Solomon J Benjamin

Coastal Karnataka’s rapidly urbanising South Canara reveals a substantive conceptual agenda for the SUBURBIN project. This chapter makes three interrelated arguments exploring its territories as multiple epistemologies: First, their multiple logics are socially and institutionally embedded in complex configurations to form relational spaces. Second, land, as both a site and a realm, embodies history, forms of property control and transfer, cultural meanings built on geography to shape economy. Third, these logics can be relatively autonomous, at times contesting in relationships. The substantive part of the chapter opens with ideas of sacredness. It reveals South Canara as a site constituted of guardian sprits and spirit possession, and deeply imbibed in real estate practices. An analysis of transport and connectivity, following this section, traces their evolution since the early 1930s to emphasise how ethnics and families lobby to engage with higher public authorities on issues of regulation and infrastructure. The third part focuses on the fishing economy as a transnational space—a reminder of this region’s trading history with East Africa, SE Asia and China. Economy is embedded and, similar to transport, shaped by ethnic aspects. This read of South Canara can be seen to be a stringent critique of the New Economic Geography (NEG) that is not only dehistoricised but also oblivious to material constructs shaped by complex institutional and cultural spaces.

The framing of ‘southern urbans’ poses urbans as a diversity of ‘landing sites’ constituted around ‘local’ political economies, under capital’s planetary condition. However, tongbian philosophy connects to the complexity of land tenure beyond such implied colonial cartography. Colonial urban history reveals how land tenurial under colonial administrations remained unsettled and politicized sites: in Bombay; urban sites across Canada, such as ‘Turtle Island’; and Palestine Australia; Niger, among other sites in Africa; and Indonesia. While people recognize the importance of the philosophy of internal relations in itself, the tongbian philosophy is central to emphasize spatial complementaries and problematize contradictions in land transformation. According to the tongbian epistemology, knowledge is developed within the context. Unlike others around the world, the Hong Kong government has always been under the command of the British government at a distance while living with the Chinese within, as well as outside, the city boundary.

As a framing device, occupancy urbanism disrupts the notion that master planning could be the sole defining reference locating forms of territoriality, demarcating illegal non-conforming development or conf lating the history of the city with ‘modernity’ (Holston 1989; Sarin 1982; Sundaram 2010). Such perspectives name territorial processes beyond the plan as externalities: as ‘slums’, ‘the informal sector’, or as ‘piracy’; their underlying politics is viewed as a perversion, for instance as ‘vote banks’ and ‘patron clientelism’, and a criminalized ‘Urban Infra Power’ (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009) all driven by the ‘land mafia’. As deeply politicizing processes, the working of land embeds a range of diverse and often conf licting actors into urban administration, such as: settler groups, municipal councillors, firms, but also higher levels of the state and its associated agents. Challenging conventional assumptions about the politics of urban land in southern cities, occupancy urbanism draws attention to the complexities of political practice and helps us think about how particular parts of the state govern through law and regulation formed and directed in a world of practice.