Planning their Homes in Entrepreneurial City: The Capacities of Urban Poor and the Constraints of Public Policy

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Abstract

This chapter compares two communities of urban poor in the entrepreneurial city of Bengaluru (India) in their quest to access adequate housing. Their tactics reflect the possible agency of disadvantaged communities in the city. The same NGO intervened in both the communities. One community accessed housing through a public scheme called ‘Basic Services to the Urban Poor’ (BSUP), and the other relied on the means of mobilization and negotiation that assured land tenure to plan their own built environment. Housing for the former resulted in apartment blocks, but the entire housing process neither united the community nor corresponded to their needs. For the latter community, the housing process took much longer, but they engaged collectively and built the houses on their own terms and plans. The study reveals how the encounter between claim-making communities and political opportunities (Kriesi et al. (1995). New social movements in Western Europe. A comparative analysis. comparative and general pharmacology. London: University of Minnesota Press) is articulated through negotiations with bureaucracy in the case of the successful community and through a political nexus that sustains entrepreneurial governance in the case of the policy-targeted community. This study reveals that innovation is applied in novel ways to navigate policy and political actors and to stand out of the competition among the urban poor. The cases in this study further show how social skill of the community and brokerage by civil society organizations (CSOs) could foster confidence, build strategic alliances, and enable innovative strategies to face entrenched politico-institutional structures. Thus, the author highlights that social skill of the community is key to overcome the exclusionary practices of the entrepreneurial city and assert sustainable housing on their own terms.

Keywords

Housing policy Urban poor Bengaluru Social skill Entrepreneurial city Slum 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2014 Swiss Human Geography Symposium in Fribourg, Switzerland. I would like to thank the participants for their useful comments. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation and my host institutions the Development Planning Unit at UC London and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Development Planning Unit UCLLondonUnited Kingdom
  2. 2.Indian Institute for Human SettlementsBangaloreIndia

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