REACTIVE REGULATION: Rethinking Urban Growth and Governance through Property Relations

Abstract

As social and environmental crises multiply and compound each other in the urban Global South, I ethnographically illustrate the micro-scale, obscured, but constitutive modes of governance that shape megacities. Through an account of property record-keeping, registration, and regularization in the emerging global real estate hub of Hyderabad, India, I show how macro-scale urban transformations form an aggregate outcome of micro-political bureaucratic processes that enlist the participation of bureaucrats, city-dwellers, and intermediary brokers. I argue that in lieu of regulatory processes that direct actions toward future goals, governance takes the form of reactive regulation, wherein the objectives are to render the city as property and re-assert the state's authority. On the one hand, these constitute deeply political processes, ones that incrementally transform urban environments. On the other hand, these processes exclusively frame urban space, time, social relations, and ecology in reductive terms of property, forestalling transformations toward sustainability or social justice.