SPECIAL ARTICLE june 15, 2013 vol xlviiI no 24 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 58 A version of this paper was previously published as a Working Paper at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, titled “Is Urban Planning Relevant for Indian Cities?” Gautam Bhan (gbhan@iihs.co.in) is with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, New Delhi. Planned Illegalities Housing and the ‘Failure’ of Planning in Delhi: 1947-2010 Gautam Bhan 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 City was not planned as it is, but the City is an outcome of planning. 1 –Peattie 1987:15 T he “failure of planning” has become a ubiquitous, long- standing 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 irrele- vance, 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 manipula- tion of change” has been, argues Amita Baviskar, “continu- ously 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 levelled 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 implica- tions 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 organisations 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. Narratives of ‘Failure’ and Planning What does it mean for planning to have “failed”? Narratives of “failure” are simultaneously narratives of planning. Accusa- tions of chaos, irrelevance, incompetence and exclusion, in other words, each rely upon an imagination of what func- tional, 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 plan- ning by problematising, in the Foucauldian sense, the cer- tainty 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