Draft: Please contact before citing (forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to the

Planning in the Cities of the South Reader 2017)

A ‘Peripheries’ view of planning failures in Kolkata and Hyderabad in India

Sudeshna Mitra

Commentaries regarding India’s rapid and multi-dimensional urban transition often

allude to ‘unplanned’ cities. Terms such as planning ‘failure’ and ‘exception’ are also
common critiques. Such diagnoses have intuitive appeal, since urbanisation in India is
dominated by disaggregated and disparate acts of political negotiations and auto-
construction, which exceed and elude the terrain of governability made possible by
formal planning tools such as Master Plans. However, in this chapter, diagnoses of
planning ‘failure’ and planning ‘exceptions’ are used as provocations to examine the
assumptions of power embedded in planning as a professional practice, particularly in
expectations of normative outcomes, such as spatially ordered spaces and social and
spatial equity. Critical research decrying the shortcomings of planning practice also often
lapse into the same frame of expectations, even as they highlight the need to pay attention
to the complexities of political society and incomplete nature of claim-making that marks
state-society relationships in post-colonial context India. This chapter asks for the
suspension of expectations of particular outcomes as frames to analyse planning practice
and suggests instead an engagement with contemporary exigencies and processes shaping
the practice. It considers planning practice as is, with a focus on processes and
instruments being deployed by planning bodies, in the face of multiple instrumentalities
of state, society and market. The cases in this chapter highlight ways in which planning
practice is evolving, particularly ways in which there is a break from static imaginations
of territorial state power and absolute spatial control, embedded in planning instruments
such as Master Plans. Further, the chapter highlights that the continuities and
discontinuities visible in contemporary planning practice are visible historically. These
highlight that planning has always been a politicised terrain, despite the static and
imagined binaries of planned/ unplanned urban spaces claimed both within the

professional practice’s own discourse, as well as research that foregrounds the lens of
‘failure’, in critiquing the role and impact of planning practice.

Overall, the chapter’s argument is that planning, like the post-colonial state, needs to be
understood beyond the lexicon of developmental ‘failure’ and in light of new scales,
actors, negotiations and imperatives, manifesting in uneven power geographies,
particularly around questions of land, investments and development partnerships.
Planning mandates and planning failures need to be examined beyond desired planning
outcomes, and as discrete questions of governance, law, instruments and processes.

This chapter uses the notion of ‘periphery’ in two ways: firstly, as a positionality to
reassess planning practices within a relational milieu of power; and secondly, there is a
focus on the geographic peripheries of cities, or periurban areas, where presumptions
regarding territorial powers of the state are disrupted, by jurisdictions of multiple
government bodies, as well as interests of land owners and investors.

The chapter focuses on the periurban transformations of two of India’s largest cities,
Kolkata and Hyderabad, after liberalisation of the national economy in 1991. In both
cities, the periurban areas that are discussed in this chapter were located just outside the
territorial boundaries of the cities’ planning and development authorities, and were
eventually brought under urban jurisdiction either through new authorities or through
extension of jurisdictional boundaries of existing authorities. In both cities, the periurban
areas transformed rapidly, with state-level governments actively remaking relationships
with investors, landowners, businesses and residents, and instituting changes in planning
and governance systems. The state governments’ city-scale place-making objectives,
consolidated after liberalisation, were explicit – to create externally legible and attractive
investment destinations. In using the term ‘place making’, I refer to state governments’
objectives to create internationally legible destinations to attract and anchor external
investment flows in particular cities, often in direct competition with projects and policies
of other state governments. I am also highlighting how these objectives were
operationalized by efforts of city- level government bodies and private sector players,

particularly through the aegis of planning instruments and/ or planning bodies. The two
cases provide a window into the actions of planners and contemporary exigencies of
planning practice, and are useful for reconsidering the historical assumptions regarding
the territorial powers of the state, manifested through planning agencies. It also provides
a frame to understand planning in periurban areas of India’s mega-cities, often decried as
particularly aggravated sites of planning failure, beyond a place-based autopsy of
overlapping crises and as a relational practice within a milieu of diverse incentives and
objectives, across the public- private spectrum.

The following sections of the chapter discuss Kolkata and Hyderabad’s periurban
experiences and examine the extent to which city- level planning authorities1 and
planners in these authorities were able to direct, exercise control and participate in place-
making. Various forms of planning instituted to respond to state-level development
visions, including spatial and infrastructural interventions, creation of new planning
bodies and financial guarantees and negotiations with land-owners and investors are
discussed, along with their susceptibility to changing governance and market conditions.
The experiences in both cities reveal emergent competencies of planners to engage with
particular market conditions, albeit with outcomes that severely compromised on equity
and sustainability. A brief contextualization of the cities’ planning experiences within the
historical legacies that have shaped planning practice in India, highlights that rather than
being artefacts of a neoliberal turn in India’s development trajectory, the cities’
experiences reveal continuities in underlying presumptions regarding the state, market,
land, state-citizen compacts, and urbanisation’s constitutive geography of power. The
concluding section revisits the chapter’s core argument that planning is shaped by urban
power geographies and there is need for planning practice to be analysed through frames
that go beyond spatial and normative outcomes and binaries such as success/ failure and
rule/ exception.

1
City- level planning authorities in India are parastatals. Though they have city- level
jurisdiction, they are not constituted through city- level elections. They comprise of state
government appointees and report directly to the state government. As such, actions of city- level
planning bodies often reveal clear instrumentalities of state governments.

Place-making in the peripheries of Kolkata and Hyderabad

The periurban transformations in Kolkata and Hyderabad have yielded landscapes,

comprised of bounded islands of development with iconic state- led and developer- led
projects. These pockets, often reflecting hyper-modern built form and investment
aspirations, transcend locational specifics and constitute the advertised, imagined ‘place’
on billboards and investor meets and are part of larger narratives regarding the making of
‘globally’ competitive cities. New infrastructure corridors have made particular periurban
areas legible to investors. Meanwhile, large swathes of land, situated between iconic
developments and infrastructure projects are being consolidated, subdivided, transacted,
and developed by various scales of private actors, many local, who comply with extant
regulatory regimes to differing degrees. The changes reveal a continuing cycle of catch-
up to the periurban area’s new image and imputed value in the eyes of local and external
capital flows. Land markets are marked by price volatility and speculation, often linked
to government decisions. These transitions have impacted urban-periurban linkages of
food, water, energy and waste and the spatial, economic and social fragmentations in both
cities have eventually reflected in the political constituencies of state-level politics, also.
The political parties responsible for the cities’ initial transformations – the Communist
Party of India-Marxist (CPI(M)) in West Bengal and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in
Andhra Pradesh (united) – lost their respective state elections in the period following
their most intensive efforts to create new ‘global’ images for Kolkata and Hyderabad,
with pushbacks from the rural electorate, which felt marginalised by the state
governments’ attempts to bring in external investors to particular locations.

Yet, it would be disingenuous and reductive to characterise the periurban areas of

Kolkata and Hyderabad as planning ‘failures’. The idea of planning ‘failure’ is closely
tied to normative expectations regarding planning outcomes, rather than analyses of the
constitutive geography of planning processes. Expecting particular planning outcomes
reveals assumptions regarding planning power (Forester 1988). Planning practice as an
instrument to actualise particular visions of the modern state at the city-scale continues to
remain mostly unquestioned. Within planning practice there is also enduring belief in the

planning ideals of ‘organised’ and planned urban spaces, over and beyond other
considerations of use and value of urban land. Current planning practices and processes
emerge from India’s post-independence trajectory of applying ‘travelling’ planning ideas
from mostly the US and the UK (Healey 2012), via the Ford Foundation (Banerjee 2009)
among others. These practices and processes aim to create new urban and industrial
destinations, including new capital cities such as Chandigarh, industrial townships such
as Jamshedpur and the institution of Master Plans as the key instrument of spatial control
for urban growth and land markets, with little consideration for existing formal-informal
urban forms and activities (Holston 2008; Miraftab 2009; Vidyarthi 2010). Through this
history and onto contemporary imaginations of professional planning practice, the power
of the state to territorialise at the scale of the city-region remains assumed rather than
constructed. However, the politics that emerge out of the complexity of urbanisation’s
constitutive geography of power, the voice and agency of public, private and community
networks, and the rescaling of the city as a destination across the regional, national and
international scales are now difficult to ignore in everyday practice encounters. This
provides the imperative for conceptually unpacking assumptions associated with planning
practice and the metrics used both in academic and policy research to assess its relative
‘success’. These questions are relevant not only in India, but across countries, where
planning authorities are struggling to come to terms with increasing land values and
investment interests. The following sections detail planning as it was instituted in the
periurban areas of Kolkata and Hyderabad. The first section highlights the post-
liberalization development motivations of the state governments consolidated at the city-
scale, which set the planning agenda in the two cities. Subsequent sections highlight the
forms and instrumentalities that planning initiatives took on to materialize these visions,
including spatial and infrastructural interventions, creation of new planning bodies and
financial guarantees and negotiations with land-owners and investors.

Post- liberalisation state government development visions

The state governments’ place-making efforts to attract external investors and gain greater
financial autonomy became locationally focused on state capitals such as Kolkata and

Hyderabad; particularly their periurban areas. These locational specifics reflect choices
made by regional political parties who were in power at the state-level, in response to
decentralisation and rescaling of fiscal responsibilities that occurred after liberalisation.
They were also prompted by virtue of being operationally simpler alternatives to the
complexities associated with instituting deep, comprehensive and inclusive state-level
market reforms.

The national economy was liberalised in 1991, in response to an International Monetary

Fund (IMF) loan to remedy a balance of payments crisis. It was concurrent with the rise
of economic and political regionalism (Sinha 2004). The Congress (I) party, which had
dominated elections at both the national level and across states, eventually lost ground to
regional parties in state elections. No single political party was able to secure a clear
majority in the national elections between 1989 to 1998, and several coalitions with
regional parties, such as TDP in Andhra Pradesh (united) and the CPI(M) in West
Bengal, were used to form the national government. This gave regional parties voice and
agency beyond their regional constituencies. Meanwhile, liberalisation created a terrain
of new imperatives – financial autonomy, international consultancies and business
lobbies – and regional parties had to learn to balance these against regional constituencies
and mandates. Inter-regional competition for investments was coloured by state-level
social and political constituency politics, including those of linguistic, social and regional
identity, as well as the power that regional parties gained within a fractured national
political milieu.

To navigate this terrain, both the TDP in Andhra Pradesh and the CPI(M) in West Bengal
hired private consulting firms, including McKinsey, to devise post-liberalisation
strategies. In Andhra Pradesh, McKinsey prepared the Vision 2020 (Ramachandraiah
2003), and in West Bengal, prepared a policy report to promote information technology
(IT) and other knowledge economy sectors (WEBEL n.d.). These plans were meant to
delineate a state-level economic vision, but in practice, they were abstract and without
links to operational plans. McKinsey proposed a radical shift from agriculture to the
services sector in both states. Both the TDP and the CPI(M) found this difficult to

operationalise, given the importance of their rural constituencies – the TDP emerged
through the support of the land-owning agricultural entrepreneurial class of the
‘khammas’ (Kohli 1988) and the CPI(M) consolidated its position through a long process
of agricultural land reforms (Hariss 1993; Bandyopadhyay 2003). However, it was
possible to operationalise plans for state capitals such as Kolkata and Hyderabad, in
isolation from the rest of the state, by focusing on zones of improved connectivity, easy
land availability, medical and educational facilities, and a more accessible and consumer-
friendly governmental interface (Chakravorty 2000; Ramachandraiah 2003; Dabla 2004;
Dupont and Sridharan 2007; Chacko 2007; Kennedy 2007). Spatialising these initiatives
in the cities’ periurban areas offered access to investors from high growth, ‘global’
sectors, such as IT, Information Technology Enabled Services (ITeS), Biotechnology and
other knowledge economy sectors (NASSCOM McKinsey Report of 2005), looking for
large land parcels to recreate United States suburban landscapes, without compromising
on access to labour, services and political presence that India’s megacities offered. In
choosing the periurban areas of state capitals as priority and default locations, the TDP
and CPI(M) exemplify the route that many state governments adopted to navigate a
complicated political and economic terrain post-liberalisation, within limited time frames.

Planning through territorialisation: Role of new parastatals

Roy (2003: xx) highlight “rapid peri-urbanisation… unfolding at the edges of the world’s
largest cities is an informalised process, often in violation of master plans and state norms
but often informally sanctioned by the state”. The statement highlights both the
‘informal’ nature of the actions of developers and land- owners, and the ‘informal’ nature
of state presence and sanctions in these areas. The periurban transformations of Kolkata
and Hyderabad however belie both invocations of the diffuse modality of ‘informality’,
in this description. Firstly, in both cities the conscious intent of the state governments’ to
materialize particular development visions through particular interventions and in
particular locations was clear. Secondly, the consolidations, developments and violations
by owners, developers and investors that emerged in these areas reveal responses to land
market structures and incentives that the instituted planning interventions put in place,

thus highlighting particular logics, rather than diffuse patterns of ‘informality’.

Operationalising the development of Kolkata and Hyderabad’s periurban areas involved
state governments acting at the city-scale, prioritising certain development visions and
using planning instruments such as Eminent Domain and Master Plans to operationalise
their visions, in ways that had been impossible with McKinsey’s broad- brush plans,
which nonetheless recommended deep structural transitions. In reverting to particular
planning powers and instruments these cities’ experiences reveal more continuities than
deviations from historical trajectories of urban developmentalism, as well planning
practice in the country.

However, there were also discontinuities within the cities’ planning trajectories. In both
cities, new parastatal planning agencies were created, over and beyond existing
institutional structures. New agencies were used to extend jurisdictions of existing
authorities and expand into areas beyond the stipulations of previous Master Plans. There
were also new politicised governance coalitions across the public-private spectrum.
These could be termed neoliberal exception, but exception as a lens is a form of
‘othering’ a substantive pattern of how planning power is actualised in India’s cities and
discourages analyses of processes re-structuring state-market-society relations.

In Kolkata, the Housing and Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO), under

the state Housing department (not the Urban Development department, as is usual) and
Bhangar Rajarhat Area Development Authority (BRADA) were created to develop the
city’s eastern periphery, where development was restricted by the basic development plan
of 1966, because of its wetland characteristics. Yet the east offered proximity to the
existing IT hub in Salt Lake (renamed Bidhannagar) and the creation of HIDCO and
BRADA allowed circumvention of the earlier Master Plan. However, there were conflicts
within the bureaucracies of Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA),
Kolkata’s existing planning and development authority, and between KMDA and
HIDCO/BRADA in operationalising these new visions. Now, these dynamics are less
visible. The Principal Secretary of the Urban Development department is the chairman of
HIDCO, and BRADA was dismantled after the Trinamool Congress won the state

elections, after 34 years of CPI(M) rule. BRADA’s dismantling came with the
acknowledgement of indiscriminate land speculation and violence associated with land
aggregation in the new areas.

In Hyderabad also, new authorities were established for strategically important periurban
areas. The Cyberabad Development Authority (CDA) was set up for a new IT sub-city to
the northwest of the city, beyond Hyderabad Urban Development Authority’s (HUDA)
jurisdiction. In practice, CDA’s planning work was undertaken by HUDA officials.
However, a new authority allowed Cyberabad to have its own Master Plan. Hyderabad
also used public-private partnership-based governance models. The GMR Hyderabad
International Airport Limited (GHIAL) was a consortium between the state government
and private partners, including the GMR group, to develop the Shamshabad international
airport, considered to be a critical infrastructure to reposition Hyderabad in the national
and international investment context. The project was bundled with 5000 acres of land
and declared a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with autonomous governance. This
facilitated financial structuring through the leveraging of land. Moreover, 40 per cent of
the area designated as the SEZ was under the catchment zone of the Himayatsagar lake,
one of the main sources of water for the city. The SEZ designation played an important
role in navigating the politics that emerged, when a public interest litigation (PIL) was
filed against the airport. The PIL was rejected (Ramachandraiah and Prasad 2004). Later
the Hyderabad Airport Development Authority (HADA) was established for the airport’s
hinterland. The GMR group was part of the new authority. In Hyderabad also, these
dynamics are now less discernible, as these authorities have been subsumed under the
new Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA).

Territorialising through new development corridors

Place-making in the periurban areas was also facilitated through new high speed, limited
access road connections between new investment destinations and the cities’ international
airports. These transport corridors were not meant to mitigate existing infrastructure
deficits, as is often the case in India’s planning initiatives, but meant to anticipate and

direct future growth. These corridors provided spatial form, without using a bounded
notion of a development area. In Hyderabad, an eight lane, high speed, limited access
Outer Ring Road (ORR) connected the airport to Cyberabad and Gatchibowli in the west,
Genome Valley in the north, and multiple SEZs. The new development corridor,
encircling the city, opened up the zone between the boundaries of the existing city and
the ORR as a land market and secured a high degree of private development interest. It
legitimised land consolidations on the outer boundaries of the ORR as being part of the
Hyderabad growth story, which were otherwise perceived as being too far. In Kolkata
too, a new six lane high speed road connection was created between New Town Rajarhat
and the city’s international airport, which bolstered New Town and Rajarhat as
independent land markets. In both cities, the new roads made it possible to enter and exit
the city and conduct business in the periurban locations, without substantive engagement
with the existing cities. This speaks to the intent to create a new ahistorical image for the
cities. Such parallel spaces and economies allowed the cities, and by extension the
respective state governments, to develop connections with external investors, without
deeper and broader market reforms, post liberalisation.

Building relationships with land owners and private sector partners

An enduring critique of planning practice has been its uncomfortable conceptual and
operational relationship with urban land markets, tenure arrangements and private and
community rights to own, transact and develop property. From an economic perspective,
planning regulations are interpreted as ‘constraints’, skewing land markets and creating
‘inefficient’ zones of high prices. From a more operational perspective, planning
instruments such as Master Plans almost never acknowledge property boundaries,
spatiality of tenurial practices, and/or private and community interests in owning,
transacting, using and leveraging property at various scales. In many Indian cities, the
Master Plan’s proposed landuse map is created in isolation from the development
dynamics of the city, with little or no relationality to individuals, firms, developers,
institutions, business and other interest groups associated with producing urban space.

10


In contrast, planning authorities in both Kolkata and Hyderabad’s periurban areas tried to
navigate the terrain of property owners, land markets, corporates and developers, often
through dynamic ‘transversal’ logics that Caldeira (2016) imputes as characterising the
behaviour of peripheral residents, rather than the actions of the state itself. Planning
authorities preferentially targeted a select elite group, who dove-tailed with the state’s
vision of post-liberalisation development. In both cities new generation public-private
coalitions were built through process-stage engagements with actors, seen as significant.
The coalitions highlight changes and learning in planning processes, beyond assumptions
regarding the monopoly power of planners to spatialise collective urban futures in
regulatory detail.

Initially, HIDCO tried to control the periurban land market through outright acquisition
in New Town. As per HIDCO, the compensation amounts of INR 36,000 per acre
(US$720) were the highest in the country at the time. Nonetheless, there were
mobilisations and protests as villagers claimed that compensations neither reflected the
displacement value of fishing and five rotations of crops that the land supported, nor did
it reach all the people who were part of the dense social network of livelihoods and tenure
based rights in the area. The failure of the New Town pricing experiment prompted a
different modality in the Bhangar-Rajarhat area, where the state retreated from direct
acquisition and private actors were allowed to aggregate land under ‘laissez-faire’
principles, with implicit support from BRADA. This was associated with a high degree of
violence. Eventually, BRADA was dismantled. In Hyderabad, by contrast, the politically
significant land owning class of ‘khammas’ were active in Hyderabad’s periurban areas,
before liberalisation. Original landowners, engaged in low-return agriculture, were often
easily displaced via financial compensations. In Hyderabad’s periurban land markets,
there were limited deployments of Eminent Domain and while facilitating access to land
was a cornerstone of negotiations between the state government and preferred investors,
state role in land aggregation was less obvious.

Beyond access to land, the public-private coalitions highlight the cities’ particular
histories with local capital. In Kolkata, the imperative to build coalitions with developers

11


emerged from efforts to allay the city’s negative business image. Powerful union politics,
a communist state government, deindustrialisation and state-level economic stagnation
made it difficult to reach out to external investors. The CPI(M) government started
remaking their own and Kolkata’s image by floating thirteen public-private companies
(Bengal Ambuja, Bengal Shrachi, etc.) in partnership with local capital, represented by
developers from the Marwari community, to build affordable housing (Sengupta 2006).
These efforts were expanded through investor meets and road shows to reach domestic
and international investors. Developers who partnered with the government became
unofficial advisors and facilitators of developments in Rajarhat and New Town. This bias
towards developers is still visible in Kolkata. In contrast, Chandrababu Naidu of TDP
leveraged the ambitions of the ‘khammas’ who were prominent not only in Hyderabad’s
land and construction industry, but also constituted the diaspora connected to the IT
industry in the US. In building his own legitimacy and Hyderabad’s new image, Naidu
aggressively wooed corporates, such as Microsoft, from the beginning, and allowed this
to trigger medium and small-scale domestic, often local investment interest
(Ramachandraiah 2003; Chacko 2007). Naidu convinced Microsoft to establish its first
international offshoring centre in Gatchibowli. He built high recall infrastructure, such as
the Shamshabad international airport, explicitly in competition with Bangalore, which he
identified as Hyderabad’s closest locational rival for international investors. These
actions of the Naidu government at the city-scale shaped national discourses of good
governance and normalised particular practices of land aggregation, compensation, plan-
making, instrumentality of planning agencies, and public-private negotiations within
planning (Basu 2007).

State guarantees in land markets

Braudel highlights that the state typically acts as a regulator, particularly of price, to
prevent monopolies (Wallerstein 1991). However, the state may also act as a guarantor of
price, and exceptional profits are possible only when the state rescinds its role as
regulator and becomes a guarantor. In both cities, the place-making efforts in the
periurban areas were associated with state guarantees, such as continued support for land

12


development in far-flung periurban areas and commitment to provide governance and

infrastructure support to new investors. The significance of these explicit and implicit
state guarantees are revealed in the volatile land prices that followed perceived shifts in
the state government’s intent, in both cities. In Hyderabad, the alignment of the ORR
went through multiple changes. In 2006, the alignment was changed 115 times (The
Hindu 2006) and land prices fluctuated with each change. In Kolkata New Town, HIDCO
tried to become the monopoly supplier of developed land and capture land value
increases, but the price markups were argued to be one of the highest in Asia. The
implied state guarantees of well-planned spaces and infrastructure were not sufficient for
the asking price and there were no takers for HIDCO land. In contrast, private actors
were allowed to aggregate land in the Bhangar-Rajarhat area, with the state government
guaranteeing conditions for this ‘laissez-faire’ private role in land markets. Land
investors responded well to this form of state guarantee and prices soared. When BRADA
was dismantled, the land market collapsed and prices dropped, almost overnight. In both
cities, state guarantees directed and shaped investor interest in periurban land markets.

Developing relationships with investment logics

The state governments’ partnerships with different categories of private sector players
were associated with the leveraging of land in multiple ways. Some partnerships
facilitated private access to aggregated land – a general ‘sweetener’, since urban
regulations, complex tenurial relationships, incomplete land records and urban land
ceiling legislations are often entry barriers for private actors, especially investors without
local networks. In some cases, land was the government’s equity share and effectively a
subsidy, since it diminished the private partners’ imperative to recover land costs, in
order to break even. Both modalities shaped the first generation public-private
partnership projects in Kolkata. Land was also collateral for institutional financing, for
example, in Hyderabad’s international airport. With the government facilitating land
access, private partners were able to attract private equity partners interested in projects
with assured access to land to reduce their risk exposure. Brokers and developers in both
cities revealed that certain investors used land as a ‘hedge’ in portfolio strategies. Land,

13


like gold, retains value well over time, with or without development. If inflation rates
remain lower than the rate of appreciation of land value, land assets are able to ‘hedge’
other risky portfolio investments. Hedging is possible only with implicit and explicit state
guarantees.

These modalities reveal certain sophistications in conceiving land beyond the static
imaginations that mark planning legacies. However, by all accounts, they reveal the
capture of this sophistication by certain preferred partners, in exclusion of other forms of
use and value of land associated with existing and future users of land in the areas.

Continuities with planning legacies

Kolkata and Hyderabad’s experiences focus on a particular moment of India’s planning
history, post- liberalization. While it may be convenient to explain these experiences as
artefacts of a neoliberal turn in state- society- market relations, a brief look at India’s
modern town planning history, highlights many continuities. Modern town planning in
India through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reveal continuing presumptions
regarding the power of the state to territorialise at the city- scale through planning
instruments, often going over and beyond existing political configurations of state-
society- market relations. Moreover, planning has remained a key terrain of state practice
to materialize and mobilise development visions at the city– scale. There are also
continuities in planning practice being invested with expectations of particular normative
spatial and social outcomes, by a select group of elites, whose visions, while being
situated in the city, transcended to desires to build a modern Indian state.

In India, this group of urban elites was also part of the political elite in the Congress party
post-independence and constituted the first professional body of planners in the country.
Notions of spatial ordering and place-making emerged from their imaginations regarding
cities as spaces for social engineering, albeit egalitarian ones, where scientific and
ordered spaces would facilitate an ordered urban society comprising of a civil citizenry
(Vidyarthi 2010). Moreover, planning was seen as a project to hold at bay haphazard
urban growth tendencies, engendered either by the agency of an unbridled urban

14


population, or an unbridled market. The ordered spaces of colonial ‘White Towns’ were
spatial blueprints for early sanitary commissions and city improvement trusts, which
introduced planning measures at the city- scale. Greenfield administrative capitals such as
New Delhi and Chandigarh translated state-led development visions of building a modern
nation (Kalia 2006). Planning territorialised state power at the city-scale through Eminent
Domain, enforced use-separated zones through planning permissions, developed transport
networks and regulated land markets through development controls. Notions embedded
in these exercises were normalised, with the third five-year plan mandating cities across
the country to prepare Master Plans and the Delhi Master Plan, prepared by the Ford
Foundation (Banerjee 2009), with its landuse zoning and development controls,
becoming the default template, used unreflexively in cities across the country.

The planning experiences in the periurban areas of Kolkata and Hyderabad reveal
continuities with these legacies, particularly in terms of planning mandates translating
development visions of the state and local elites, through place-making initiatives. The
contemporary inter-institutional conflicts and collaborations, which emerged between old
and new planning authorities in Kolkata and Hyderabad, find historical parallels in the
negotiations that marked interactions between planners during the planning of
Chandigarh in the 1950s (Kalia 1999) and between Indian and international planners
during Ford Foundation’s preparation of Kolkata’s Basic Development Plan (Banerjee
2009). Currently, many such conflicts between planners within planning practice have
been rendered invisible, with ritualised making and enforcing of Master Plans. However,
the disjunctures, are now clear in interactions with market and society, and in the
difficulties in materializing and territorializing state power, without considering urban
residents, actors in the land market, property rights, tenurial arrangements, etc.

Conclusion: Planning ‘failures’ or emerging terrains of planning practice?

The experiences in Kolkata and Hyderabad reveal certain competencies on the part of
planners navigating a complicated terrain. In both cities, planning mandates were
determined by state level development visions, which emerged in response to political

15


and economic exigencies post-liberalisation. In both cities, planners were relatively

successful in actualising their given mandates. In both cities, planners engaged, often
within highly politicised terrains, with local and external players at scales that were more
disaggregated than those typically associated with Master Plans. In both cities, planners
learnt to engage with the logics of certain developers and investors.

These learning curves make it difficult to reduce the planning experiences of the two
cities to planning ‘failures’, even though long-term normative outcomes traditionally
associated with planning interventions are hard to find. The spatially fragmented value
landscape of public-private investments, susceptible to local and external changes, reveal
more than ‘failure’. They highlight the ways in which planning practice has negotiated,
collaborated and conflicted with a varied set of developer/investor/landowner-led urban
practices. These highlight the need to go beyond teleological outcome- led development
binaries such as success/ failure, rule/ exception, and planned/ unplanned urban spaces as
frames to analyse planning practice. They highlight planning continues to be an evolving
terrain of politics, where changes in state- society- market relationships are being actively
constituted.

The exigencies shaping contemporary urbanisation demand something more than static
planning ideals, which as Chatterjee (2004) has argued, are conceived in ‘universal urban
space-time’, i.e. place- and time-less imaginations of ordered and planned spaces beyond
social and political dynamism. Producing more equitable urban spaces requires higher
levels of dynamism in planning processes than is visible in the periurban areas of Kolkata
and Hyderabad. Without incremental politics of planning operationalised and built over
time with different creators and users of urban land value, across the tenure spectrum,
incorporating knowledge networks that emerge as cities transform, planners are reduced
to occupying a binary space of either enforcing a static Master Plan or facilitating highest
and best use, dictated by powerful interest groups. Both roles are difficult to sustain
within uneven and dynamic geographies of power in urban areas. Legacies of spatial
control have disincentivised planners from building coalitions with diverse urban
residents. Static, two-dimensional spatial planning regulations have made invisible much

16


of the dynamism associated with production of urban space, creating a vacuum of data
and imagination, and allowing colonisation by interest groups.

Deeper epistemological engagements with processes and instrumentalities shaping

planning practice may in themselves be important to re-engage with normative
expectations such as social and spatial equity. Advocacy and intervention, which
acknowledge rather than dismiss politicized terrains of planning practice, offer more
grounded practices of hope, to engage with planning in the face of power (Forester 1988),
re- imagine normative expectations from planning practice and construct potential
pathways towards these expectations. While, it may be naïve to have absolutist
expectations from planners to hold and actualise larger normative values within a
politicised urban realm, it may be imperative to devise relational practices of advocacy
and intervention to lend weight to particular normative values. The contemporary
challenge for planners is to conceive outcomes and instruments, which engage with
value-laden occupancy and development politics of residents and groups creating,
capturing and using urban space and articulating urban land values, beyond dynamics of
elite capture.

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