https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392117697465 Current Sociology 1 –16 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0011392117697465 journals.sagepub.com/home/csi CS From the basti to the ‘house’: Socio-spatial readings of housing policy in India Gautam Bhan Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, India Abstract In June 2015, the Government of India approved a national housing program called the Prime Minster’s Awas Yojana (PMAY; Prime Minister’s Housing Plan), the latest in a series of ‘urban missions’ that have seen the urban emerge as an object for policy intervention in a country long rurally imagined. The emergence of these missions has necessitated the construction of a new urban grammar. Concepts, categories and classifications have sought to define, delineate and measure different aspects of the urban landscape so that different modes of practice and intervention may emerge. This article reads this grammar. It does so not to assess policy through its design, efficacy or feasibility, but to argue that policies, at least in part, attempt to create their own objects. A policy is thus both a product and an agent of contemporary politics, simultaneously instrumental and generative, acting as a means to an end but also an end unto itself. It is, in many ways, as much a site of the construction of meaning as it is the allocation of resources. This article looks at housing policy in the Indian city from a particular site: auto-constructed neighborhoods in the Indian city – referred to here as the basti in contra-distinction to the ‘slum’. In doing so, it offers a socio-spatial reading of these settlements along three lines: transversality, transparency and opacity. It then reads the proposed new national housing policy against these spatialities and argues that the policy fundamentally misrecognizes ‘housing’ in the Indian city. Keywords Informality, slum, southern urbanism Corresponding author: Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, IIHS Bangalore City Campus, 197/36 2nd Main Road, Sadasivanagar, Bangalore 560080, India. Email: gbhan@iihs.co.in 697465CSI 0010.1177/0011392117697465Current Sociology Bhan research-article 2017 Article 2 Current Sociology In June 2015, the Government of India approved a national housing program – what is known in India as a ‘Centrally Sponsored Scheme’ – called the Prime Minster’s Awas Yojana (PMAY; Prime Minister’s Housing Plan). In India’s federal system, a centrally sponsored scheme channels funds for a specific purpose (in this case particular modes of providing affordable housing) from the central government to the states. 1 The tagline signaled the scheme’s ambition and imagination: ‘Housing for All by 2022’. 2 The PMAY represents a continuation of a relatively recent trend in India. While rural development had long dominated the attention of policy makers in a country believed to – demographically, politically and affectively – ‘live in its villages’ (Gandhi, 1967: 302), recent years have seen the urban emerge as an object for policy intervention. The first set of urban policies initiated at the national scale in 2005 was the previous government’s ambitious Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM), a comprehensive set of infrastructure, housing and urban development programs that one of its architects described as ‘one of the most extraordinary shifts in thinking in India about cities and urbanization’ (Mathur, 2009: 31). As part of the JnNURM, the particular scheme that focused on housing was called the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), whose own tagline was nothing less than seeking ‘slum-free cities’ (Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation [hereafter MoHUPA], 2013). The PMAY is part of the second generation of such ‘national urban missions’, sitting alongside similarly ambitious programs on sanitation, infrastructure, smart cities, and the provision of basic environmental services like water and sewerage. 3 The ‘urban turn’ – to use Gyan Prakash’s evocative phrase – indeed does seem to have taken root in the Indian policy landscape (Prakash, 2002). The emergence of these missions has necessitated the construction of a new urban grammar. Concepts, categories and classifications have sought to define, delineate and measure different aspects of the urban landscape so that different modes of practice and intervention may emerge. In this article, I am not interested in an analysis of policy that focuses on design, efficacy, or feasibility. Such readings presume that the object or prob- lem that policies seek to address exists independently of the policy. I argue instead that policies, at least in part, attempt to create their own objects. They do so necessarily imperfectly, in a dialectical and productive tension with other understandings of these objects – for example of ‘smart cities’ or ‘inclusive growth’ – but still significantly. A policy is thus both a product and an agent of contemporary politics, simultaneously instrumental and generative, acting as a means to an end but also an end unto itself. It is, in many ways, as much a site of the construction of meaning as it is the allocation of resources. In the context of this monograph issue, I suggest that relational readings of space are particularly suited to such inquiry. Through a socio-spatial reading of the PMAY, I ask: what does the policy mean by ‘housing’ when it promises ‘Housing for All’? I do so to argue that the PMAY seeks to perform a critical shift from the form, social relations and temporalities that have hitherto characterized the ways in which affordable housing has been built in Indian cities. Instead of embedding itself in these practices, the PMAY seeks to reduce ‘housing’ to a ‘house’, a fixed spatial, economic and legal form of dwell- ing unit. This shift from housing to house, I argue, has tremendous social, political and Bhan 3 economic consequences that we can recognize only if we read housing socio-spatially rather than see it as just an infrastructural or economic unit. Below, I focus on one such set of existing socio-spatial practices of creating and inhabiting affordable housing: the basti. The Hindi/Urdu word basti (related to basna , to settle; plural: bastis ) means settlement. Colloquially, it is the word most commonly used by residents of urban poor settlements in northern Indian cities to describe their homes and communities. In this general meaning, bastis are understood to represent settlements typically marked by some measure of physical, economic and social vulnerability. It is these settlements that are often called ‘slums’. I use basti rather than slum both following its use by residents as well as in line with several scholars who argue that the use of the term ‘slum’ itself can be one of the ways in which certain forms of settlements are devalued and impoverished (see Ramanathan, 2004; Rao, 2006; Roy, 2004). 4 I also focus on bastis both because they are a declared object of housing policy and because they have been the dominant mode of producing and inhabiting the city for a majority of income-poor residents of India’s cities, as with most auto-constructed cities in the global south (Caldeira, 2014). The article proceeds as follows. The next section locates the PMAY in a policy con- text in India and describes it in more detail. Thereafter, a brief section lays out a well- known theoretical framework shared by many of the authors of this monograph issue on socio-spatial reading. Then, I present a socio-spatial reading of the basti on three lines: transversality, transparency and opacity. I contrast these socio-spatial practices of making a basti with those of the ‘house’ proposed under the PMAY. I conclude with a reflection on the implications of this contrast and what it means for contemporary housing policy in urban India. From Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) to Prime Minister’s Awas Yojana (PMAY) The PMAY’s story actually begins from its predecessor: the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), the main housing scheme of the previous government. Running from 2010 to 2013, the RAY marked a significant development in the Indian housing landscape. Its terms sig- naled a desire to include. The vision statement aimed to create ‘inclusive and equitable cities in which every citizen has access to basic civic infrastructure, social amenities and decent shelter’ (MoHUPA, 2013: 5). A sense of multiplicity was evident in the vision. Housing was seen not just as a dwelling unit or shelter but also as infrastructure and amenities. The RAY’s core objective was thus similarly scaled: ‘improving and provi- sioning of housing, basic civic infrastructure and social amenities in intervened slums’ (MoHUPA, 2013: 5). The site of intervention was the neighborhood, not the individual housing unit. Appropriate modes of intervention then followed. In-situ development was encour- aged and, crucially, it was separated into two distinct modes. The first was termed ‘rede- velopment’ described as the ‘development of the entire slum by providing adequate housing and infrastructure (civic and social) to the slum dwellers after demolition of the existing built structures’ (MoHUPA, 2013: 9; emphasis mine). This was distinguished 4 Current Sociology from ‘in-situ upgradation’ which developed ‘the entire slum by filling gaps in housing and infrastructure (civic and social) to the slum dwellers without complete demolition of the existing structures’ (MoHUPA, 2013: 9; emphasis mine). This distinction is crucial. Redevelopment re-builds an entire slum, focusing on the construction of new houses. Here, vertical apartment style construction quickly became the norm, laid out on grid patterns and rising from two to five floors. This was called ‘new housing’ (MoHUPA, 2013: 10). Upgradation, however, drew on histories of neighborhood improvement that focused on improving housing (‘filling gaps’) through the improvement of collective infrastructure, letting individual houses improve slowly through private investment in their own time. 5 This was termed ‘incremental housing’ (2013: 10). Improvement in housing, in this manner, can be defined and understood as improvements in community- level infrastructure and social amenities, attributes that make housing livable and viable without necessarily improving the materiality of the house itself. In contrast, the PMAY’s objective describes its mission thus: to ‘support the con- struction of houses up to 30 square meter carpet area with basic civic infrastructure’ (MoHUPA, 2015: 1). This shift from ‘housing’ to ‘houses’ is not just semantic – the PMAY funds projects markedly different from those under the RAY. The main mode of spatial intervention is ‘in-situ slum redevelopment’, described as the use of ‘land as a resource’ with ‘public private participation’ to create ‘houses for slum dwellers’ (MoHUPA, 2015: 2). These houses have to be apartments of 30–60 m 2 that are to be allotted with property titles to individually delineated nuclear families. This is like the RAY’s imagination of ‘new housing’. But what is different from the RAY is that the possibility of ‘upgradation’ or ‘incremental housing’ has been removed – only new houses are to be built. In another part of the scheme, some incrementality does seem possible. Here, individual households 6 can avail of subsidized loans to enhance their existing house rather than building a new house. However, ‘ownership’ has been made mandatory: beneficiaries have to have ‘adequate documentation regarding availability of land owned by them’ (MoHUPA, 2015: 10). Given that the basti is often defined precisely by the absence of such documentation, this condition means that incremental improvement remains open to very few households. On socio-spatial reading How should we read these policies? Before we proceed, I give a brief note on the con- ceptual approach for the socio-spatial reading that follows. This article uses one tradition given the limits of time and space: the work of structural-materialist theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Edward Soja. Both Lefebvre and Harvey are concerned with the material dimensions of space just as they are with its symbolic register and its relationship to other objects and phenomena. While Lefebvre speaks of his now well-known triad of lived, perceived and conceived space, Harvey speaks of a related but different triad of absolute, relative and relational space (Harvey, 1973, 2006; Lefebvre, 1991). Absolute space, for Harvey, is when one views space ‘as a thing in itself’, one ame- nable to measurement, demarcation and calculation. This is the most recognizable form of space to many and certainly to the world of policy – the space of the Cartesian Bhan 5 geometry of grids and units. In contrast, space is relative, Harvey argues, when it is seen as a ‘relationship between objects’ which exists not ‘in itself’ but only because the ‘objects exist and relate to each other’. Here, the context of relation, and ‘what is being relativized by whom’ become crucial, as does the dimension of time (Harvey, 2006). The space of the 30 m 2 house, in other words, derives its meaning only in relation to the basti it seeks to replace – it is not just a thing unto itself. In this understanding of relative space, objects are related but still autonomous. Relational space, Harvey’s third category, marks when space is ‘contained in objects in a sense that objects can be said to exist only insofar as they contain and represent within themselves relations to other objects’ (Harvey, 1973: 13, as cited in Harvey, 2006). Reading space this way implies that no easy distinction can then exist between space as a container for social relations, a determinant of them, or a product shaped by them. When we read socio-spatially, as Soja reminds us, spatiality is both ‘social product (or outcome) and a shaping force (or medium) in social life’ (Soja, 1989: 7). Martina Löw elaborates on this space–society compact, reading space as a ‘relational ordering of liv- ing entities and social goods’ allowing us to distinguish ‘what is ordered and who orders it’ (Löw, 2008: 35). The usefulness of these conceptual distinctions is in helping us ask and answer, as Harvey says, the question of ‘how is it that different human practices create and make use of different conceptualisations of space?’ (1973: 14). In thinking of the shift from housing to the house, this analytical tradition allows us multiple spatial readings. Housing as a space is then not just a materiality or built form. We must simultaneously assess it as a space that represents a certain production of exchange value in particular political eco- nomic regimes; ask what social forces generate it as well as the social practices, mean- ings and norms it generates in turn; understand the implicit and explicit temporalities within it; see the meanings attributed to it or the emotions or affect associated with it; understand how its relations with other societal formations are different from, say, the basti ; as well as use it to assess broader social relations of power within which it is pro- duced and embedded. It is to this that I now turn. The space of the basti What is a basti ? At its simplest, an archetypical basti is a settlement that houses residents who are often income-poor in a built environment that reflects some measure of their impoverishment. Characterized by relatively poor environmental services and infrastruc- ture, it consists of houses often built of what are considered ‘temporary’ materials – thatch, bamboo, plastic or tarpaulin sheets – though a significant number may just as well be made in brick and concrete, particularly in older bastis. Master plans as well as municipal and other laws variously consider bastis as ‘informal’ or ‘illegal’ because they are built in violation of planning norms and standards, and usually through the occupa- tion and settlement of public or private land that basti residents do not own in title. This is the way housing policy reads the basti : a definable object that can be understood, mapped, bounded and intervened into. Yet what if we ask instead: what kind of space is a basti ? Read this way, the answer shifts. The basti becomes much more than a place, a type of built environment or a 6 Current Sociology planning category. Read relationally, its graspable, tangible, absolute space begins to become porous, blurry and difficult to contain. What it is, and what it means, are altered. Below, I offer three of what are undoubtedly many possible readings of the basti as a relational or relative space: transversality, transparency and opacity. Transversality The basti marks a certain political relation. It does so because a basti in New Delhi – just like a favela in Rio de Janeiro, a musseque in Luanda, or a sahakhum in Phnom Penh – is not just a place but a form that, as many scholars have argued, constitutes a particular mode of urbanization (Benjamin, 2008; Bhan, 2016; Caldeira, 2014; Ghertner, 2015; Roy, 2005). Teresa Caldeira writes of this mode as a process of ‘auto- construction’, the production of the city by residents and communities building and constructing their own homes and neighborhoods. Auto-construction, she argues, is marked by ‘transversal engagements with official logics of legal property, formal labor, colonial dominance, state regulation, and market capitalism’ (Caldeira, 2014). In many cities of the global south, this mode of urbanization is not the exception but, in fact, represents the way in which most urban residents – rich and poor – find a place in the city. The basti then is not simply ‘illegal’. It represents a long-term negotiation – a ‘trans- versal engagement’, a relation of multiple circuits of power and meanings – with the state, law and planning that renders the meaning of the latter objects themselves uncer- tain and transformed. It is not just, then, that law and planning see the basti as illegal but that the basti shows precisely the limits of legal categories to have either meaning or implication, confounding what ‘law’ or ‘planning’ themselves mean in the auto- constructed city. As objects, each of these then constitutes and gives meaning to the other. It is not a coincidence that scholars of urban India across disciplines repeatedly find themselves trying to interpret and mine these relations as sites of meaning. Ayona Datta has argued that ‘encounters with the law in everyday life have destabilised the binaries of urban studies – state-citizen, urban poor-middle class, city-slum, centre-periphery’ (2012: 518). Asher Ghertner has shown how evictions of bastis and other urban develop- ment in Delhi make visible a ‘rule by aesthetics’ where the ‘rule of law’ is produced within a ‘grid of aesthetic norms’ that determines legality as well as status (2015: 281). In the contemporary Indian city, as I have argued elsewhere in detail (Bhan, 2016), a basti can be seen as a territorialization of a political engagement within which sub- altern urban residents negotiate – incrementally, over time, and continuously – their presence in the city. This engagement is transversal by nature, refusing linear and appar- ent readings with defined actors. It is an engagement with (but not limited to) the institu- tions of the government that often involves their implicit and explicit patronage and, at times, even their active participation. It works through as well as despite the law and regimes and practices of planning. It takes just as often the form of resistance and opposi- tion – through, for example, vigorous social movements resisting eviction or pursuing greater legitimacy and security of tenure – as it does the more institutionalized forms of state–citizen relations such as the ballot. As Solomon Benjamin has argued, these are better understood as part of the ‘open-endedness’ of the city within an ‘occupancy Bhan 7 urbanism’, rather than narrow readings of clientelism and patronage (Benajmin, 2008). Ananya Roy would argue, in a different register, that such engagement makes visible urban informality rather than policy acting as regimes of rule, creating a ‘spatial vocabu- lary of control, governance and territorial flexibility’ (Roy, 2004: 157). Reading the basti is, then, to read the current instantiation of this negotiation. In different political economies the (relational) space of the basti changes. If in one narrative of developmentalism, the basti marks precisely the vulnerability that a devel- opmental welfare state seeks to address and redeem, then in another, it represents instead what Vyjayanthi Rao has described as the ‘distorted substance’ that changes the ‘urban into a dysfunctional stage for violence, conflict and the iniquitous distribution of resources’ (Roy, 2004: 231). The former creates one kind of policy response, the latter another. It is not that the basti is external to this relation. It is instead – as Soja would have argued – both formed by this political relation and forms it. The nature and direction of this co-production are thus sites that make visible contemporary contesta- tions in urban politics. Temporality A second reading is that the basti as a space has a particular temporality. It is, as a form, evolving and incremental, never finished. An average house in a basti can take years to complete – moving forward every time resources come together to build one more wall, cover one more square yard, or when further negotiations add another layer of security to tenure arrangements or bring in a new infrastructure or service (see Hardoy and Sattherthwaite, 2014; IIHS, 2014; Payne, 2001, 2002). The structures of the house and the basti move with and reflect the politico-economic reality and potential of the people who live within it, as well of the city in which these are determined. This temporality is not linear – houses are just as easily erased through fire or flood, sold to withstand a welfare shock, are demolished in an eviction, or simply no longer represent a viable shot at life due to the constant changes in the kind of possibilities open to anyone at any point of time to make urban life work. The changing space–time of opportunity is a key part of the basti . If national and global economies go through ‘cycles’ and ‘recessions’ over years, then the basti represents the scale of space–time where pos- sibility emerges and vanishes in an instant, and a lottery is just as much a future plan as a savings account. Abdoumaliq Simone calls this a ‘make-shift life’, where residents literally ‘make’ and then ‘shift’ to adapt in rapidly changing circumstances to ‘constantly put together some workable form of income and inhabitation’ (Simone, in press). One can read this space–time in the form of the basti itself. Some houses may remain, build and grow. Others may stagnate for years. Still others may vanish, change hands, be built and rebuilt repeatedly without it being clear to what ends or by whom. Others see a rapid, spectacular shift in material life without clear explanation. ‘Success’ or ‘improve- ment’ become uncertain, contested words. Digging in, remaining and surviving are as much aspirations as growing, consolidating, transforming and improving. No single telos dominates, no single aspiration is possible. The basti as a space is precisely that which can absorb these flows of time, holding them and their contradictions together, aggregat- ing them but always being more (and less) than the sum of their parts. 7 8 Current Sociology How to frame the temporality of the basti is a key struggle in determining what kind of space it is and it is a tension that particularly marks policy approaches to it. Let me take one example: the language of the plan. State apparatuses of planning use a set of terms precisely to contain the temporality of the basti through the choice of terms they use to describe and define it. The term used in Master Plans in Delhi, for example, is ‘JJ Cluster’. If one visited bastis in Delhi, and asked for Ekta JJ Cluster or Sanjay Camp JJ Cluster, the likelihood is that one will be told that no such place exists. Instead, one will be asked: ‘do you mean Ekta Colony? Or Sanjay basti ?’ It is not unknowingly that resi- dents of bastis refuse the idea of the ‘cluster’ and replace it with the English word ‘col- ony’ even when they are not English speaking, or with other words: camps, nagar, basti Each of these words creates a different space–time than the ‘cluster’. A ‘cluster’ marks a spatial and temporal imagination that suggests something temporary, fragile and frag- mented. It seeks to deny the fact that most bastis have existed for years, slowly and incrementally adding layers of identity, infrastructure and basic services. A cluster mis- recognizes (Balibar, 1988) what is a community, a locality, a settlement, a colony. It marks instead a space that can be erased, whose absence is of no great loss since it was – in the first place – temporary, amenable to change and transformation whether for ‘improvement’ or for ‘clearance’. Opacity The third and final reading is that the basti possesses, requires and defends a certain opacity. Take the basti seen as an economy rather than a space of shelter. It is well established that most bastis are sites of dynamic and vibrant economic lives, particularly in an urban economic structure where what is called the ‘informal’ or ‘unorganized’ sector dominates both employment and economic production (Harriss-White and Prosperi, 2014; IIHS, 2016; NCEUS, 2007). The nature of the basti as a space is, again, both a context and outcome of these economic flows. Various forms of formal and informal activities popu- late its landscape that, on the one hand, flourish precisely because of the relative protec- tion that the space of the basti provides from external attention, and, on the other, create and maintain this spatial and political landscape to ensure the sustainability of this lever- aged visibility. For example, planning norms that prevent mixed use, particular forms of home-based work, or the keeping of animals are absent within the basti , allowing precisely for a kind of innovation and flexibility in the kinds of economic activities that take place, the ability to keep multiple such activities running at once, and the dynamism to quickly shift from one to another should an old opportunity vanish or a new opportunity arise. These shifts are further aided by the basti ’s ability to absorb new migrants into low-value economic and spatial circuits that allow easy access to affordable shelter as well as networks to find work at almost every skill level. These economies – local, the space of what Chatterjee (2008) calls ‘non-corporate capital’ – are dynamic, shifting entities. They engage with and respond to local and global economic trends that are still, however, deeply place-specific, able to take root in a particular space–time. Kaveri Gill captures this when she describes the shift that a Bhan 9 community of informal waste-pickers makes in a basti in east Delhi that move from working in wet waste to what they describe as a ‘modern’ and more profitable sector like recycling electronics and plastics. Gill argues that it is a combination of the caste geog- raphy of the settlement, its distance from formal regulation, as well as the ability to reconfigure a spatial landscape quickly to a new emerging industry, that allowed a com- munity with very little social and economic capital to still attain economic dynamism (Gill, 2010). This vibrancy requires a distance from legibility. Here, another one of the enduring tensions that shape the basti emerges. The opacity of the basti protects a certain space– time in which new possibilities emerge and a certain form of life is possible that is not possible in any other space in the city. Yet this opacity is precisely what also limits and contains the basti – its economic activity cannot scale, its materiality must improve slowly and remain within the sphere of vulnerability, its residents must always be proxi- mate to but not reducible to clear identification, their flexibility remaining always uncer- tainly distinct from exploitation. Every act of making the basti legible – the survey, for example, that would bring better water or more secure tenure, the registration and enu- meration of small enterprises, the distribution of identity cards – is equally one that brings the risks of visibility and legibility, opening up some opportunities and foreclos- ing others. Yet in the absence of such risks, the basti remains, in part, a space also of precarity, vulnerability and marginalization. The ideal type of the basti is thus a space of a constant, shifting balance between these opposing forces of opacity and legibility, consolidation and change, vulnerability and resilience, each and all of which are themselves nested in the larger shifts of its position in the city within very different political and economic conjunctures. The question then that remains is this: when the PMAY seeks to build ‘houses’ from this space, what is it that is sought to be transformed and how? From the basti to the house As I argued earlier, it is not my intention to debate the PMAY’s efficacy, design or feasi- bility. It is, instead, to point out its assumptions about one of the objects it implicitly and explicitly addresses – what it calls the ‘slum’ – and juxtapose that object with the space of the basti I have described above. I offer three juxtapositions below. The first juxtaposition is perhaps the most apparent reading of the PMAY. If the basti represents an opacity behind which lie multiple forms of economic value, then the attempt to rebuild it as individual houses with clear titles is an attempt to create a legible, visible and calculable landscape. Such houses are a commodity form amenable to exchange, their ability to accrue and transfer rent cemented through the creation of prop- erty from an uncertain landscape. For Lefebvre, the building of such individual houses is a classic description of a homogenization, of the creation of what he described as ‘abstract space’ (1991: 229). As Martina Löw has described, Lefebvre saw the measurement and control of space as a key means of the exercise of the power of capital: ‘hence the space too is made up of “boxes for living in”, of identical “plans” piled one on top of another or jammed next to one another in rows’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 384, as cited in Löw, 2008: 28). Space here, argues Löw, is characterized by Lefebvre as simultaneously fragmented and 10 Current Sociology homogenized: ‘fragmentation refers to the described division of space into marketable lots, while homogenization stresses the levelling-down of the exchange value, which in capitalism prevails over the utility value of space’ (Löw, 2008: 28). Such modes of transformation have gained significant currency because they do not just transform the basti into a different form of housing but also transform the land that bastis occupy. When Hernando de Soto (2000) argues that the poor sit on ‘dead capital’ that can be unlocked, it is not the space of the basti he refers to but the abstract space of the land below it. Such unlocking is not limited to the basti . Since real estate developers undertaking this transformation do so in exchange of Transfer Development Rights (TDR) elsewhere in the city, the project of transforming the basti also leads to changes in the housing market and built form of other parts of the city. Leveraged and unearthed from the basti ’s transformation, then, are square feet of real estate packaged as traded commodities, unshackled from particular building sites to be sold and moved in abstract space. Yet it is important to remember that this is not a move from space’s ‘utility value’, to quote Lefebvre (1991), to exchange. Such a reading would once again misrecognize the basti only as a space of use value, shelter and utility which, as I have argued earlier, it is not. Instead, the shift from housing to the house represents precisely a narrowing of the kind of economic exchange that can occur in these spaces, and the privileging of certain circuits of accumulation and value circulation over others. This is precisely because the opacity that defines and makes the basti what it currently is deeply chal- lenged in a settlement form centered around individual houses. Planning norms and standards, restrictions of use, and new regimes of taxation and maintenance restrict the possibilities for flexible yet opaque economic circuits, or of particular forms of vulner- able yet possible economic life. In fact, in the PMAY, the house is not seen as a place of work at all. It is exclusively intended as a shelter and asset. Nothing in either the PMAY or RAY suggested in either specifications or design that the ‘new housing’ would be anything other than shelter. From its design to its regulation, the house is contained as a space, unable to physically or legally bend to changing economic contexts or opportunities. The entire set of flows that shaped the basti as a particular economic space are rendered impossible in a complex of individual houses. The second juxtaposition follows from here. If the basti marks a transversal political relation, then policy brings to its negotiations a new set of terms and new arenas for contestation. As cities make ‘Housing for All’ plans, they mark and map bastis , bringing a new project management imperative to identifying and intervening in them. The terms of the ‘right to remain’ (Weinstein, 2014) are thus altered once again. If part of the basti ’s negotiation with the state was for the latter to look the other way, then both the RAY and PMAY have sought to bring the basti into sharp focus. The basti must then become the site of varied contestations on how to act, with different residents and com- munities within it engaging in that contestation from different locations and with differ- ent power. I do not wish to suggest either that basti residents do not have a way to use, evade or reject the set of ‘models’ and ‘choices’ the policy offers, or that (some or all) residents of particular bastis may not want to choose the models on offer. I am arguing only that this choice will have to be read against a landscape where security of tenure and presence Bhan 11 itself is predicated on making a choice of some kind, within a particular time frame and a mode of practice. Since PMAY projects require a level of ‘community consent’ (MoHUPA, 2015: 4) – though the means to demonstrate this consent remain ambiguous – a new space of contestation will certainly emerge. Different bastis will choose to give, modify, or deny consent, and will face, as they have done before, a new set of challenges in resisting, modifying or accepting yet another layer of transformation. The final juxtaposition is that the temporality of the house – unlike the basti – can be neither incremental nor multiple. A house as imagined under the PMAY represents a finished, fixed form that assumes a particular kind of social and economic life. This life bears the markers, habits and patterns of everyday life under a particular political economy: steady income, nuclear families, the individual fulfillment of needs, a particular telos of accumulation of assets and experiences, a particular landscape of consumption. Yet the basti ’s ability to absorb and sustain both new migrants and income-poor residents was rooted precisely in its ability to make space for non-linear lives that are marked by risk, the absence of social protection against frequent and everyday welfare shocks. There is no evidence to suggest that incomes have shifted in any manner for a majority of urban Indian residents that would allow them to live the economic life of regular payments and guaranteed incomes that a housing unit imagi- nes. If the basti as a form is then shaped by where its residents are in their lives (to play with that spatial metaphor), the individual house is abstracted precisely from such an embedding or sensitivity to location. 8 I do not want to suggest that that the kind of redevelopment that the PMAY seeks is entirely collapsible to a narrative of dispossession. The ‘house’ is its own set of spati- alities, many of which we have not seen yet and whose own possibilities over time we do not know. Even in the present, basti residents who move into houses will certainly inherit new assets, partake in new economic circuits, possibly enjoy a higher and more secure level of services, and move into more reliable and safe dwelling units. New forms of social status and capital may become available, new ways of belonging, senses of selfhood and means of relating to the city. Just like opacities enabled some economic flows, legibility will enable others. Many will buy and sell property, possi- bly shift to higher levels of accumulation, enjoy greater and more secure consumption, circulate in the formal registers of loans, benefits and secure identification. Better forms of design may emerge from this settling just as the basti evolved, with the cur- rent standardized form of the ‘house’ itself becoming undone or transformed. Housing built through the form of a collection of standardized houses will thus create its own socio-spatialities and space–time, creating yet another transformation that will open up some opportunities and close others. However, the question for the PMAY – itself a creation of a particular space and time – remains this: have the forces and flows that led to the basti being formed shifted in such a way that the new spatialities of the ‘house’ are the more appropriate form through which to settle the city? In the current political economy of urban India, is there a new kind of urban citizen who can play this game, take on its windfalls but also weather its risks? If not, what is the measure – for the resident, for the basti , for the city – of what stands to be gained and lost in a transformation that is triggered rather than auto-con- structed and negotiated? 12 Current Sociology Tracing new interfaces The new housing policy announced by the Government of India is the latest of a long list of many kinds of external events, processes or shocks – depending on how one sees it – that the basti has faced. It is not my intention to argue that the PMAY wields any new or disproportionate power to shape, contain, discipline or transform the basti. The role of plans and policies in the auto-constructed city is a much longer story of the inability to shape outcomes than it is success in transforming landscapes. Yet, as I have argued else- where, even failed plans shape the objects they seek to influence, in intended and unin- tended ways (Bhan, 2013). It remains important for us, therefore, to read the interfaces in which the basti and this particular policy will meet if only to be attentive to what will emerge from them and what shape these interfaces will take. The relational and spatial readings of the basti and the house made in this article sug- gest that these interfaces will be one of intense friction precisely because the spatialities of these two objects are deeply distinct from one another, more so than the ‘incremental housing’ of the RAY was. The PMAY – deliberately or otherwise – misreads and mis- recognizes the space of the basti , especially in its relational characteristics. Doing so implies that the policy’s own conceptions of space must be imposed on the basti and such imposition cannot but be a space of a certain kind of violence – both creative and destructive, spectacular and ordinary. As the policy is implemented, it is these interfaces that future research must trace. In doing so, it must go beyond commonsensical refer- ents of corruption, implementation gaps, delays, inappropriate technology, or the lack of capacity and financial resourc