [by providing] in advance some basic categories, a positive pattern in which ideas and values are tidily ordered.’¹⁵ It is the ‘public character’ of these categories that gives them ‘authority’, which may or may not be enshrined in law.

 

What then are the ‘other distinctions’, the ‘disorder’, the ‘simplifications’ of our categories? The categories of Table 1 are planning categories. By this I mean that they take as their primary principle of classification the relationship of housing to the master plan. The criteria for being a ‘planned colony’ are to be built within the appropriate zone of the master plan which itself is in an area marked for urban development. It is to be, in other words, where the master plan intended. This is no small feat in an environment where the gaps between the planned city and real city are seen as one of the clearest ‘failures’ of planning. Any variation from this definition places a settlement in a different category – it becomes unauthorized, a cluster, or a slum. It becomes what Douglas would call an ‘anomaly’, part of the dirt that must be kept at bay.

Sen’s ‘primary variable’ here then is the relationship to the master plan. This is an important choice to note and it is indeed a singular and particular choice. Housing categories could have just as well been based on, to give a few examples, the quality of the built environment; measures of density of people, services or infrastructure; on different types of urban form and fabric; employment patterns; a history of inhabitation; or even cultural criteria like localized historical associations or identity markers. Choosing the relationship to the master plan as a primary variable implies that all these other possible choices become what Sen describes as ‘outlying perspectives’. The categories no longer emphasize, for example, how many households have access to adequate waste disposal. They instead choose to read how many are built according to the appropriate zonal regulation.

 

Let us momentarily, however, accept both this principle of classification as well as the definition of a planned colony within it. Even within this definition’s own terms, any empirical analysis of the categories would make it clear that the category of ‘planned colonies’ is not the only one that meets all the criteria. Take a resettlement colony. These colonies are built to house households evicted from other settlements in the city. A resettlement colony is built with explicit inclusion within the master plan. It stands where the master plan intends it to and, importantly, it has done so since its inception. It is and always has been, in other words, legal and planned. Why then does our table of housing categories simply not call a resettlement colony a ‘planned colony’? The regularized-unauthorized colony is a second example. When the 1639 colonies, whose story opened this essay, were granted legal status, why were they named ‘regularized-unauthorized colonies’ rather than simply being called planned colonies? The naming practices of our table are not technical but political choices.

Elsewhere, I have traced the production of housing under each of the categories of Table 1 in detail.¹⁶ I showed there that because of a set of factors – particular and skewed housing shortfalls and population misprojections, delays in the notification of master plans, deliberate exclusion of large areas from being notified for urban development, among others – being ‘planned’ was an impossibility in Delhi from almost the inception of planning in the city both for the income poor as well as the relatively more resourceful. I suggested that the history of the production of housing in Delhi is not just one of illegality but, in fact, of the impossibility of legality. I described the contemporary housing conditions of housing in the city as ‘planned illegalities’, and argued that the production of housing in the city is best understood amongst different illegalities rather than on an assumed distinction between the legal and the illegal. This is a story not just of Delhi but of what can be thought of as all auto-constructed cities, to borrow a phrase from Holston and Caldeira in their writing about Sao Paulo.¹⁷

 

If the production of urban space is marked by a range of differential illegalities and, most often, a move to move from legal to illegal – to ‘legalize the illegal’¹⁸ – then what explains the differential naming of the resettlement colony? Keeping resettlement colonies and regularized-unauthorized colonies outside the category of ‘planned colonies’ is a way, as Douglas would argue, of ‘keeping the dirt at bay.’ They are the rituals that separate and punish transgression. Policing the boundaries of the categories ensures both that no other form of settlement can acquire the same status of a ‘planned colony’. This allows the system of categories to then both reflect the ‘failure’ of planning just as it ensures that planning categories still remain relevant in describing and determining inhabitation within the city. It allows the category of being ‘planned’ to remain powerful even when such colonies house no more than 25% of the city’s population. It allows a ‘foundationalist fiction’¹⁹ to consistently reproduce and prevent other imaginations of what it means to ‘plan’ cities that are largely auto-constructed. It is, in David Harvey’s use of the term, ‘counter-revolutionary’ – it not only asks the wrong question, it prevents the real question from being asked.²⁰

 

Such policing reinforces a socio-spatial hierarchy. It does so not just between settlements on either side of an assumed legal-illegal divide, but even amongst those on one side of it. This hierarchy then associates different degrees of legitimacy with the settlements that enable – directly or indirectly – other exclusions. It is not a coincidence that through its existence, the Delhi government’s award-winning citizen-government partnership programme – Bhagidari – explicitly excluded resident associations from resettlement colonies. Findings that resettlement colonies are akin to ‘planned slums’ that are home to ‘permanent poverty’²¹ because of the almost negligible investments in public infrastructure or services cannot be separated from the differential value placed upon them, at least in part through using the hierarchies created by a particular practice of categorization. Settlements that are seen as less legitimate can be governed, treated, spoken about and invested in differentially.

 

A second illustration of how categorization deepens socio-spatial inequalities is a more familiar one – naming practices. Colloquially, the Hindustani term basti is used to describe settlements largely populated by income-poor residents where the built environment reflects their impoverishment in some measure. Basti comes from a word root meaning to ‘settle’. Bastis in planning terms are named JJ Clusters.

If one visited most bastis in Delhi, and asked for Ekta JJ Cluster or Sanjay Camp JJ Cluster, the likelihood is that, much of the time, one will be met with perhaps a bewildered correction. There is no such place, one is likely to be told, but there is the Ekta Colony, or the Sanjay Camp JJ Colony. The only housing category in our table that is not termed a ‘colony’ is the JJ Cluster. It is not unknowingly that residents of bastis refuse the idea of the ‘cluster’ and replace it with the English word ‘colony’ even when they are not English speaking, or with the others: camps, nagar, basti. Each of these words represents and symbolizes legitimate housing. It holds the promise of recognition and security. Refusing to recognize this aspiration is a means by which the settlement, and all those who live within it, are delegitimized.

The definitional manipulations and naming practices of the categories of housing are techniques of rule, exercised in the name of and as part of planning practice. They are critical in determining the distance between the legitimate and the legal. In other words, they are part of the calculus – beyond the technical, de jure limits and permissions of policies, rules and schemes – that determine whether a legal or illegal colony can enjoy a de facto security of tenure, can be seen as a site where services must be provided, can be thought of as a place where life must improve over time. A ‘cluster’ marks an alternate spatial and temporal imagination. It suggests something temporary, fragile, and fragmented even if many JJ clusters have existed for decades, slowly and incrementally adding layers of pucca brick buildings, infrastructure and basic services. A cluster misrecognizes²² what is a community, a locality, a settlement, a colony. A cluster cannot be upgraded or redeveloped on its own terms. A cluster can only be tolerated until it is evicted.

 

The value associated with a settlement cannot but influence how the residents within each of these types of settlements are perceived. What kind of urban citizenship is possible from within a ‘cluster’? Much has already been written about the use of the term ‘encroacher’ within the judicially ordered evictions that have scarred New Delhi’s millennial landscape.²³ The use of the term ‘encroacher’ binds the identity of income-poor residents to the spatial illegality of the settlements in which they live. It reduces the poor to the slum, stripping them of other identities and claims. The encroacher, in a sense, is the antithesis of the citizen – within the court, it became the primary and often only identity of basti residents foreclosing their identities as workers, dalits, women, migrants, and urban citizens.²⁴ A spatial identity, in other words, is personified.

I do not mean to suggest a neat or deterministic alignment of categories here – it is not that residents of JJ Clusters are only or even dominantly seen as ‘slum dwellers’, or those within ‘unauthorized colonies’ cannot be workers, traders, or elected officials. Neither am I suggesting that other vectors of identity that shape the gaps between formal and substantive citizenship – caste, gender, religion, age, ability, language, sexuality among others – are not at play. I am, however, arguing that in the context of the widespread production of urban space through some or the other form of illegality, the impact of living in, claiming and being associated with different forms of spatial illegalities also shapes the substantive possibilities of urban citizenship. In short: belonging in one or the other category matters. The emergence of the ‘encroacher’ reminds us precisely of this. It also marks the complex interlinkages between spatial illegality and urban residence in auto-constructed, occupied and squatted cities. It is beyond the scope of this article to delve in adequate depth into this relationship, but it remains a pressing question of southern urbanisms in particular: what political subjectivities emerge in interaction with particular categories of settlement and urban presence?

 

In her study of crime and socio-spatial segregation in Sao Paulo, Teresa Caldeira argues for the ‘generative symbolism’ of what she calls the ‘talk of crime.’²⁵ Narratives that tell and retell stories of crime create categories that ‘attempt to establish order in a universe that seems to have lost coherence.’²⁶ This ‘symbolic reordering’ relies on ‘simple, clear-cut categories.’ The categories are ‘rigid’, argues Caldeira – ‘they are meant not to describe the world accurately, but to organize and classify it symbolically.’²⁷

Planning categories similarly order and classify the world. In doing so, they shape urban politics. In this essay, I have suggested one set of ways in which they do so: through the particular naming and discursive strategies of categorization that shape narratives of belonging, the possibilities of substantive urban citizenship and the formation of different political subjectivities. I have done so to argue that these categories are one of the ways in which socio-spatial hierarchies are created and inequalities enforced and reproduced within and through contemporary urbanism. These hierarchies are based not just on technical classifications of housing that is within or outside planning and the law, but equally differentiates among different settlements on either side of this imagined and constructed divide.

 

If the naming practices and discursive circulation of categories are one set of mechanisms through which urban citizenship is made differentiated and inegalitarian, then political practices seeking more inclusive cities will need to critique these categories, questioning both their internal logics as well as countering the discursive and political effects of their circulation. It is too easy to see these categories as benign, technical and less important than the legal and material differences that also separate these forms of housing. Yet those material differences are inseparable from the differential legitimacy associated with different forms of settlements. Inclusive cities need not just different material structures, but also new narratives of belonging, value, and legitimacy that can enable them to emerge and sustain.

 

Footnotes:

1. M. Foucault, ‘Polemics, Politics and Problematisations’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-84. Penguin, London, 1994, 1984.

2. For a related argument on the deliberate obfuscation of data within Indian planning, refer to Ananya Roy’s idea of ‘unmapping’. See A. Roy, ‘The Gentlemen’s City: Urban Informality in the Calcutta of New Communism’, in A. Roy and N. AlSayyad (eds.), Urban Informality. Lexington Books, Lanham, 2003.

3. For accounts of case law on evictions, see G. Bhan, ‘This is Not the City I Once Knew: Evictions, Urban Poor and the Right to the City in Millennial Delhi’, Environment and Urbanisation 21(1), 2009; A. Ghertner, ‘Analysis of New Legal Discourse Behind Delhi’s Slum Demolitions’, Economic and Political Weekly 43(20), 2008, pp. 57-66; U. Ramanathan, Illegality and Exclusion: Law in the Lives of Slum Dwellers. International Environmental Law Resource Centre, Geneva, 2004. For an account on ‘sealings’, see A.K. Jain, Delhi Under the Hammer: The Crisis of Sealing and Demolition. Rupa, New Delhi, 2010. For industrial closures, see A. Nigam, ‘Industrial Closures in Delhi’, Revolutionary Democracy 7(2), 2001.

4. R. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism. Routledge, London and New York, 2009.

5. G. Bhan, ‘Planned Illegalities’, Economic and Political Weekly 48(24), 2013.

6. A. Roy, ‘Urbanisms, Worlding Practices and the Theory of Planning’, Planning Theory 10(6), 2011.

7. G. Bhan, op. cit., 2013. G. Bhan, In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi. Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, forthcoming, 2015.

8. J. Scott, Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998, p. 77.

9. Ibid., p. 81.

10. A. Sen, Inequality Reexamined. Harvard University Press, New York, 1992.

11. M. Douglas, Purity and Danger. Routledge, London, 1966, p. 35.

12. Ibid., p. 94.

13. Ibid., p. 4.

14. J. Scott, op. cit., 1998, p. 83.

15. M. Douglas, op. cit., 1966, p. 39.

16. G. Bhan, op. cit., 2013.

17. T.P.d.R. Caldeira and J. Holston, State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions, in A. Ong and S.J. Collier (eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2005.

18. Ibid.

19. I borrow this term from Judith Butler’s writing on gender. See, generally, J. Butler, Gender Trouble. Routledge, New York, 1999.

20. D. Harvey, Social Justice and the City. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973.

21. G. Bhan and K. Menon-Sen, Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi. Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2008.

22. E. Balibar, ‘Propositions of Citizenship’, Ethics 4, 1988, pp. 723-730.

23. G. Bhan, op. cit., 2009; V. Dupont, ‘Slum Demolitions in Delhi Since the 1990s: An Appraisal’, Economic and Political Weekly 43(28), 2008; U. Ramanathan, op. cit., 2004.

24. G. Bhan, op. cit., 2009; G. Bhan, op. cit., forthcoming, 2015.

25. T.P.d.R. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.

26. Ibid., p. 20.

27. Ibid., p. 31.