Contestation over Property Regimes and Housing: (Un)doing Commodified Urban Land Ownership in India and Germany

The first phase focused on property practices within India’s largest and iconic “slum”, Dharavi in Mumbai (Case Study A), and on property dynamics over four generations in an extended Dalit patrilineage in the semi-urban/rural context of Madhya Pradesh (Case Study B). Both case studies exposed the socio-political embeddedness of property relations and requalified conceptual assumptions. Reconceptualizing land and housing property categories in the case of Dharavi, we realized there was a need to overcome the binaries of formal versus informal, de jure and de facto property relations, and legality versus illegality, and introduced the concept “constructing ownership rights in practice” to capture prevalent property hybrids. The second phase of the project intends to deepen the understanding of property regimes and contemporary forms of (un)doing property through the overarching conceptual lens of contestation. To that end, the project will extend its comparative approach, involving other metropolitan regions, Bangalore and Delhi/Gurgaon, on the one hand (Case Study A), and, in an effort to straddle the “Global South”/ “Global North” divide, to Germany on the other (Case Study B). Both case studies will analyze three arenas of contestation over property. In Germany contestations over (1) the socialisation of land, (2) the management of land and land policies, (3) land taxation and the appropriation of socially produced surplus value; in India contestations over (1) “slum” redevelopment (“urban poor”), (2) land use planning concerning middle-class housing, (3) land governance and real estate development in the urban-rural interface. With regard to methods, we combine fieldwork, qualitative interviews, the use of publicly available documents, and critical discourse analysis, emphasizing contextual factors. Contestations are involved in a process that we describe as doing, undoing, and redoing property. We see radicalisation and contestation of commodified property and the formulation of alternative forms of property not as independent of each other but as simultaneous and dialectically related. Contestations over property unfold within and not outside the existing property orders and socio-institutional contexts, at once counteracting and contributing to the reproduction of existing property regimes. Based on the case studies, the project will trace and compare the trajectories of contestations of the urban land/housing property regimes in the two “Global North” and “Global South” contexts and discuss the question of their transformation/reproduction. It will investigate similarities and differences in property practices in the urban context in the two countries, the different de jure/de facto articulations of property, practices that undermine private land consolidation and commodification, and how these are conceptualized in the affected areas and by scholars. While the land and housing question is rooted in specific contexts, we suggest that a comparative perspective allows making more general theoretical claims about urban property regimes and the dual process of radicalization and contestation under present global conditions.