ABSTRACT
As a framing device, occupancy urbanism disrupts the notion that master planning could be the sole defining reference locating forms of territoriality, demarcating illegal non-conforming development or conflating the history of the city with ‘modernity’ (Holston 1989; Sarin 1982; Sundaram 2010). Such perspectives name territorial processes beyond the plan as externalities: as ‘slums’, ‘the informal sector’, or as ‘piracy’; their underlying politics is viewed as a perversion, for instance as ‘vote banks’ and ‘patron clientelism’, and a criminalized ‘Urban Infra Power’ (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009) all driven by the ‘land mafia’. As deeply politicizing processes, the working of land embeds a range of diverse and often conflicting actors into urban administration, such as: settler groups, municipal councillors, firms, but also higher levels of the state and its associated agents. Challenging conventional assumptions about the politics of urban land in southern cities, occupancy urbanism draws attention to the complexities of political practice and helps us think about how particular parts of the state govern through law and regulation formed and directed in a world of practice.
