URBANISMS OF ENTRENCHMENT: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE BANKS OF A

FAILED CANAL IN CHENNAI1

Karen Coelho
I. Introduction
1. The failed canal and Chennais urbanisation
This paper explores what it means to be urban for people living precariously yet determinedly on
squatted territories along the banks of a failed canal, the Buckingham Canal in Chennai. From
certain perspectives, forinstance from the windows of the elevated train that runs above and
along the canal, these settlements constitute an exuberant waters-edge city, densely built up in
bricks and concrete, brightly painted, and full of the missing majority (Simone, 2014) of
unaccounted for, uncategorized and invisible urban denizens. On the ground, walking inside their
lanes, however, these neighborhoods and their built space manifest histories of behind-the-scenes
urbanization wherestealthy advances are made within neglected/informalised/negotiated
landscapes, the backyards of governance (Anand, 2012; Bayat, 1997; Benjamin, 2008;
Chatterjee, 2004). Here, dynamic circuits of wealth generation and social mobility operate within
settings of precarious labour and poverty. These intermediate, indeterminate precincts, I contend,
are key to understanding the generic possibilities as well as the specific character of the urban as
it plays out on the ground.
The edges of the canal, sometimes frontage, sometimes hinterland, are where the urban as theory
is in formation. These spacesoffers a particular kind of geography for theorizing the way that the
urban is constituted in the coming together of i) multiple processes of production of space by
1 This paper is based on research conducted in 2014 for a case study entitled
Settlement and Struggle on Chennais Buckingham Canal: Working Class Histories
of the City, commissioned by the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS) in
Bangalore. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the IIHS, especially of Gautam
Bhan. Most of the ethnographic material for the case study was collected by a
brilliant young team of researchers that I worked with in Chennai, and to whom I
owe many of the insights of this study. I would like to thank T.Venkat, Meghna
Sukumar, Anusha Hariharan, Madhura Balasubramaniam, M.Subadevan, R.
Vaishnavi, Vilasini Kailasam, Veronica Angel, and Akshaya Kumar for their
contributions to this paper, although I take full responsibility for its theoretical
angles and arguments.
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settlers, squatters, entrepreneurs, migrants, and the state ii) specific modes of governance of
territories, in particular of waterways and their banks, and iii) relationships between residents
and the waterway, increasingly inflected by evictions and the option/spectre of resettlement in
the peripheries of the city. If global urbanism is defined as a commitment to producing an
understanding of the urban which is potentially open to the experience of all cities (Robinson
2014), can perspectives gleaned from these marginal spaces within the metropoliscontribute
toward such an understanding?
The Buckingham canal is a central figure in the physical and historical landscape of
Madras/Chennai. Running down the length of the city, this nearly 200-year-old canal has been an
important part of the citys processes of urbanization and growth. Yet the canal in the city today
is the urban-ecological equivalent of a basket case, a body that has become so pathologically
dysfunctional, so injured and disfigured, that it is considered incurable. The canal was built by
the British in intermittent segments between 1806 and 1897,to serve as an inland navigation
channel for the transportation of basic commodities such as salt, lime, agricultural produce and
firewood from the northern parts of Madras Presidency (now Andhra Pradesh) to the capital city,
Madras. Today, it runs like a long curving spine down the southeastern coast of India for 420 km,
from Peddaganjam in Andhra Pradesh to Marakkanam in Tamilnadu. But the 50 km stretch
within the city of Chennai is distinctive in its histories, trajectories, and future prospects. In 2004
the city section of the canal was officially declared deadfor navigation purposesby the Inland
Waterways Authority of India (IWAI), whichproposed to revive the larger Buckingham Canal for
navigation as a part of National Waterway 4, linking ports and harbours along the east coast. In
preparing its report, the IWAI found that the Chennai segment of the canal was not salvageable,
indeed that it had los(t) its existence (2004:p.), partly due to sewage pollution from the city,
but also due to competing infrastructures, i.e, the priority that had been accorded to road and rail,
and to the fact that there were too many bridges within the city. The report recommended
multi-modal cargo transfer for the stretch of the canal inside the city.
Historical documents reveal that the canal served as an envisioned stimulus to urbanization in
various, often conflicting ways, starting with the older colonial imaginaries of facilitating the
cheap transportation of basic goods. In the 1950s, as navigation became challenging on the
canal, there were debates and discussions about turning it into a tourist site for leisure boating, or
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alternatively, concreting it over for roads and other infrastructure (Krishnamurthy, 1964). Thus,
by the 1980s, the canal began to figure less as a waterway than as a tract of open space on which
to site urban amenities such as the elevated railway of the Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS),
which aimed in part to divert development and investment away from the central business district
toward this corridor. In the current millennium, given the failure of the MRTS to achieve these
goals, and having also failed to qualify for revival as a navigation corridor, the canal is inserted
into new imaginaries of elevated roadways, walking and cycling paths and waterfront parks
(citation).
Yet, there are other histories of this waterway that have been overshadowed, ignored,or sought
to be erased by these dominant utilitarian perspectives on the canal. Almost since its completion
in the 1890s, the canal has hosted on its banks a slowly expanding complex of informal
residential settlements and small-scale industrial and commercial establishments. While its
navigation functions declined from the middle of the 20th century, these settlements continued to
expand, offering workers and their families, migrant or local, an affordable living space within
the city. These settlements underwent various trajectories of change over time: some entrenched
themselves, were upgraded by the state, and morphed into solid urban neighborhoods. Others
were cleared and resettled; still others have remained informal, unserviced and constantly
vulnerable to threats of eviction. Many canal-bank settlements have also served as staging
grounds for movements, voluntary or forced, of populations to other areas of the city. In all these
ways, these settlements have played important roles in shaping the socio political and economic
geography of Madras/Chennai.
Dominant histories of Madras have sketched the citys historical formation from either statist,
largely colonial, (e.g. Lewandowski, 1975) or elitistviewpoints (as in accounts of important
native figures and their territorial projects (e.g. Muthiah, 1989 )), excepting a few accounts (e.g.
Ahuja, 2001; Neild, 1975) that track lower caste and working class spatial dynamics in18th and
19th century Madras. In contrast, the larger study on which this paper is basedattempts to trace
the processes of settling and moving of the citys subaltern populations, covering a more recent
chronological span, from the 1940s to the present. It combines historical with ethnographic
methods to elucidate the hows of land claims, home building, livelihood construction and
mobility pathways of the urban poor in Chennai. We chose the Buckingham Canal as a setting,
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not only because of its physical centrality in the citys geography, but also because this corridor
is the single largest site of slum concentration in Chennai, accounting for 10 percent of the
citys slums in 1960 (Census of India, 1961), and because it provides, through its diverse
landscapes of settlements, a metonymic lens on the citys character and processes of
transformation.
What can perspectives from the banks of this canal offer? What are the urbanisms that are/can be
proposed in this distinctive space, what can these neighborhoods tell us about building, settling,
moving, claiming, concealing, connecting and aspiring? This paper seeks to explore the varied
ways in which the urban is constituted within the bounds of a single city, both as a process of
becoming for subaltern groups, and as a territorial complex of colliding visions and projects. In
a city where waterfront development is being actively envisaged as a crucial part of its projects
of world-classing, this paper highlights the specific conditions of waters edge urbanism, and the
shifting trajectories of opportunity, challenge and threat that it offers. From the claiming and
taming of neglected hinterlands through labour, stealthy mobilizations and autonomous
construction, these urbanisms later turn into struggles to remain and entrench these occupancies
as the territory becomes coveted frontage for various infrastructure developments. The concept
of entrenchment that this paper proposes refers to a project, a striving, rather than an
accomplishment. And as the ethnographies in Part II of this paper reveal, these urbanisms of
entrenchment are not always and only about acquiring land as property, but entail diverse and
multifaceted ways of building and partaking in the urban modern, against the backdrop of
ongoing precarity.
2. Theorising southern urbanisms
The emerging agenda of theorizing the urban from the global south, including acall to rethink the
geographies of urban theory (Robinson, 2014; Roy, 2009; Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Sheppard
et al 2013, Bunnel and Maringanti, 2010), encompasses several challenges. First, it interrogates
the spatial confinement of the urban within the deceptively empirical territorial unit of the
city. As Brenner and Schmidt (2015), have forcefully argued, the nature and scale of urban
realitiesof cityness have become so differentiated and spatially promiscuous, cross-cutting
the urban-non-urban divide and exploding the boundaries of the city in so many ways, that both
the traditional notion of the city as a bounded entity, and the long-held definition of the urban
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(since at least the 1960s and 70s) as referring to a specific spatial unit or settlement type, are
outdated. The urban in southern countries in particular has come to assume a wide range of
spatial forms, from extended or poly-nucleated city-regions (postborder cities) to corridor
developments and networks that bring smaller towns into intimate relations with spatially distant
urban centers through flows of critical resources such as labour, finance or technology. A central
challenge of urban theory, then, as Brenner and Schmidt point out, is one of interrogating the
epistemology of the urban through what categories, methods, cartographies, should urban life
be understood (2015:155). In their view, the urban is a theoretical abstraction rather than an
empirical object. It refers to distinctive interactions and experiences, types of flows, a thickening
of connections.
Second, theorizing urbanism from the south brings into focus location it involves dis-locating
northern/western cities both as centers of knowledge production and as grounds for theorizing.
This is in response to two dominant strands of urban theorizing that frame third world cities
either as pathological deviants, or as marginal and irrelevant. The first is the set of theories that
emphasise the distinctive featuresof third world urbanization as being a planetary spread of
slums owing to phenomena such as urbanization without industrialization, jobless growth,
over-urbanisation, and the urbanization of poverty (Davis, 2004; UN-Habitat 2004). Here third
world urbanization is a deviant in terms of classic theories of modernisation and development.
The second dominant reference point is that of the global/world cities paradigm proposed by
Sassen (2001) in the early 2000s, which outlined a hierarchy of cities within the global system
based on their dominance within circuits of financial and information flows, wherein a few
western/northern cities like London, New York, Tokyowere identified as world cities while third
world citiesfailed to figure anywhere in this scheme. Challenging this scheme, scholars like Roy
(2009) and Brenner and Schmid (2015) call for shifting paradigm by shifting location, or taking
the distinctive conditions, experiences, and processes of urbanism in southern cities as sources of
insights and concepts for understanding urbanism at a broad elsewhere. This also involves
dwelling closely on the productions and relations that render a specific place as urban, while
suggesting how these speak to larger understandings of the urban thus simultaneously locating
and dis-locating theory (Roy 2009).

Here Robinson (2014) emphasizes the importance of comparison, of thinking across different
cases, for navigating the theory-building course between the located and the general. However,
she cautions that the parameters of the case needretrofitting to avoid the
restricting/territorializing trap of only comparing (relatively similar) cities (ibid: 57) and to take
account of the multiplicity of locations, units, spatialities and categories that may be dealt with
under the rubric of the urban. In other words, she calls for comparisons not of given
geographies or of spaces as containers, but of the formative processes encompassing different
sites the circulations, processes, connections that bring places into engagement with each other
and lend themselves to understanding the complex spatiality of urban forms. (ibid: 57).
Most urban geographers engaged in theory-production on emerging urbanisms, however, remain
preoccupied with expanded and explosive landscapes of urbanism, with ex-urban corridors and
conurbations, megacities and city-regions. My reflections here, in contrast, dwell on the
alternative spatiality of the urban in the intra-urban, the inner-city corridors, the localized
splinters within the city that generate various conditions of urbanism, give rise to diverse forms
and experiences of urbanization, and create distinctive nodes of larger processes. These
neighborhoods as nodes, then, serve as key fragments that, through synechdoche, illuminate
the formation of the larger whole.
While the manifestos for theorizing urbanism from the global south, predominantly emanating
from urban geographers in the last decade,are deeply informed by epistemological concerns, they
ultimately say very little about method. However, the epistemic challenges they outline, namely
of speaking from one location to all cities, of being reflexive about location and positionality of
the knowledge-building project, of framing the case to challenge restrictive boundaries and to
offer insights for multiples scales of urban realities, have been central questions for ethnographic
practice and scholarship for at least three decades now. Ethnography is fundamentally oriented
toward builds theoretical insights from the constitutive elements of a grounded and situated
reality, uncovering categories, relations, connections and meanings from the workings of that
placeto speak to the larger world of like phenomena. In particular, multi-sited ethnography
allows the researcher to follow a problematic in this case the constitution of the urban
through varied field settings, explaining differences and commonalities, allowing generalizations
to surface, and building systematic explanations, while being grounded in specific locales. In
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this paper, then, a comparative approach is adopted by engaging three intra-urban sites along the
banks of the Buckingham Canal, one each from the northern, central and southern sections. The
concepts and theoretical insights outlined here are drawn from ethnographic work conducted
over several months by teams of researchers in each site.
In this study, the canal corridor, while providing a common site for the three settlements, did not
remain a backdrop, nor was it a homogenous phenomenon the distinctive historical, ecological
and urban features of the canal in each setting emerged as part of the story of place-making,
informing how each settlement came to be urban and what urbanism meant in each case.
3. Urbanisms of Entrenchment
Concerns with articulating a southern theory of global urbanism, arising partly in response to the
world cities paradigm as outlined above, have become preoccupied with the worlding of
third world cities, with demonstrating the range of different ways in which urban centers have
become inserted in global processes or have forged connections across the world (Roy and Ong,
2011). The perspective from the canal banks, however, decenters that paradigm. On the edges of
the canal, the concern of residents is less with worlding than with entrenching,with advancing the
project of becoming urban through establishing and consolidating claims to belonging and to the
benefits of belonging in localized territorial relations, mostly oriented toward the traditional
modernities of education and economic mobility. The comparative ethnography in the three
settlements on the Buckingham canal found that the common strand characterizing the strivings,
both historical and ongoing, of settlers in the three very different economies and ecologies
studied, was about deepening, extending and diversifying their claims on and interlinkages with,
the city and with the urban local where they had settled.
The concept of entrenching indexes the urbanisms emerging from long struggles for settling,
rooting and concretising urban lives against the ongoing precarity of settlers claims on land, and
against the permanent backdrop of potential resettlement in distant resettlement sites. This
concept builds on and extends a well-developed body of literature that has theorized the way that
informal occupancies have shaped urban territories and their economies, politics and governance
in southern cities(Bayat, 1997; Benjamin, 2008; Chatterjee, 2004; Liang 2005; Roy, 2009). As
Liang (2005, p.7) puts it, The contribution of urban studies has been to provide a more nuanced
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sense of the phenomenon of the illegal city. Benjamins (2008) paradigm of occupancy
urbanism,premised on the fundamental fluidity of legal claims to land in urban areas, tracks
how informal occupancies for residence and small-scale economic activities are established
through negotiations between organized groups of urban poor and the local state, with
regularization workingas an episodic yet ongoing driver in establishing basic infrastructure,
advancing small informal local economies, and adding value to subprime urban land, in the
process subverting the grand real estate capitalization schemes of finance capital. Bayats (1997)
theory of the quiet encroachment of the ordinary also maps the domain of atomized, noncollective, but prolonged direct action of the urban poor, aimed at securing the basic necessities
of life through illegal yet non-confrontationalmodes, in other words, through the politics of
stealth.
The emphasis on entrenchment here pushes harder on both the spatial and temporal openendedness of these theories of occupancy and encroachment. While they account for a substantial
part of the story of settlement through incremental securing of amenities, networks and influence
in local areas, they do not fully apprehend or explain the shifting of stakes and the new strategies
called for when well-established occupancies come under threat, immediate or imminent, from
metropolitan development projects.
The banks of waterways, classically the spaces of informal urban settlement,are particularly
salient for the shifting maneouvres of entrenchment. As waterfronts become prime real estate for
globalizing metropolises, even the gains of long occupanciescan be dismantled. Most vulnerable
in these shifts is a section of the urban population typically neglected in the literature on
encroachment and occupancy, namely the burgeoning legion of rental residents in metropolitan
cities. One strategy of entrenchment in the urban, as our case revealed, is to move from longoccupied inner-city settlements to virgin territories on the urban fringes in order to enter the
circuits of property ownershipand real estate economies, still in the domain of the informal. Here
the encroachments are not geared toward establishing a foothold in the city to make a livelihood.
Rather, footholds already gained (usually the tenuous and costly foothold of the renter) are
surrendered in favor of entering the now dominant modes of accumulation through land rents.
The urbanism of entrenchment is crucially and increasingly framed against the ambivalent
other of prospective resettlement in state-built peripheral tenement complexes. This future,
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while realized (typically by force) for some, remains always imminent for the rest. The contours
of this future are never fully and reliably known, but are apprehended through rumour or through
the accounts of neighbours or relatives who have been resettled. The prospect of resettlement
offers some attractions, mainly that of legally secure housing, but is mostly an object of dread,
indicating that the goals of entrenchment are not simply secure tenure, but comprise a complex
of urban aspirations.
Across the three settlements, quite distinct modes of entrenchment were found. In the northern
settlement of Wood Wharf, it comprised settlers steadily concretising their occupancies of land
claimed from the slush and mud of the canal banks through building, supporting, and partaking
in an infinite proliferation of informal economic and entrepreneurial activities, enabled by the
settlements location in the middle of Chennais commercial precinct. The dynamism, diversity
and vigour of the livelihoods landscape that had been established here far outweighed, in
residents perspectives, the congestion, squalor and challenges of their residential conditions.
Entrenchment here is represented by an imploding settlement where few leave and more keep
coming, although nothing is formally approved. In the middle section settlement of
Anumanthapuram, settled by a relatively organised community of Scheduled Caste families, the
long and ultimately successful struggles for patta were embedded in a process of becoming
modern, respectable and disciplined citizens through locally enforced cultural sanctions and
disciplines, to distinguish themselves from the rowdy urbanisms of the adjoining settlements.
In Neelangarai, the entrenchment comprised a second-generation encroachment, where people
already settled in middle sections of the city, in cramped quarters or as renters, moved out as
pioneers in search of open lands that they could stake claim to as owners, re-enacting the cycle of
taming rural lands for urbanization.
The next section elaborates on the aspirations and meanings that these projects of entrenchment
carried, and the kinds of modernities the urban spelled for the settlers.
II. Ethnographies from the Canal Banks
1. Backyard to Frontage.
The edges of waterways are where urban life is seeded and formed for thousands of working
class families, where forest-like undergrowth is cleared and housing posts planted firmly into the
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soil. This pattern, of landless migrants, workers and squatters settling along urban waterways
hardly unique to Chennai -- occurs primarily due to the open nature of the lands along
waterways, not just in ecological terms but in their revenue classification. These lands are
typically poromboke government common lands, not available for sale, hence unlikely to be
settled by more elite sections in pursuit of secure property holdings. But these lands are usually
alsoopen in the sense of being uninhabited, untamed, considered unsuitable for settlement by any
but the most desperate, who then expend considerable effort taming the lands to their needs
filling holes and levelling the ground, constructing bunds against the waterway, fighting off
snakes, insects and other water-edge fauna.In some but not all cases, the attraction of the water
body may also lie in the livelihood opportunities if offers.
Our study reveals however, that processes of settling and urbanizing do not yield linear historical
narratives of then and now, stories of greenfield sites along waterways steadily become settled.
Rather there is a reiterative cycle of urbanizing and conquest, of settling, uprooting and moving,
resettling, being resettled. Different forms and drives of urbanization are played out along these
borderlands and in the productive interstices between state visions, plans, and failures of
implementation and governance.River and canal banks as urban spaces are zones of contest,
between their typical historical patterns of informal settling and the multiple other visions, plans
and schemes that they invariably invoke. Urban waterways in third world cities are bodies that
carry intense imaginaries, from memories of better times to visions and plans of restoration.
Whether in looking nostalgically backward, or in envisioning its future, the waterbody is colored
in strong hues of emotion and expectation, which typically have little purchase on the current
state of the waterbody sluggish, choked and near-lifeless.
The ways in which these waterways figure in the social geography of the city and in the citys
geographic imaginary of itself have shifted over time. As outlined above, until the 1970s, its
banks were seen as a rear in the citys development, a backyard mess. In the 1980s, when the
canal alignment was identified for the elevated rail corridor, it was still perceived as cheaply
available open land. And in the 2000s, the waterway became subject to new metrics of
governance and worlding through waterfront restoration and beautification schemes. These
shifting state perspectives on waterways create special challenges for informal occupancies.
Strategies of entrenchment arenecessarily devised in reaction to the ways in which
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encroached/occupied lands figure in the projects of the transforming city. As long as the canal
was a neglected backyard where slums proliferated, occupancies thrived, enabled by local
politicians. As the canal becomes frontage, all but the most powerful of occupancies are
threatened, and even local politicians shrug, unable or unwilling to stand upto the juggernauts of
world-classing.
Notably, perspectives on the canal had changed over time even for the residents on its banks.
Despite the different initial relations of settlers with the waterway and the different canal
ecologies embedding each settlement, this switch in perspective was common among them all.
As pollution and health hazards increased in the waterbody, the settlements turned their backs on
it. Even in older settlements like Wood Wharf, which were born of the canal and its economies,
their frontal relations with the canal had faded and withered, and the canal was now a rear the
space for effluents, drainage outlets, or for storing unwanted things. The unlucky families that
found themselves established on the edges of the canal tried to shield themselves in some way
from the murky waters lapping at the garbage-strewn banks.
In Anumanthapuram and Neelangarai, communities that had been attracted to and attached
themselves to the canal, now pointed to it as the one thing they least liked and most wanted to
change about their habitat, pointed to the canal. One woman in Neelangarai, directly addressing
our aim of capturing histories of the settled areas, declared herself to be opposed to remembering
history. She said that in her view, history should be forgotten. She said that she had seen scenes
in the past, like the body of an aborted foetus floating in the canal, and a person falling into the
canal after a drunken fight, and the memories made her feel sick. Thus, although this body had
once provided many of the bare needs of life for the canal-bank communities, it had now turned
into their biggest menace. Now that they had become urban in having secured most of the basic
amenities of city life, the waterway figured as a nuisance, a sore, a source of disease and death.
Interestingly, despite the canals all too palpable materiality of stench and stagnation, itwas also a
metaphoric figure for these communities, albeit in ironic ways. Far from it being a key spatial
marker of their niche in the city, or a landmark for their residential address, many canal bank
residents call it the Cooum, which is the name of another river in the city. This perhaps
suggests that the Cooum itself has become an emblem of a dirty stream of sewage, in other
words, that these are all indistinguishable drains. In Neelangarai, four groups of children living
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along the banks of the canal were asked to map the canal. Three groups drew a single line on the
edge of the paper, only one drew it in the center. Can one infer from this a marginality of the
canal in their perspective? One boy asked for a black sketch pen. When asked to use the blue pen
he had been given, he asked back: how can the Cooum be blue?.
2. Heterogenous Metropolitan Modernities2
What is at stake in theorizing southern urbanisms, insists Roy,is an analysis of the heterogeneity
of metropolitan modernities (2009: 81).Ways of enacting urban citizenship emerge as radically
divergent among the three settlements along this corridor, inflected by their locations along the
canal and vis--vis the larger metropolitan space of Chennai, and shaped by the urban socioeconomies in which each settlement is embedded.
Wood Wharf
Wood Wharf in the northern stretches of the canal formed and grew in the unending slush of the
canals close encounter with land, where wharves and landing docks attractedDalit families from
parts of northern Tamil Nadu in the early to middle decades of 20thcenturyto work as daily wage
loaders, porters and watchmen. The tents they pitched on vacant lands adjacent to the canal
banks have now turned into brick and concrete houses. But more crucially, thelow-end service
economies of the wharves and loading sheds have been transformed into a vibrant small-scale
manufacturing economy that providespathways to economic and social mobility for large
numbers of workers,both local and fromother parts of north Chennai.
From quite early on, the landscape of this area turned commercial. In the 1950s, to supplement
revenues from the canals operations, the PWD leased out land on the canal banks to individuals,
who established warehouses, commercial sheds, firewood depots, salt godowns, and lorry repair
and parking sheds in these lands. In the mid-70s, withcapital from the Marwadi community
which operated in the nearby trader precincts of Sowcarpet and Purushawakkam, these godowns
were converted into small manufacturing units, fabricating a range of aluminium and
stainlesssteel products, from nuts and bolts, plates and utensils, to large drums and metal trunks,
2 Many of the insights and some of the language in this section are taken from the
case studies written by Meghna Sukumar (Wood Wharf), Anusha Hariharan
(Anumanthapuram), and T.Venkat (Neelangarai) for the larger project.
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for sale in local wholesale markets and inthe neighbouring states ofKarnataka and Andhra
Pradesh.The original PWD leases were informally traded and changed hands frequently over the
years, with some Wood Wharf locals who began as workers also turning entrepreneurs and
successfully running these businesses. These manufacturers, organised into associations,
managed to improve roads and lighting and bring some public amenities to the area through
negotiating with local politicians.
Urbanism here is framed partly around the physical building up of living and working spaces,
from thatched roofs and jute walls on marshy lands to concrete houses on concrete lanes.
Everybody without exception spoke of slush knee-deep, ankle-deep, slush, that they had earlier
walked through, played in, slept on. The production of space here, then, comprised concretising
the territory, reclaiming land from canal-bank slush, for habitation, but most crucially for
industrial activity. Given its location near the commercial center of the city, the availability of
warehouses, godowns, sheds and land in this area was vigorously leveraged by Marwadi and
local entrepreneurs to create a manufacturing hub with intense multipliers and linkages, directly
employing thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and indirectly providing livelihoods
to hundreds of local families through a proliferating support economy of logistics, maintenance,
water supply and tiffen centers.
All this has resulted in exponential population growth and congested conditions. According to
residents, very few families have moved out, while large numbers have moved in. Since nobody
here has pattas for the lands they have occupied for over 60-70 years, there is minimal vertical
building-up of accommodation, although almost all have invested in improvements to their
houses, primarily in rendering them concrete. Living accommodation, then, is a crunch -extended families crowd together in small quarters. While urbanization has meant moving out of
the slush, it has also brought cramped lives with little or no sanitation, chronic mosquito
infestations, and homes set among noisy lathe workshops, soot-emitting factories and industrial
godowns along a highly polluted canal. Wood Wharf displayed many of the classic features of a
third world slum, like high rates of alcoholism and suicides. Yet residents assertively embraced
this modernity of dense agglomeration, diversity and opportunity, where Marwadi businessmen
operated side-by-side with Christian evangelists, and where daily wage workers were intent on
educating their children as much as possible, and in English medium if possible. All our
13

respondents insisted that this was a place that had provided for them across 2-3 generations, had
brought jobs and livelihoods and access to education and mobility for their families, that it would
be unthinkable for them to move. In fact, several residents owned flats in other parts of the city,
but would not leave this place despite its congestion and squalor. The precarity of settlement
here was highlighted during our fieldwork when a section of families that lived on the edge of
the canal were evicted. This event provoked discussions on the possibilities of being removed
and resettled outside the city, a prospect that was strongly rejected by settlers here. Nevertheless,
the struggle for patta did not emerge as a central preoccupation here, as it did in Neelangarai.
Instead, place-making through intense infrastructural webs of small-scale economic and
entrepreneurial activity appeared to be the mode of entrenchment in this settlement.
Anumanthapuram
Lodged in the dense middle of central canal neighborhoods is the small community of
Anumanthapuram comprising about 250 families. Viewed from the railway line running above
them, these neighborhoods all run into each other and are indistinguishable. On the ground,
however, they are distinct, many characterized by their caste, religion and ethnic concentrations.
Anumanthapuram has, since its establishment over 50 years ago, defined itself in opposition to
the rough societies of its neighbours, where the rowdy is a feared but often respected leader
figure, and where violence is commonplace. This community, predominantly SC, has, thanks to
its center-city location and to having obtained pattas for most of its residents two decades earlier,
achieved substantial socioeconomic mobility, as evidenced by the solid, well-painted, often
multi-storied houses equipped with a range of consumer electronics, and by the male youth
holding mostly white-collar jobs.
Here, however, residents accounts of settling, their memories, and their narratives of
urbanization all centered strongly around their late leader, Ekambaram, who had not only led
successful struggles to obtain pattas for most of the families in the settlement, but also played a
strong role in shaping the collective moral character of this group of settlers. Residents
described the community in Anumanthapuram as highly disciplined in comparison to other
communities in the area, thanks to a raft of rules that Ekambaram had laid down and enforced.
These rules included banning political party gatherings, handbills or posters in the
neighbourhood in order to eliminate rowdyism, and discouraging family members of residents
14

from staying indefinitely while looking for work; this was to prevent the neighbourhood from
becoming congested and slum-like. Ekambaram did not allow the police to intervene in
neighborhood fights, instead he resolved them internally at community panchayats. He
encouraged residents to pay their electricity and water dues on time, and to store the receipts
carefully; he carefully cultivated relationships with local officials, smoothing the process of
settling and acquiring facilities. Residents repeatedly asserted that Ekambarams leadership had
ensured not only that they did not get evicted, but that they collectively improved themselves
and lived better lives.
Improvement in these accounts referred both to the observance of moral strictures, and
enhancement in their status through building socio-economic mobility. Under Ekambarams
leadership, the residents identities as Dalits were firmly relegated to a secondary position
relative to their bids for respectability through disciplines on individual and household practices,
assertions of community responsibility through Panchayat authority, and appeals to the states
powers of protection. This framework of improvement underpinned a range of other bans, such
as on beating the parai (a percussion instrument that is a sign of Dalit mobilization), on the
carrying and sale of beef and fish, and on the consumption of alcohol and any form of tobacco in
the neighbourhood space. Paradoxically, while the area has a strong Ambedkarite affiliation as
seen in prominent pictures of Ambedkar in the community tuition center, and an annual
community-wide celebration of Ambedkars birthday, none of the people we interviewed would
identify as Dalit and almost none were connected to movements linked to Dalit or caste identity.
Notions of discipline here extended also to the spheres of gender and sexual relations.
Ekambaram enforced norms of public morality in which elopements were forbidden, and were
punished by tying the couple to the big tree outside the Hanuman temple and whipping them.
Young women under 35 were discouraged from going out to work; norms of middle class
respectability and changing caste identity dictated that that they sequester themselves at home
and appropriately raise their children. However, emphasis was placed on educating girls, and
most women in the age group 18-25 had received/were receiving a college education or at least
vocational training after completing school. Children were forbidden to light sparklers or burst
crackers, as this would pose a hazard to the then mostly thatched roofs; they were also forbidden

15

to play cards or Gilli or marbles (games that are characteristic of lower class neighborhoods) on
the grounds that these would distract them from their studies.
Respondents recollections of Ekambaram, even his dictatorial measures, were conveyed in tones
of gratitude. Ekambaram was described as a leader who had taught them to come together as a
community and live ethically. We were repeatedly told that without the disciplines he had
introduced, the community would have turned out like others in Chepauk, infested with rowdies,
drug dealers, and eve-teasing.
Yet, inevitably, there were fissures in these narratives of internal transformation. During our
fieldwork, we found freshly emptied bottles of alcohol strewn in the public toilets behind the
houses. One woman commented that Ekambarams rules often hindered residents livelihood
options, by which she meant that he had put a stop to her brewing and sales of liquor in the
neighborhood. However, she told us this with a lowered voice and guilty looks, and reiterated
that despite this, she considered him a great man. There appeared to be a silent pressure on
community members to agree on accounts of a glowing past under Ekambarams reign, and to
concur on the moral frameworks he instituted.
These collective memories of Ekambaram offer glimpses into the formation of low-caste settlers
as urban subjects, entrenching themselves in their metropolitan niche through pursuing norms
and practices of middle-class respectability, modernity, and distinction from other communities
like themselves through education, the control of sexual desire, elimination of black and informal
economies, gendered constraints on movement, and regulations on everyday speech, play,
celebration and mourning.
Neelangarai
The community of Arignar Anna Nagar 2nd Street in Neelankarai in the southern reaches of the
canalrepresents a voluntary resettlement by working class families who moved, largely as
individual households, from their central city settlements to the peripheriesin search of land to
own rather than simply for shelter. The ethnography here tracks the evolution of a few
determined settlers into an enterprising, cosmopolitan, urban community in the span of three
decades, through the classic process of collectively and incrementally building up their essential
infrastructure -- bridges, temples, schools and community halls. The settlement is a far cry from
16

a slum, despite the fact that none of the residents have obtained pattas and thus remain squatters
in official designation. It comprises a neat row of concrete houses inside walled yards, many
built up with an extra floor, with street lights, water facilities, a few provisions stores, several
temples, and scattered community facilities ranged along a road that runs beside a quietly
flowing, if polluted and malodorous canal. Residents widely acknowledged the vast
improvements in their living conditions, which they ascribed variously to local leaders and
councilors, to Amma (the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu), or to the fact that the area had now
become incorporated into the city corporation. Most asserted that they had few problems any
more apart from the state of the canal and the insecurity of their tenure.
Education and employment have seen a rise here, with a trend toward graduate education,
especially among males. While the second generation has mostly followed the career of their
parents and close relatives in self-employment and semiskilled work, several among the present
generation of youth work in white collar, skilled jobs along the nearby IT corridor. Household
incomes have seen a rise, which is reflected in the improved condition of housing, in assets and
investment in education. Increased incomes from rents have also added to family revenues.
In the process of producing this space as urban, the settlers have also become part of the
transformation of the regions economy from largely rural farming and fishing activities to
largely urban industrial and service sectors, primarily through providing space for the
reproduction of low cost labour. On the canal banks reside a growing constellation of workers
from the northeastern states, accommodated as tenants in the extra rooms that settlers have
constructed. Here a second generation of migration is encompassed in the first under quite
distinctive terms and conditions, arriving into relatively well-serviced conditions of living and
employment availability, yet vulnerable in quite different ways to the perils of the host territory
than the earlier migrants were. The north-eastern migrants constitute a strand of emergent
urbanization in which this remote edge of the city is refigured by distant economic and social
conditions, where, it seems, labour exports are not just about men leaving to earn money to send
home, but about boys being sent away to keep them out of trouble and away from harm regions
where ethnic tensions and militarization are as severe as depressed economic conditions.

17

As the area has urbanized, a new tar road, complete with road markings and reflectors, has been
laid on the canal bank where a government mini-bus plies, forming a crucial transport link to the
city, and giving rise to very urban issues of security. The new road has caused speed to increase,
shiny new sedans pass along with the ubiquitous motor bikes, and the once open and leisurely
gathering space of the canal bank has become one where people scurry out of the way of
traffic.But the construction of the road has also been read by residents as a sign that they will not
be evicted, and has given them confidence to build up their houses.
In Neelangarai, however, the crux of the project of entrenchment centers on getting a patta.
Every conversation or interview in our fieldwork concluded with a demand for pattas in this
property-oriented urbanism, pattas emerged as their ultimate aspiration and their deepest despair.
Notwithstanding the wide-ranging advances that had been made in physical infrastructure and
housing conditions, residents ascribed any remaining backwardness in the area to the lack of
secure title. The patta would, in their view, bestow respectability; they posited a direct
relationship between property and decency. A group of young men who had lived there all their
lives asserted that they would not like to move anywhere else as they were living on their own
property. They added that they might appear underdeveloped at the moment, but they were only
waiting to get patta, which would propel the area into multistoried development with expanded
potential for rentals.

III. Reflections on Urban Incrementalism

1. Expectation and the Unexpected
Theories of occupancy urbanism and quiet encroachment rely heavily on the premise of
incremental advances as the mode through which subaltern urbanization proceeds. The notion of
the incremental assumes a steady, linear, progressive accretion of urban goods housing rights,
amenities, services, contacts, economic security. However, this notion in turn assumes the sort of
undisturbed chronology or progressions of time-space that informally settled territories,
particularly in ecologically fragile areas, rarely offer. Often, if not mostly, the impetus for a big
step forward is a collapse a fire that guts the hut, a flood that drowns assets. People then

18

proceed to rebuild in brick and stone, not because they are now better off, but because they may
as well; typically they go into debt.
The urban is all about the unexpected. Trajectories are carefully mapped out but they dont travel
very far before they are interrupted, diverted, subverted, simply by the turn of urban events
nothing subversive, just the inevitably jerky rhythm of social and economic agglomeration.
Things come together making other things fall apart. Two examples are briefly presented here.
In 1975, soon after the formation of the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) with its
mandate to resettle slum dwellers in tenements constructed in situ, a special action plan was
drafted to clear 40 slums comprising about 6000 households from the central section of the
Buckingham canal banks and resettle the residents in tenements constructed on lands
immediately adjoining the slums, at a total cost of Rs. 6.8 crore.3 The PWD identified parcels of
land belonging to various departments at 15 different sites along the canal to be transferred to the
Slum Clearance Board. With funds from the central government, the scheme was approved in
1976.
However, these well-made plans did not materialize as envisioned. Almost immediately, many of
these communities rejected the tenement schemes and instead demanded pattas for the lands they
occupied. Meanwhile, in the late 1970s came an official shift in slum clearance policies, which
interrupted and diverted the trajectory of these plans. The World Banks entry in 1972 into the
urban housing sector of Tamil Nadu and its substantial funding support for the Madras Urban
Development Projects (MUDP) I and II, implemented between 1977 and 1988, impelled the state
housing agencies toward considerations of financial sustainability and replicability in their
housing interventions, and provoked a shift in their housing approaches from expensive tenement
construction to in-situ slum upgrading and Sites and Services schemes, as part of an emerging
global consensus on best practices (Raman 2011). The MUDP schemes offered pattas, basic
amenities and loans to slum dwellers to enable them to incrementally develop their housing.
Faced with this policy switch, the TNSCB and the states Housing Department decided to drop
3G.O. 1004, Public Work Department, 17/7/1976. Slum clearance scheme - Madras city.
Removal of slums on the banks of south Buckingham canal. Construction of tenements for
slum dwellers under 2 phases- proposal of S.C.B. Approval. Obtained from Tamil Nadu State
Archives.

19

the tenement scheme in several of the canal settlements, and include these sites under the MUDP
schemes.
Thus, in 2014, our field research on settlements along the canal found a landscape vastly
different from that envisioned by the neat, rational and mathematically balanced proposals
sanctioned in 1976. The planned tenements were in evidence in only 8 of the 40 slums named in
the proposal. Several others had been improved under MUDP schemes, receiving titles and
support to build up their own housing. These settlements, along with numerous others not
officially recorded under MUDP schemes, are today vibrant, dynamic and solidly built up lower
middle class neighbourhoods, with multi-storied buildings of varying shapes and sizes, water
facilities, and community infrastructures such as schools, temples, and meeting halls. The built
residential space in all these settlements is enmeshed with livelihood spaces and infrastructures -shops, saloons, warehouses and small enterprises. These neighborhoods, spread down the length
of the canal banks, present an illuminating counterpoint to the few tenements that succeeded in
being built, some of which have degenerated into vertical slums. Thus, being in the right place at
the right time, like living in slums on government lands in 1980s Madras when the MUDPs were
rolled out, allowed for transformations that incremental strategies do not always ensure.
In general, then, the urban experience for working class settlers or squatters is far from being one
of incremental modernization. Establishing a footing,or even more, entrenching oneself in the
urban means treading uneven, unpredictable paths, taking ones chances in unknown terrain.
Going after property is particularly hazardous. The stretch of canal in Neelangarai with its wide
open lands attracted people who had been long urbanized in center-city conditions of squalid or
serial rentals, or from congested spaces under bridges, often also along the canal.Yet it was not
an entirely consensual southward move. Dragging behind the pioneers were often unwilling
wives or mothers, skeptical of this endeavor to colonise new lands. Thenmozhidid not like the
place when they moved there 30 years earlier, with young children and a 7-month old baby.
There were very few people, no streetlights, only one foot path leading to the area, and she
would hear howls of jackals and the snorting of buffaloes. She protested to her husband, Why
have we moved here?, but was eventually persuaded, because this gave her distance and
independence from her husbands family.

20

Neelangarai epitomizes the backward-forward dialectics of incremental urbanism where urban

dwellers venture into rural-like wastelands in pursuit of some of the emerging values of a global
urbanism, like the search for land as real estate. A woman in Neelangarai who moved there in
1984 recalled how they she used to take her children and her clothes to a distant tank to wash, as
in rural areas. Another woman remembers that there were goondas who would raid the street
armed with sticks, demanding money from families. They would hand over 100 rupees without
resisting, as they lived in fragile huts which offered little security. The area was sparsely peopled,
each family took care of themselves and there was not much interaction.Herein is revealed once
more the porosity of the urban border in processes of entrenching, or the two-way traffic that
occurs at the rural-urban seam.
The unexpected also cuts across the unfolding of the present. Chandrain Neelankarai complained
about the unbearable stench from the canal, caused by sewage and effluent from hospitals and
industries in the area, and from the rapidly increasing households along the banks, travails they
had not expected when they moved here.
But in Neelangarai, interruptions to the incremental also providedunexpected boosts to
entrenchment. As the community proceeded to build bridges, negotiate for water supplies and
improve homes, the eviction of 150 houses on the canals edge in 2002 ironically ratcheted
forward their tenure security and the physical condition of the settlement. Most of the
demolished houses were owned by families who also held houses on the opposite (landward)
side of the canal bank road, where no houses were demolished. Many of these houseowners,
thus, obtained allotments in the resettlement colony of Kannagi Nagar, which they apportioned to
growing members of the family, sold, or leased out. The demolition also cleared the congestion
and disorderly growth of huts on the canals edge, opening up the landscape and creating
aesthetic order. It also cleared space for utilities and water supply systems. It boosted the value of
housing, including rental costs, by easing access across the bridges to the industrial corridors of
ECR and OMR. After the evictions, the canal was widened, a bund was created on the canal side
which provided some protection from the canal waters, and a red line was drawn marking the
boundary of PWD land. This line ran a few feet inside each compound, but this, ironically,
provided some reassurance to residents as it also showed that most of their land lay outside the
canal land boundaries, emboldening them to build up further inside their compounds.
21

Incrementalism is a strategy employed by settlers to stay under the radar. Yet, thisfear of drawing
attention to their settlement also holds residents back from pushing for further improvements.
Youth in Neelangarai confessed that they chose not to complain about the pollution and accidents
in the canal or to demand any protective measures from the state as this might awaken the
sleeping animal, bring unnecessary attention to the area, and expose them to chances of
eviction. Thus, incremental advancement is sometimes hindered by the need for stealth. Instead,
as the post-evictions situation in Neelangarai revealed, the settlers keep close watch on the lines
that the state draws.
III.

Conclusions

This paper makes three theoretical offerings toward the understanding of urbanism. First, it
attempts to characterize distinct urbanisms that emerge in specific types of places here tied
together through the common interpellation of being located along a dubious canal. The stakes
in framing all these under the rubric of entrenchment is to emphasise, against the preoccupation
of urban theorists with worlding and inter-urban connections, the fundamental and ongoing,
indeed the intensifying, condition of precarity of working class settlement in the city. In this
project of entrenchment, as we saw, the patta as a formal legal entitlement figures in varied ways.
In Wood Wharf, pattas have long been seen as a near impossibility, and entrenchment is sought
through leveraging PWD leases on sheds and warehouses to produce space for a vibrant
manufacturing economy, which, by dint of its location, has created urban opportunity for large
numbers. In Anumanthapuram, it was partly the mobilization for and achievement of pattas that
enabled the formation of a community of respectable, modern, disciplined and economically
mobile urban citizens. In Neelangarai, the entrenchment strategies for a cohort of renters,
dovetailing with dominant modalities of the urban, is through the route of property as real estate
although pursued for livelihoods and incomes rather than, at least for now, surplus
accumulation. The settled lands, thus, become a complex amalgamation of use values,
commoditised space and commons.
Second, by discussing perspectival switches between fronts and rears, centers and margins, the
paper attempts to show how shifting perspectives on a place (e.g. the canal), do not occur on
level grounds, but are part of the operation of a systemic field of power. As outlined by World
Systems Theory, centers and peripheries are not simply relative, they are mutually constitutive.
22

Peripheries and rears are constituted by dominant modes of the urban, and when hinterlands
become frontage, this typically means that they are taken over, colonized by the center, casting
their denizens into new domains of peripheralisation and precarity. The shifting perspectives map
topographies of power in how places are positioned in the urban system.
And third, in illustrating the workings of the unexpected, it highlights the limits of incrementalist
models of urban development, purveyed both by earlier accounts of occupancy and
encroachment and by best practice policy models of slum upgrading. While they explain some
of the ways that urbanisms are formed over time, they fail to capture the contingent and
conjunctural moments that create transformative outcomes. If pattas are obtained in Neelangarai,
there will be no incremental development, there will be an explosion of high-rises, and perhaps
rapid gentrification.

23

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