Sundaresan, Jayaraj
(2013)
Urban planning in vernacular governance land use planning and violations in Bangalore.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Using a relational state-society framework, this research examines the relationship between land use violations and the urban planning process. This thesis seeks to answer how and why land use violations in the non-poor neighbourhoods of Bangalore are produced, sustained and contested in spite of the elaborate planning, implementation and enforcement mechanisms present in Bangalore. Land use violations are identified as a key geographic site to empirically examine power and politics in urban planning practice in Bangalore. Critiquing the simplified representations often used to explain informality and illegality in the cities of the developing south as deviation, implementation failure and corruption; I propose that violations in Bangalore are an outcome of the planning practice rather than a deviation. In the process, I highlight how particular planning institutional systems operate when located in specific socio-political and governance contexts where vernacular networks of association transform the ‘governmentalised’ state into one that is amenable to specific interests through forging various forms of alliances. Providing evidence from ethnography of planning and violation networks in operation, this thesis argues that planning practice in Bangalore is inhabited by a variety of public and private interest networks. These associational networks, I argue, capture planning power, and prevent the possibility of a planning authority. Various case studies of plan violation, planning for violation, neighbourhood activism along with planning practice narratives, documents, and court cases form the extensive data set analysed in this thesis.
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