City drafting: property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia

Jonnalagadda, Indivar; Cowan, Thomas

Abstract

This Special Feature explores the negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia. City drafting refers to the flexible and contextual practices, procedures and policies required to haul diverse property regimes into order and provisionally render urban land clear and settled. The drafted city, we argue, is necessarily provisional and uneven, left open to politicised remapping, redrafting and resettlement by a host of institutionally embedded brokers, bureaucrats, clerks and surveyors each wielding their own political and socio-technical vision of land. These drafting practices, not only shape a politics of uneven urbanisation in South Asian cities, but also help to explain the persistent fractal morphology of urban property in South Asia; spanning categories of public, private, non-private, commons, unauthorised, regularised, agrarian, urban and so on. While the South Asian city is commonly understood through the high-resolution imagery of masterplanners, policymakers and investors, city drafting methodologically focuses on the grounded bureaucratic struggles of the map, plot, record and title, through which claims to property rights, exclusions and access are shaped.

Citation

Jonnalagadda, I., & Cowan, T. (2024). City drafting: property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia. City, 28(1-2), 7-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2024.2321024

• Journal Article Type: Editorial
• Acceptance Date: Feb 12, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Mar 7, 2024
• Publication Date: 2024
• Deposit Date: Mar 8, 2024
• Journal: City
• Print ISSN: 1360-4813
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-3629
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 28
• Issue: 1-2
• Pages: 7-23
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2024.2321024
• Keywords: Urban Studies; Geography, Planning and Development
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/32177603
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2024.2321024