Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2016. xiv, 290 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8203-5010-3.
Urban restructuring through (forced) evictions has intensified under neoliberal capitalism in cities across the world. Gautam Bhan’s fine-grained study drills down into the case of Delhi, where 70,000 to 150,000 households have been evicted from “slums” in recent decades. Bhan interrogates these evictions through an archaeology of the city’s urban planning that foregrounds the maps, data, and narratives of Delhi’s Master Plans and the Delhi Experiment, in dialogue with traces of planning through the Supreme Court, judicial deliberations, and the everyday realities of settlement in this megacity. The result is a significant advance of critical urban theory from Delhi, from the urban south that not only explodes the dualisms of informal/formal, legal/illegal, and regular/irregular, but constructively re-orientates the debates on to questions of legitimacy and a relational urban politics that will have resonance within and beyond critical urban studies.
In the first of four rigorously documented and artfully woven empirical chapters, Bhan disrupts the normative idea that Delhi’s slums or bastis are the outcome of planning’s failure, and examines what work the discourse of failure does, and crucially, what it permits. By mapping the city’s actual settlements vis-à-vis their planned ideals, Bhan makes the persuasive case for “urban chaos,” and in particular, the spatial pattern of “unauthorized colonies” being integral to, rather than outside of, the city’s planning practices. Bhan argues that it is the plans, rather than their failures, that produce and regulate legality as a spatial mode of governance. Settlement categories that represent common descriptors to Delhi inhabitants (such as “planned colonies,” “unauthorized colonies,” “regularized unauthorized colonies,” “JJ clusters,” “slum designated areas,” and “resettlement colonies”) function as techniques of rule beyond state governance which determine their degree of legitimacy on Delhi’s land.
How the plans are assembled and interpreted in cases of court-ordered eviction forms the focus of the next chapter on the politics of urban governance and the role of the judiciary. Drawing on twenty-four Public Interest Litigation (PILs) cases at the Supreme Court between 1990 and 2007, Bhan documents the creeping judicialization of governance in Delhi which is taking place within new urban government rationalities that gain their legitimacy through notions of the failure and “crisis” of planning. Originally conceived of as a progressive judicial innovation which democratized justice for India’s marginalized populations, Bhan shows how PILs have been transformed into a repressive tool of the middle classes. As such, PILs have served to augment urban restructuring whilst exacerbating inequality, in order to pursue “new frontiers of capital accumulation.”
In “Unmaking Citizens” (chapter 3), Bhan evidences how the discourses, logics, and techniques of the judiciary serve to reproduce inequality and exclusive politics in the city through the production of “spatial illegality.” In regards to the Indian state’s failure to build adequate housing for the income poor, Bhan illustrates how the judiciary framed those who inhabited “spatially illegal” settlements as “encroachers,” as illegitimate citizens. The moral and spatial struggle over residence produces the city, rather than nation, as the scale for the determination of citizenship. Concurrently citizenship is not mediated via the group-differentiated categories of the post-colonial nation, of caste, or even poverty, but instead via the legitimacy of an individual to occupy land, allied to class.
What emerges through these excavations of the city’s urban planning policy is the advent of a city’s judiciary that commands a powerful role in mediating aspects of governance, state-citizen relations, regimes of value in the urban economy, and public policy and planning in Delhi. Bhan calls this mode of urbanization—with its particular rationalities, technologies, and subjectivities—judicial urbanism, and makes a powerful case for developing this enquiry to enrich critical urban theory and practice in Delhi and beyond.
Bhan shares a sense of that practice and its challenges in his final empirical chapter on the “judicialization of resistance,” which examines the repercussions of judicial urbanism on the shifting spaces for/of political engagement in Delhi. Through a series of vignettes detailing petitions and appeals made by social activists on behalf of those facing eviction, Bhan explores the shifting relationship between the executive-judiciary-citizen-social movement. Unlike the experiences of the state’s executive arm, which are more often the subject for research, the judiciary functions at a distance from society, reachable only through those with legal know-how and professional licences. In the absence of a statutory, legally binding right to housing in India, social movements and their legally trained activists must navigate and translate a complex terrain of rights claims, identities, histories, and vulnerabilities for those they represent. As Bhan makes clear, the perversity of legal logic means that in order to fight for their “right to the city,” within the courts, activists must deny basti residents their presence as citizens with the “right to have rights.” How to challenge the bounds of legal sense and confront the court system through its own codes—in a context where judicial urbanism increasingly shapes urban governance—is the new challenge facing urban activism in India and the rest of the world.
In the Public’s Interest opens valuable and practical new sightlines to theorizing urban governance and the economy, citizenship, and rights, from the south, executed through the particularity of Delhi’s planning experience in tandem with provocative, shrewd questioning of subaltern urban practice and theory. This important new book will find welcome traction with critical urban theorists, planners, geographers, anthropologists, urban activists, and legal scholars from undergraduate students to established scholars and practitioners. Though the stories that Bhan depicts of eviction and inequality are not upbeat, there are nonetheless traces of optimism and directions for action, for as Bhan makes very clear, “urban practitioners … have no choice but to engage with planning because of the continuing relevance of its failures” (80).
Philippa Williams
Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom