Housing and the ‘Failure’ of Planning in Delhi:

Chaos, irrelevance, incompetence, and exclusion, what do these “failures” tell us about the apparently self-evident understandings of plans, “planning” and “planned development” in Delhi? What implications does this have, in particular, for an urban politics and practice interested in the many forms and imaginations of a just and more equitable city? This paper argues that in Delhi the “chaos that is urban development” is not planned but is an outcome of planning. Plans do not control but they influence, determine and limit.

The “failure of planning” has become a ubiquitous, longstanding, and commonsensical refrain in Indian cities. Decades apart, Ashis Nandy and Jai Sen both famously described Indian cities as “unintended” (Sen 1976; Nandy 1998). Meera Bapat’s description of the “failure, even irrelevance, of the dominant ideology of urban planning” (Bapat 1983) seemed to echo even two decades later as Gita Diwan Verma’s “chaos that is urban development” (Verma 2002).

The planners’ desire to “effect a controlled and orderly manipulation of change” has been, argues Amita Baviskar, “continuously thwarted” by the “inherent unruliness of people and places” (Baviskar 2003: 92). Urban planning is considered, at best, “hopelessly inadequate” in terms of being able to tackle this chaos (Patel 1997) though inadequacy is the gentlest of the charges leveled against planning. Citing the twin jaundice and cholera epidemics in Delhi in 1955 and 1988, Dunu Roy argues that the worst aspect of the failure of planning was that, in fact, “planners did not even understand the implications of what they themselves had done” (Roy 2004).

Crisis-ridden as well as crisis-inducing, chaotic, irrelevant, incompetent, and exclusionary: planning in India does indeed seem to have “failed”. In Indian cities, this “failure” has acted as a reason, impetus, and justification for a range of diverse urban practices: increasing juridical intervention into urban governance by the higher courts; political action by civil society organizations and resident associations; the emergence of new forms of public-private governance mechanisms within urban reform and policy paradigms; and trenchant critiques by social movements seeking rights to and in the city.

What does it mean for planning to have “failed”? Narratives of “failure” are simultaneously narratives of planning. Accusations of chaos, irrelevance, incompetence, and exclusion, in other words, each rely upon an imagination of what functional, relevant, competent, and inclusionary planning could and should look like within an Indian city. “Failure is”, in Ravi Sundaram’s words, “a diagnostic of planning” (Sundaram 2009). In this essay, I take Sundaram seriously.

I assess planning by problematizing, in the Foucauldian sense, the certainty of its “failure”. Foucault argued that “for an object to enter into the field of thought, it is necessary that a certain number of factors have made it uncertain, have made it lose its familiarity, or have produced around it a certain number of difficulties”. It is necessary for it, in other words, to be “problematized”. The task of the analyst then is to understand how these “difficulties” become “a general problem for which one proposes diverse practical solutions”. In other words, the “failure of planning” is not a given – it is “a question whose formation and obviousness must itself be subject to analysis” (Foucault 1994 (1984): 114-17).

To do so, I ask: How have diverse sets of actors come to agree, seemingly without exception, on the “failure of planning”? What comprises these diverse understandings of “failure”? What do these “failures”, in turn, tell us about the apparently self-evident understandings of plans, “planning” and “planned development” in Delhi? What implications does this have, in particular, for an urban politics and practice interested in the many forms and imaginations of a just and more equitable city?

I problematize “failure” within a specific aspect of urban development – the production of housing in the city. My question thus becomes more specific: what is the relationship between planning, the nature of its single or multiple “failures”, and the production of housing in the city for and by its various residents?