This article examines the relationship between planning, violations and powerlessness in Bangalore. It argues that although planning power is supposed to be produced in the public administration by urban planners and bureaucrats working with and through different protocols, it is never actually produced in reality. Engaging with this paradox and drawing on Latour and Nāgārjuna, this article suggests that planning power has no ontological substance and that planning is performatively constituted in real time by diverse collectives. I argue that the millions of observable everyday practices that mutually constitute the social, political and administrative cannot be explained, criticised or controlled by a single concept of ‘planning state power’ as a structural force. Instead, the article proposes Yojana as a context-sensitive vernacular concept to better understand the practice of planning in India and beyond.
AgambenG (2005) State of Exception. Translated by AttellK. University of Chicago Press.
2.
AmbedkarBR (1954) My philosophy of life. In: Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 17, part 3. Government of Maharashtra, p. 503.
3.
BaptistaI (2012) Practices of exception in urban governance: Reconfiguring power inside the state. Urban Studies50(1): 89–104.
4.
BenjaminS (2008) Occupancy urbanism: Radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and programs. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research32(3): 719–729.
CertomàC (2020) The ‘fluid governance’ of urban public spaces: Insights from informal planning practices in Rome. Urban Studies57(5): 1031–1047.
10.
ChatterjeeP (2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Columbia University Press.
11.
ChattopadhyayS (2017) Neoliberal urban transformations in Indian cities: Paradoxes and predicaments. Progress in Development Studies17(4): 307–321.
12.
CleggSHaugaardM (2009) The SAGE Handbook of Power. Sage.
13.
DaviesJS (2013) Rethinking urban power and the local state: Hegemony, domination and resistance in neoliberal cities. Urban Studies51(15): 3215–3232.
14.
DwivediGS (1967) Location of sovereignty in India. Journal of the Indian Law Institute9(1): 71–84.
15.
FernandesL (2004) The politics of forgetting: Class politics, state power and the restructuring of urban space in India. Urban Studies41(1): 241–270.
16.
FlyvbjergB (2002) Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. University of Chicago Press.
17.
FoucaultM (1982) The subject and power. Critical Inquiry8(4): 777–795.
18.
FoucaultM (2000) Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984. Penguin.
19.
Fox-RogersLMurphyE (2014) Informal strategies of power in the local planning system. Urban Studies51(6): 1240–1256.
20.
GarfieldJ (1995) The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyama kakārikā. Oxford University Press.
21.
GhertnerDA (2017) When is the state? Topology, temporality, and the navigation of everyday state space in Delhi. Annals of the American Association of Geographers107(3): 731–750.
22.
Government of Karnataka (GoK) (1961) Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act 1961. Government of Karnataka.
GururaniS (2013) Flexible planning: The making of India’s ‘Millennium City’, Gurgaon. In: RadmacherRSivaramakrishnanK (eds) Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability. University of Hong Kong Press, pp. 118–143.
25.
HaugaardMCleggS (2009) Introduction. In: CleggSHaugaardM (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Power. Sage, pp.1–25.
NagendraH (2016) Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future. Oxford University Press.
31.
PrasadA (2016) Political vultures, real estate sharks and criminals ganged up to ruin Bengaluru. Firstpost, 13August. Available at: https://www.firstpost.com (accessed 25 July 2022).
32.
PutriAA (2019) Insurgent planner: Transgressing the technocratic state of postcolonial Jakarta. Urban Studies57(9): 1879–1895.
33.
RobinsonJ (2014) Introduction to a virtual issue on comparative urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research38(2): 1–6.
34.
RovelliC (2021) Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution. Penguin.
35.
RoyA (2009) Why India cannot plan its cities: Informality, insurgence and the idiom of urbanization. Planning Theory8(1): 76–87.
36.
SamiN (2013) From farming to development: Urban coalitions in Pune, India. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research37(1): 151–164.
37.
SreedharM (2013) My Days in the Underworld: Rise of the Bangalore Mafia. Westland Ltd.
38.
SundaresanJ (2011) Planning as commoning: Transformation of a Bangalore lake. Economic and Political Weekly46(50): 71–79.
39.
SundaresanJ (2019) Urban planning in vernacular governance: Land use planning and violations in Bangalore, India. Progress in Planning127: 1–23.
40.
SundaresanJJohnA (2021) Emotions, planning and co-production: Distrust, anger and fear at participatory boundaries in Bengaluru. Urbanisation5(2): 140–157.
41.
SundaresanJAllenAJohnsonC (2015) Reading urban futures through their blue infrastructure: Wetland networks in Bangalore and Madurai, India. In: BellSHoffmanATehTH (eds) Urban Water Trajectories. Springer, pp. 223–238.
42.
VanoloA (2014) Smartmentality: The smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Studies51(5): 883–898.
43.
WeinsteinL (2008) Mumbai’s development mafia: Globalization, organized crime and land development. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research32(1): 22–39.
44.
WesterhoffJ (2009) Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction. Oxford University Press.
45.
WongC (2015) Reconsolidation of state power into urbanising villages: Shareholding reforms as a strategy for governance in the Pearl River Delta region. Urban Studies53(4): 726–743.
46.
YiftachelO (1998) Planning and social control: Exploring the dark side. Journal of Planning Literature12(4): 395–406.
47.
YoungRJC (1990) White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. Routledge.
