This second ongoing project focuses on the everyday practices of urban administration in Global South cities which are assembled through micro-politics of negotiation grounded in property relations, in contrast to abstract techniques of urban planning. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in government offices in Hyderabad (India), I illustrate the actually existing modes of regulation through which bureaucratic agencies attempt to reconcile their imperfect records with the ever-changing material realities of the city. This mediating work engenders an epistemology of the city as constituted by layered and uncertain claims. Although this mode of governance forestalls normative projects framed in the ideological terms of planning, it is constitutive of everyday urban spaces. Understanding these actually existing practices of bureaucratic urbanism enables a situated and constructive critique of urban governance in the Global South.
Journal Articles
[Forthcoming] Jonnalagadda, Indivar. “Reactive Regulation: Rethinking Urban Growth and Governance through Property Relations,” Cultural Anthropology.
Jonnalagadda, Indivar, and Thomas Cowan. 2024. “City Drafting: Property-making and Bureaucratic Urbanism in South Asia.” City 28 (1-2): 7-23. [Link]
Relevant Past Articles
Jonnalagadda, Indivar, Ryan Stock, and Karan Misquitta. 2021. “Titling as a Contested Process: Conditional Land Rights and Subaltern Citizenship in South India.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (3): 458–76. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2018. “Citizenship as a Communicative Effect.” Signs and Society 6 (3): 531–57. [Link]
Maringanti, Anant, and Indivar Jonnalagadda. 2015. “Rent Gap, Fluid Infrastructure and Population Excess in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood.” City 19 (2–3): 365–74. [Link]