Planning the Millennium City: The politics of place-making in Gurgaon,India

Introduction

The following paper presents research on the politics of place-making in Delhi’s satellite, Gurgaon, the “millennium city.” The Delhi Land and Finance Corporation (DLF) was one of the first to coin the nickname. Beginning in the late 1970s, the DLF launched one of the largest real estate acquisitions in India’s history, assembling nearly 3500 acres of what was relatively inexpensive agricultural land. This venture was accelerated by economic liberalization reforms in the 1990s, and triggered a massive rush to build and invest in Gurgaon. Since then, the city has grown to over 1 million inhabitants. With its municipal government established as recently as 2008, Gurgaon has also become a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of public–private partnerships, headlining with stories such as “Gurgaon: How not to Build a City” (Narayana Kumar, 2012). It is often unclear who is responsible for planning. The real estate developers (also referred to as builders or colonists), the municipal corporation, and state-level agencies share an entangled set of responsibilities for various sectors and the provision of goods and services.

Nonetheless, Gurgaon’s exponential growth illustrates its desirability despite the bad press. It has become a destination city, attracting corporate talent and migrant labor from all over the country. Some of its worst critics are also the most vocal champions of its possibilities. The research presented in this paper finds a much more complex web of meaning and attitudes associated with Gurgaon than either the futuristic millennium city brand or doomsday media coverage suggests. This paper examines the ways in which residents identify and address gaps in the practice of planning within local government and the private sector, a set of activities referred to here as the politics of place-making.

Through in-depth interviews with residents, activists, and planning professionals, the research asks: what possibilities exist, in the post-liberalization Indian city, for residents to forge a coherent sense of place or plan within the piecemeal? For Gurgaon, can the notion of planning be recuperated? Answering these questions requires considering a broader understanding of what planning is or could be. It may not simply be satisfaction or dissatisfaction that triggers participation in planning, but ambivalence and a desire not to abandon place, but to make do with it. Place-making becomes a process by which individuals and groups work out this ambivalence. In response to many of its challenges, Gurgaon has become an incubator for a number of civil society groups, targeting urban service delivery, among other causes. The line between the demands of establishing a home in a new city and formal planning becomes increasingly blurred in the accounts of residents. In Gurgaon, I argue, the politics of place-making becomes a form of planning in its own right.

The paper is structured as follows. The first section offers theory and definitions for planning and place-making in the context of the research. It traces the conceptual arch of planning as a field of theory and practice. This entails describing the historical challenges of planning as a government practice that is subject to the legacies of bureaucratic, post-colonial governance and informality, which make certain kinds of planning innovation, participation, or transparency profoundly difficult (Mathur, 1996; Roy, 2009). A lack of participation or inclusion of local perspectives is often accompanied by the implementation of one-size-fits-all planning solutions, applied without careful consideration of social or cultural context (Hull, 2011). While much scholarship has treated planning as a heuristic for looking at the weaknesses of state governance, this paper treats planning not as an example of how institutions work, but as a broader concept and normative practice in service of the public domain. The issue of context, or inclusive planning that addresses the specific wants, desires, values and needs of a city’s residents, is central to the idea of place-making, which has slowly crept into mainstream planning discourse.

The second section of the paper offers a brief history of Gurgaon. The third section details the methods used in the research and their justification. The fourth section describes the research findings, focusing on constituent groups and their roles in planning, local politics, and spatial relationship to the city within various enclaves. Participants include formal government planners, members of housing societies, residents of gated communities, plotted areas and urban villages, and activists involved in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other volunteer organizations that tackle planning issues in Gurgaon.

Among the key findings include, for Gurgaon’s urban villagers, a narrative of rural Haryanvi culture displaced by the city’s rapid urbanization. However, the experiences of low-income migrants are undervalued in structured attempts at place-making. Within formal planning, the institutional frameworks for planners to address issues beyond zoning, licensing, and facilitating Gurgaon’s real estate development, are lacking. Finally, among middle-class and more affluent residents, a sense of ambivalence and frustration has led to direct action beyond the scope of residential organizations and housing societies.

Theory and definitions: planning and place-making in India

Planning is often synonymous with physical planning and the making of master-plans. Despite half a century of theoretical and practical reflection and innovation, this is still often the primary avenue for the profession. This paper offers a more broad and flexible definition of planning as a “mode of decision-making” and an “eclectic field” of procedural practices and technologies used to benefit the public domain (Friedmann, 1987). The planners could be individuals or institutions that make decisions and put them into practice, such as government agencies, private firms, NGOs, civil society groups, or even citizens themselves.

Since India’s independence in the middle of 20th century, the notion of planning, as a state-sponsored enterprise of large public works and interventions, has experienced setbacks that altered the profession in important ways (Fainstein, 1996). Early planning theory drew on 19th century social science in response to the problems of rapid industrialization, poverty, crime, and disease in European cities (Hall, 2002). After World War II, the US’s suburban boom contributed to the deterioration of central cities. Large-scale urban renewal projects did little to ameliorate, and often exacerbated, the socioeconomic ills of urban minority populations and the poor (Clavel, 1986). The failures of planning opened up other ways of considering the role of a planner, for example, as someone who could facilitate community development and social learning, or mediate public disputes (Friedmann, 1987; Marris, 1987). The discipline also began to take seriously the knowledge and desires of local communities as inputs to decision-making and intervention, drawing on many disciplinary approaches to the study of urban populations (Healey, 1996). For example, Gans’s (1982) work offered important insights into the composition of an ethnic enclave facing displacement, and highlighted the importance of place-attachment, social networks, and neighborhood culture. However, even with new emphasis on more democratic or inclusive practices, the financial crises of the 1970s and 1980s allowed entries for a neoliberal agenda. This became visible in patterns of devolution, privatization, corporatization, in the US and abroad, and a new faith in the market to supply the actors who would shape the growth and development of cities.

The planning profession in India is highly specialized. Planners tend to have formal planning degrees or backgrounds in architecture and civil engineering, and work through government institutions (Kudva, 2008). The creation of master-plans occurs largely at the state level and within cities of a certain size. After independence in 1947, various aspects of colonial planning were dismantled, while others were retained, as the new administration asserted its legitimacy as a planner for the nation. Hull (2011) suggests that technocratic planning could only reproduce the strategies of colonial bureaucracy or look to outside influences. For instance, 5-year plans were borrowed from the soviet model (Roy, 2007). Urban ecologists from the Chicago School assisted Indian planners on Delhi’s first master-plan of 1962, drawing on Clarence Perry’s neighborhood unit concept, although attempts to integrate disparate religious communities in urban colonies were rejected by their intended beneficiaries (Hull, 2011). In light of the failures of cut-and-paste urban planning solutions, there has been an ongoing debate about the relevance of planning theory generated in the global North for addressing the contexts and planning issues of the global South (Watson, 2009; Yiftachel, 1998). For example, the tendency to use the word community as a neutral planning term or as shorthand for a gated housing development can be problematic in India, where the concept is charged with myriad religious, ethnic, regional, caste or sub-caste (jati) connotations. From the early 20th century, religious or region-specific belonging has even played a role within ostensibly secular financial associations, such as the early South Indian housing societies of Mumbai’s suburbs (Rao, 2012).

In practice, place and community are often incorrectly lumped together, or assumed to coincide, circumscribed and enumerated by various kinds of boundaries, such as the census tract or political district. This is not to argue that individuals across a range of cultural contexts do not feel a connectedness to place, even without close ties to neighbors or civil groups. Holston (2007) observes it is through propertied citizenship that one achieves a right to the city via membership within neighborhood groups and homeowners’ associations. Yet, even without the financial investments of home-ownership, the location of one’s domicile, and its social context, are the initial starting points for connections and attachments within a neighborhood or geographically defined area (Manzo and Perkins, 2006). In looking for evidence of place-making in Gurgaon, it becomes clear that certain kinds of communities are forged based on proximity, or at least a common point of origin and shared linguistic or cultural background, while other communities or affinity groups involve common interests or visions for the city mediated by similarities in class status, income, education, and international exposure. In Gurgaon, community and place are not interchangeable.

It is also important to recognize that there are conceptual differences between place and space. Space is not an inert container, but is shaped by co-generative social and labor practices over time (Goswami, 2004). Often, place is conceived of as an addendum to or as an organizing designation upon space. When we say “that place,” we’re speaking of a physical point on the surface of the Earth, but also implying a set of practices that both define and are defined by imagined boundaries or peripheries, such as India, a town, a city, a neighborhood, or a street. When we speak of place we are imagining a location that is specific (Agnew, 2011). This becomes apparent when asking participants in the study to describe where they live to someone who has never visited Gurgaon. There was often a need for clarification as to what counted as where one lives. Views of one’s neighborhood versus the city at large were different (the home usually received a more favorable depiction than the city). Gurgaon encompasses multiple places and relationships to those places in the minds of inhabitants that are also modified by the frame of reference and the scale of view, as well as distinctions between different kinds of space, such as private, semi-private or public. While the same conceptual distinctions apply to thinking about most cities, a common theme in responses was a feeling of placelessness, or that outside one’s home or neighborhood, the spatial logic of the city (or lack thereof) resisted a coherent sense of place. From a formal planning perspective, defining the city of Gurgaon as a bounded space or place becomes difficult due to the multiple jurisdictions of governance and its expanding boundaries. Certain spaces and places are part of the official plan, while others (urban villages) are essentially blanks on the map, and Gurgaon’s peri-urban condition confounds generalizations about where urban space ends and the rural begins (Narain, 2009).

Place-making is a process that inscribes space with social and cultural meaning (Pellow and Lawrence-Zuñiga, 2008). It enters planning discourse as an attempt to lessen the divide between the the ways in which individuals and groups form coherent narratives and attachments to space, shaping it through imagination, common assets, and social practices into places of meaning and value, and the programmatic work and agenda of formal planning institutions.

Planners have wondered how they can better serve the public domain by incorporating the phenomenon of place-making into their work. When real estate developers take up place-making, as in the case of Gurgaon, the result is often a product, a strategy for attracting revenue, or a brand, such as the “millennium city” tag. Land is commodified through real estate, and marketed through imagery that evokes the characteristics of already recognizable places: of the West, East Asia or a pastiche of Indian modernism. However, this kind of place-making often fails to address other needs of residents, who must form attachments and allegiances to a home and its surroundings beyond the prospect of one day selling. A complex tension emerges between place-making as a profit-seeking activity, interested in the exchange-value of housing, and the use-value of place for its end-users, who are more than just consumers of goods and services (Logan and Molotch, 1987).

Scholarship that studies such phenomena in India, or the challenges of post-liberalization Indian urbanism, as Shatkin (2013) and others have remarked, is still quite limited. Post-colonial discourse on Indian cities has tended to emphasize India’s uniqueness and resistance to the homogenizing effects of global capital. India’s continued struggles in the 20th century with severe poverty, the clashes of modernity, traditional culture and capitalism, fueled debates about the nation’s founding elites and the need to reconcile historical narratives with subaltern subjectivities. Chatterjee (2004) warned about romanticizing Indian civil society (an elite and exclusionary construct), calling for a mediating political society. Similarly, Baviskar’s (2003) “bourgeois environmentalism” challenges the good intentions of middle-class civil society, observing its clashes with subalterns over urban public space. Governance and governmentality literature on Indian cities offers and critiques the possibilities for non-state and non-elite actors to become involved in planning processes through grassroots movements around tenure rights and urban service delivery (Appadurai, 2002; Roy, 2009).

Within the governance literature, scholars have asked whether other institutional arrangements and practices, such as network governance, could replace or supplement the role of procedural democracy (Pierre, 2009). Since the 1950s, Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) in India have become synonymous with middle-class politics and participatory planning. As subscription-based housing societies, they take up similar responsibilities as homeowners’ associations and tend to be exclusive networks. Since 2000, Delhi’s award-winning Bhagidari scheme has worked primarily with RWAs in unauthorized colonies. While Harriss (2005) has argued that procedural democracy is where India’s poor have their greatest presence in public decision-making, initiatives, such as Bhagidari, skirt the ballot box. Rather, they facilitate a direct dialogue between appointed bureaucrats and well-to-do residents (Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal, 2012), and provide further evidence of the “gentrification of the state” (Ghertner, 2013). One of the core criticisms of the notion of participatory planning is that it frequently misunderstands the structures of power (Flyvbjerg, 1996). An idea of inclusion, desirable in one light, can easily be distorted by the political culture and power structures in which it finds itself. RWAs perhaps represent something closer to the notion of stakeholderism, as relative shareholders pooling collective resources for services. Furthermore, it is only property owners who have a say in them.

Even among NGOs and other organizations that work toward inclusive programming, offering services for the poor and vulnerable populations, the networks and opportunities for participation in them may also be exclusive in a certain sense. Such forms of governance require strong relationships between people, essentially a collective of like-minded citizens joined by a common purpose (Stoker, 2006). They also rely on strong leadership and coalitions around particular issues. In other words, no individual organization usually has the capacity to address as broad a platform of issues as governments themselves (Pierre, 2009).

What the case of Gurgaon may offer is a kind of participatory planning that relies not on the state to extend itself or accommodate the voices of community members, but a form of participation that comes self-directed, from residents in search of state-based planning’s oversight. Residents take on responsibility as watchdogs, advocates, environmentalists, and storytellers. What remains to be seen is if these activities and the politics of place-making can overcome some of the shortcomings of participatory planning more broadly.

Research location: a brief history of the Millennium City

The city of Gurgaon is arguably a new place with a long history. Lying on arid plains skirted by the Aravalli hills, 30 km from the center of Delhi, the district of Gurgaon was composed of villages for generations. The region itself was once the breadbasket of Northern India, before tectonic shifts in the Himalayas diminished the Indus and Yamuna rivers (Jain and Dandona, 2012). According to local lore, Gurgaon is mentioned in Vedic texts and in the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, from where it takes its name, although this has not been confirmed. From the middle of the 16th to early 17th centuries, the region was composed of many dozens of villages and farming communities. These villages grew crops and raised livestock under the jurisdictions of Delhi and Agra. Sparring between chiefs and the decline of the Mughal empire put Gurgaon into British control at the beginning of the 19th century. The land was then subdivided into parganas or administrative units, and distributed to various local chiefs (Jain and Dandona, 2012).

After the mutiny and the events of 1857, the area was redistricted as part of the Punjab. The state of Haryana was later carved out after independence, in the 1960s, with its capital, Chandigarh, shared by Punjab. In the decades since independence, Gurgaon eventually became the backdrop for targeted industrialization with a Maruti auto plant, now a subsidiary of Japanese Suzuki. However, Gurgaon’s rapid urbanization was ensured after the DLF began assembling land for real estate development. The DLF was founded as a private, Indian-owned company in 1946. The company purchased and divided large tracts of Delhi’s land with the permission of the British planning authority. Post-partition, former land titles were revoked and the DLF was exiled from the city, eventually winning the rights to develop on what would become the first three phases of new Gurgaon. While the DLF had been active in the early years of independence in Delhi, the company had moved away from real estate by the time K.P. Singh took control from its founder (his father-in-law) in the late 1970s (Singh, 2011).

In the 1990s, due in large part to Singh’s relationship with executives of General Electric (GE), Gurgaon was selected for the location of the company’s Genpact headquarters in India, launching a wave of corporate development to accompany the work of the DLF’s residential enterprises (Donthi, 2014). Close to debt default in the late 1980s, India, adopted liberalization policies as part of an IMF-led restructuring program, loosening tariffs and duties on exports and the flow of foreign capital. India’s early policies and projects as a democratic state were highly insular, import substitution focused and state based, with some reforms during Indira Gandhi’s tenure (Rodrik and Subramanian, 2004). The reforms of the latter years included lifting the land-ceiling limits of the post-colonial era, allowing DLF and other builders to assemble enough acreage to essentially build a city from the ground up.

In his autobiography, Singh describes how he built relationships with those in power, including Rajiv Gandhi. Over decades of pressure and battles with the Chief Commissioner of Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA), Singh asserts that he eventually obtained the government permissions and backing from industrialists in the US to push through the DLF’s projects. The DLF not only pushed for government reforms, but also provided financial services and lending to the farmers whose land they had purchased. The capital was then used to finance the costs of construction. Singh claims he went door to door convincing villagers to sell their plots to the company, and then advised them to reinvest their compensation in exchange for 12% interest.

DLF needed money for developing land and the partnership mode was the best way forward…There were times when we bought land, handed over the money and then got them to give it back to us as investment in DLF on the very same day! (Singh, 2011)

Since the early period of the DLF’s projects, investors, small builders, and large multinational corporations have joined the real estate scene in Gurgaon, not only as landlords, but as occupants of its commercial spaces, including MG road’s infamous mall mile. Scores of multinational companies have opened offices across the city’s commercial high-rises and office parks, attracting a population of corporate professionals as well as low-income, migrant laborers. The latter have taken service work or manufacturing jobs in Gurgaon’s industrial areas. Having property in Gurgaon is seen as a good investment for some, with unoccupied units in many complexes and gated communities owned by absent investors. Without environmental oversight and limited irrigation, water rights fell to builders and property owners whose activities are depleting or contaminating the water table in peri-urban areas (Narain, 2009). The uncoordinated efforts of builders have created a built environment that scholars describe as a city of islands and of unconnected enclaves, in which governance is as divided as its discrete gated communities and urban villages (Cowen, 2015). However, the seemingly segregated city involves a web of entangled relationships between people who may not share the same rights or privileges, but depend on one another and maintain porous boundaries (Srivastava, 2014). Conflicting narratives of place, space, community, dependence, and isolation, bring to the foreground the need for planning research to engage with an idea of place and its characteristics from the perspectives of residents themselves.

Research methods

The research takes the perspective, shared by scholars in planning and related disciplines, that interviews and participant observation are important inputs to generating theory, as well as implementing socially just planning interventions. Observing evidence of place-making and related activities required, as Pinel (2015) describes, identifying stakeholders, what they know, what is important to them, and how they might respond to the urban built environment and possible solutions.

The research involved discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews with approximately 45 participants over an 8-month period. The participants included laypersons, professionals in government planning positions, consultants in urban service delivery and social justice-related NGOs, as well as volunteers in similar organizations, including RWAs, and a number of academics conducting research on Gurgaon. Participants include landowners and landlords who also occupy the spaces they rent or manage, as well as members of RWAs that are sponsored by corporate builders such as DLF. Participant’s occupations ranged from planning-related fields, including transportation planning and architecture, self-employed entrepreneurs and corporate sector employees, to primary caregivers or voluntarily un/underemployed women or housewives, retirees, domestic service workers, such as personal assistants, care-takers, maids, cooks, and drivers. A few of the participants were university students who were either supported by family or worked part-time. All were residents of Gurgaon district, and lived within the central urbanized sectors. Residents ranged from more affluent transplants with corporate backgrounds, to low-income migrant laborers, to members of Gurgaon’s ancestral village communities. Preliminary fieldwork was conducted in 2013, with the bulk of the data collected in 2015.

At the beginning of interviews, general household survey questions were asked to help sketch a demographic portrait and inform basic claims about who individuals were and which/what kind of communities they may have identified with at the time the research was conducted (i.e. middle-class, migrants, professionals, members of specific regional, linguistic, ethnic or sub-caste groups).

Low’s (2004) work and interview style with residents of gated communities in the US offered useful strategies for coding meaning and value in participant responses to questions about their residential histories. Tarlo’s (2003) description of an archive as “paper truths” was helpful in thinking about the power of records in telling Gurgaon’s history, particularly in a planning context where efforts are invested in drafting and revising master-plans. Being able to read a plan, to ground-truth it against direct experiences of space and knowledge of the terrain from field-visits was helpful in understanding the position of planning and its limits in articulating the qualities or characteristics of place as revealed in interviews. Marketing brochures, plans, news paper articles, and other textual materials, however, provided a richer frame of reference for considering the validity of interviews. In addition, mapping and photo-documentation were used in order to better understand the relationships between actors and the physical spaces of the city, various political and institutional boundaries, and to contextualize the stories and responses of participants in the study.

Findings: citizen planning and the micro-politics of place-making

This section shifts to presenting the findings and analysis of interview responses with members of several constituent groups, whose perceptions of Gurgaon as a place, as well interactions—what I refer to as the politics of place-making—reflect a form of citizen planning. Responses in interviews provided insight into different kinds of spatial arrangements or enclaves within the city; however, not all forms of citizen planning are based in the collective action of groups living in the same residential neighborhood or enclave. The first section discusses the structure of government agencies and formal planning as it is practiced in the city. The second section focuses on members of RWAs, their role in local governance, but also the limitations of their reach as forms of inclusive network governance for citizen planning. The third section discusses urban villages, which are not included in master-plans, and describes a range of issues facing their denizens. The final section concludes with a portrait of NGOs and civil society groups in Gurgaon and their role in place-making and planning.

The institution of planning in Gurgaon

Gurgaon city is the headquarters of Gurgaon district. There are a little over 50 villages within the district, although they are not zoned in master-plans. They do fall within political wards and have elected Municipal Counselors. The city of Gurgaon, or the most urbanized sectors, is the focus of study and what participants chiefly identify as Gurgaon. The city’s Municipal Corporation (MCG) was established in 2008 when the population hit the threshold for city status. The first mayor was elected in 2011. Gurgaon is also a part of the National Capital Region (NCR), which includes Delhi and a number of its satellite cities in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The NCR, as a planning body, has its own officers, internal structure and regional plans, of which Gurgaon is considered a sub-region, and is subject to their oversight.

Gurgaon’s city limits are constantly changing. The 2021 and 2031 master-plans see Gurgaon expanding further into the district. The MCG itself only holds jurisdiction over a centrally located area. The city is cut into sectors, which appear to radiate from the MCG’s territory, skirted by commercial corridors, roadways, and several major highways. Each sector falls under the governance of one of several planning agencies or builders. HUDA and the Town and Country Planning Organization (DTP) have offices in Gurgaon, but work from the state level, coordinating efforts with Chandigarh under a Chief Planner, with rotating appointed Indian Administrative Service Officers (IAS). At the time of the research, the officers in those positions in Gurgaon had been there less than 1 year. The activities of the planners in these positions ranged from revising the master-plan, issuing licenses to builders, mediating small disputes and answering questions over zoning and licensing, and facilitating the process of building on planned sectors, including supervising affordable housing draws. While the Indian Constitution’s 74th amendment pushes for the strengthening of city governments, or urban local bodies, the powers of the municipality are still quite limited in Gurgaon. While there have been plans to transition many of the responsibilities of developers, such as the DLF, to the MCG, there is no set timeframe for when this will take place.

In interviews with residents, the question of who the public planners of Gurgaon were was answered with little consensus. Some organizations, such as DTP, are responsible for planning, others for implementation and enforcement. Oversight, such as environmental impact assessments, is carried out under different agencies and departments. While a lot of attention has been given to accommodating real estate’s demands, a lack of integrative environmental planning and enforcement has contributed to severe problems with waste-water management, and impacted the livelihoods of peri-urban communities, as Narain’s and Vij’s (2015) research investigates. This has also created governance challenges for residents and developers seeking an accountable public agency to resolve disputes and enforce policy. The state, as Planner, was most accessible to participants in the petition offices and the courts.

Several of the participants in the study were also formally trained planners or architects, educated in similar institutions as the IAS officers, but employed in the private sector. As long-time residents of Gurgaon, several voiced the opinion that the current model of planning in Gurgaon was outdated in prioritizing motorized transport infrastructure above public transportation, or the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Traffic and the challenges of the road were a daily source of frustration for residents interviewed. Roads were frequently the first issue mentioned when the topic of planning, as a formal institution, was raised.

While from the planner’s perspective, roads were viewed as a technical problem for engineers, it appeared that the responsibility for road safety fell to the traffic police, and their maintenance to the developers and a state or local agency, depending on a road’s location in the city. Monitoring and reporting the conditions of roads seemed to be the concern of residents and RWAs. It is not surprising that Raahgiri day, a weekly event that closes down traffic to all but pedestrians and cyclists, has become a national movement, born and bred in the climate of Gurgaon’s transportation woes. The roads of Gurgaon, as shared public spaces, have become venues and catalysts for voicing discontent with formal planning’s lack of recognition for the quality of public space, the rights of pedestrians, and the needs of those who cannot afford motorized transport.

RWAs and housing societies

Gated communities, as highly curated and designed spaces, offer their own narratives of Gurgaon, drawing on a range of architectural inspiration from Western Europe and the US, to Southeast Asia. Their residents are nominally middle-class or affluent. Some of the participants in this study were property owners who paid dues toward RWAs, or volunteered with them. Renters typically paid some fees for maintenance costs to builders and property managers directly. Residents described their neighborhoods or gated communities with the common image of a series of homes or apartment buildings enclosed by a main gate, with restricted access to outsiders, as well as a structure of membership for services, club goods, and sometimes recreational facilities. Gated communities were also referred to as colonies, societies, developments, complexes, and phases. The majority of them were apartment complexes, with a few stand-alone houses on plotted areas (individual lots). Most blocks, including plotted areas that were not part of a major development, had some form of gating and a guard blocking access from late evening to early morning.

Outside the phases managed by major builders, such as the DLF, the services and amenities were fewer. Security, power, and water backup were less reliable, and the roads were often in poorer condition. Nonetheless, many of these roads were also gated by an RWA. The RWA invariably acts as an interlocutor between residents and the developer, service provider, or local government. While government services include basic water, power, and some waste management, individual home owners and gated communities fill in the gaps to ensure 24-hour backup, daily trash collection, security (in the form of guards), maintenance, possibly some green space or roads internal to the gated compound and, in some cases, fire departments. RWAs are recognized by the government as chartered housing societies. In smaller RWAs, each household has one vote. Renters, lessees or sub-letters usually do not have a say in RWA politics. Among larger collectives, the structure of the RWA is collegiate, where appointed or elected members act as representatives for a larger group of residents. It is not surprising, given the size of DLF holdings in the city, that the DLF city RWA is one of the largest in the country, with over 8000 members across the five phases of DLF developments. Contrary to the image of a small collective of residents, many RWAs have become large organizations that require their own forms of representative government and administration.

As expressed by several interviewees, recruiting RWA leadership is difficult, where the responsibilities of managing an RWA can often become a full-time job. Many noted that the effectiveness of RWAs seemed to rest in the quality and connections of the leadership. In several cases, interviewees had used the RWA as a platform to express frustration with local government’s lack of protection from questionable, or even illegal, real estate practices. For example, developers are required to hand over management of a gated community to the local authorities or the residents themselves at the completion of a project, yet many builders have found it in their best interest to avoid ever finishing. Instead, they may continue to add on to a gated community, building new phases, or continue to obtain revenue from private management of recreational facilities. RWAs that try to take on a more expansive self-governance role may end up grappling with this issue, though some have been successful in removing the developer. RWAs and housing societies have their benefits and drawbacks as forms of effective local governance. Their successes improve the quality of life within a particular gated community or block, but do not impact the city as whole. As the literature already suggests, RWAs are primarily middle-class organizations that are peopled with individuals who may have a strong grasp of how to negotiate with actors in the private and public sectors, and can get things done without necessarily relying on the intervention of elected governments.

Urban villagers: past and present

Gurgaon’s villages, the ones that lie within the MCG and built-up sectors of the city, have been largely subsumed by the urban fabric and decoupled from agricultural activities. Gurgaon’s original villages were composed of three broad designations of land-use: (1) farmland, which has mostly been sold to developers at this point, (2) the built core of villages, which have become denser with the vertical extension of buildings, their communal ponds or johads often filled in, and (3) the commons, which was once communal land used for grazing by members of the village, and is now technically property of HUDA and other agencies or builders. In some cases, this land has been disputed or used by various parties where no ownership was apparent (Narain, 2009). Where the impacts of urbanization are most pronounced is in villages lying within and adjacent to developments such as DLF’s phases, that is, Sikanderpur, Chakkarpur and Nathupur. These villages are some of the largest in terms of population. Accurate figures were not available, though estimates are in the tens of thousands. These villages also lie in the shadow of the elevated metro lines moving on to Delhi. Due to their centrality, they have become popular sites for the low-end rental market, hosting migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, and West Bengal.

As Cowen (2015) argues, Gurgaon’s villages have become spaces where local landowners, the ancestral villagers, still retain political clout, despite the dismantling of the panchayat system. According to some, these groups have a direct stake in limiting political representation among their tenants and migrant neighbors. Accurate census data on Gurgaon’s floating labor population does not exist, which appears to keep the villages in a state of underdevelopment, with unreliable or inadequate provisions for water and other services. However, this also means that locals maintain their representation, despite being overwhelmed in numbers.

Many renters in urban villages are part of the domestic service sector, earning wages as drivers, cooks, servants, and day laborers within Gurgaon’s malls, office parks, and gated communities. There are also seasonal laborers in the construction industry and manufacturing. Self-built shack settlements are visible around construction sites and along roads, housing workers under temporary contracts. Many laborers live under what one NGO organizer described as captivity situations, sleeping on the floor of a workshop or in a construction site, dependent on the employer for all needs, while sending remittances back to their original village or city. Such residents of Gurgaon are unable to object to their working or living conditions, which are often precarious and even dangerous. Their capacity to contribute to larger narratives or programmatic work addressing Gurgaon’s planning woes is limited by the demands of getting by.

One’s point of origin becomes significant in understanding how many low-income migrant individuals and families are able to make the move to Gurgaon in the first place. Many of Gurgaon’s urban villages host enclaves of families with common regional, linguistic, and professional ties that originate in another state. However, it was not uncommon to find, among unmarried males, individuals from several different states who had become friends after arriving in Gurgaon and had roomed together, split rent and pooled resources as a shared household. Several admitted they were careful when discussing the details of their lives in Gurgaon with family back home, only emphasizing the positive aspects of their life, while admitting to the difficulties in the interview. A few worried their families would ask them to return or offer them money if they complained, so they kept this information to themselves. Gated Communities, while physically closed to the general public with visible security personnel, are, to a certain extent, porous to the support staff who have direct employer/employee relationships and often live with residents inside the gates. Most apartments and homes include some accommodation for servants, though the small size of high-rise apartments can make it impossible for staff to bring their family to live, and they must therefore commute to work. Initial interviews with residents of gated communities, typically professionals who had relocated, yielded limited knowledge of Gurgaon’s original or ancestral village populations. For many newcomers, the history and culture of Gurgaon appeared either unrecognizable or inaccessible to their experience, and left no evidence in the lived spaces of their societies or neighborhoods. The nearby village may be blocked by a gate or service road. A few reported that their domestic staff, usually migrants, lived in or regularly visited the nearby village, often to shop or interact with other people from their home-state, but that they themselves had not visited. When asked about the original villagers or character of Gurgaon before urbanization took off, a few interviewees commented on Haryanvi culture, a few even hailed from other parts of the state, while others voiced concern over the nouveau riche, the former farmers of Gurgaon who they perceived as unable to manage their wealth.

Many former agriculturalists have used the revenue from the sale of farmland to buy land in Rajasthan or reinvest in DLF (Donthi, 2014). Some of the subjects interviewed reflected on the social stigma or perception of villagers as idle, or unable to manage the influx of wealth. Some even noted a rise in alcoholism. There was also a sense of a more conservative or patriarchal aspect to the original village culture as opposed to the globalized or corporate milieu. Some of this was conveyed as self-deprecation by the children of land-owning villagers as they apologized in interviews for how “dominant” Haryanvi language was in comparison to Hindi. Similar comments included a statement that Haryanvi culture had a reputation for gruffness and for a kind of martial, or patriarchal attitude, perhaps tied to Haryana’s historical reputation as drawing point for soldiers. A Yadav landowner in Sikanderpur village explained that it wasn’t until the 1990s, when his family sold their land to the DLF, that they built concrete and brick homes. Prior to that, they had farmed the land, but their houses had been of mud construction. At a certain point, which he could not recall, his ancestors had invited other groups to come and perform the tasks they were not able to do due to caste restrictions. In a certain sense, this region had always been a space for migrants, calling on the labor and talents of outsiders to create a cohesive and structured society. The simultaneous assimilation of and resistance to outsiders has been a continuing part of the lived experience of the region even before Gurgaon’s urbanization took off. Positive changes for landed villagers, as well as the threat of cultural displacement, highlight a complex politics of place-making in urban villages. As a formerly rural place, the city holds memories of its older heritages, now overshadowed by the “dominant” language of urbanization.

Civil society and NGOs

Alongside the day-to-day maintenance, politics, and activities of RWAs, a space for organizations which are not based on paid membership or the exclusive networks of common interest developments has emerged in Gurgaon. While NGOs and volunteer organizations are hardly a rare phenomenon (there are over 2 million in India), there is something noteworthy about the NGOs that have emerged in step with Gurgaon’s development, founded by residents who have come to know one another through participation and activism. Many of these organizations focus on addressing the needs of low-income groups and migrant laborers who have set up in urban villages or informal settlements. Organizations, such as Edulever and Agrasar, collect data on migrant populations and implement skills development classes, provide education enrichment and support to migrant families to keep their children in school, and help place workers. They also assist migrants in establishing legal residency in the city, a process that is often mired by bureaucratic barriers and the complexities of completing and filing paperwork.

The opportunities for volunteerism include initiatives such as I am Gurgaon, which works on the restoration of indigenous plant species in the Aravalli Biodiversity Park; We the People, an organization focused on educating the public about the Indian Constitution and responsible citizenship, and Gurgaon First, which brings together various stakeholders for workshops on issues ranging from sexual harassment in the workplace to enforcing solar energy mandates across the city. There are many, many others. What is striking about the range of organizations is their common emphasis on Gurgaon’s improvement. Almost universal among interviews with the organizers and staff was a story of arriving in the city for work or family reasons, establishing a household and then observing that while their home was in order, the city itself was a mess. Those who moved to Gurgaon in the early 1990s or late 1980s observed the city grow and change around them. Many of the women, in particular, had found themselves leaving a career or searching for a way to use their talents from the corporate sector or other highly skilled professions, and found a community, not always in their own neighborhood or in the activities of the RWA, but in a community of residents spread across the city.

The founders and volunteers within these organizations, as in more affluent RWAs, represent a kind of community of well-educated, not necessarily elite, but solidly middle to upper middle-class residents, often with international experience. These individuals constitute a highly networked group of citizen planners who tend not to wait for an invitation to participate, but launch their own social enterprises, network with the like-minded, and actively seek solutions to the problems and challenges they face. With the rise of corporate social responsibility funding, some organizations have benefited from their organizers’ professional knowledge and experience communicating to a corporate audience.

Many of the organizers were not timid about having their voices heard in the media, and were able to access a range of communicative tools to self-advocate or petition the government. Several interviewees even shared their growing portfolio of published articles in which they not only openly critiqued a lack of policy oversight or enforcement, but also took to task the arguments and claims of many of their own social network’s initiatives. Such debates were not placed, per se. Everyone interviewed had comments about the functioning of a block or a gated community, the daily issues they encountered with the road, with their neighbors, and occasionally with the organizations that were put in place to promote their interests. The collective reflections, despite living across many phases of DLF projects, or in plotted areas and other gated communities, were common enough to justify a shared sense of ambivalence about, but also commitment to, Gurgaon. While there were concerns strong enough to warrant action, this was usually accompanied by a desire or a belief on some level that the city was worth fighting for. While most of the activists and engaged citizen planners were middle-class residents, it is important to acknowledge that there is no simple way of defining what it means to be middle-class in India. There are many levels of relative affluence and aspects to class culture that upset tidy binaries between the rich and the poor, elite and non-elite, and raise important questions about where participatory planning, in practice, occurs within a political culture (Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal, 2012; Sridharan, 2011). For instance, many land-owning urban villagers have achieved middle-class status in an economic sense, but were still considered socially distinct from the community of organizers involved in Gurgaon’s civic improvement.

While the activism in Gurgaon is inspiring, the dynamics of structural inequality, a lack of social welfare for the large, undeniably poor population of the city, illustrates a prevailing pattern not unique to Gurgaon, in which NGOs and civil society groups are left to sort out many of the problems of a welfare state themselves. This cycle perpetuates the reliance on charitable organizations, without reforming approaches at a systemic level (Gupta, 2012). This issue was occasionally raised by participants as they voiced concerns over the longevity of their efforts in the coming years.

Conclusion

Since its emergence as a city from a collection of villages, Gurgaon has been lauded as a success story in market-driven urbanization, as well as harshly criticized for its planning failures. At a glance, Gurgaon’s rapid growth reflects the policies and economic shifts of India’s liberalization. Gurgaon’s boosters have nicknamed it the millennium city, yet it carries forward the legacies and challenges of Indian planning practice over the last century, combined with what appears to be a strategy of accommodating short-term real estate interests and growth over the long-term livability of the city. The paper asked what opportunities have emerged for residents to make sense of this or assert their own visions of planning in the city, and whether the case of Gurgaon offers an opportunity to reexamine what the practice of planning could be.

As various actors begin to establish roots or maintain them, they must construct new narratives and make meaning of the places in which they live and work, despite perceived planning failure, part of the process of place-making. The participants in this research have questioned formal planning’s role in facilitating more efficient and safe transportation, in promoting safety, sustainability, equity, and a sense of place in the built environment of the city. I have argued that participation in local organizations, calls to action for local government, and the construction of shared visions of place, constitute a fluid and flexible notion of planning or place-making much broader than the prescribed role of town planner.

Alternative narratives to the glossy millennium city brand do exist for Gurgaon, and perhaps illustrate important social phenomena (of the millennium) in unexpected ways, such as the confrontation, intermingling, and assimilation of urban and rural, modern and traditional, global and local ways of life in Indian cities. Gurgaon is a city of migrants, of immense linguistic, cultural, and professional diversity. At the same time, Gurgaon’s native Haryanvi culture, viewed as backwards to many, has been left to assert itself through political and landed power.

Furthermore, Gurgaon’s spaces of community and the relational effects of the neighborhood operate in different ways. Low-income migrants are often attracted to enclaves with members of similar regional and linguistic backgrounds, but this is by no means a universal phenomenon. Among the more affluent, proximity does not necessarily determine community or belonging in the neighborhood. RWAs function as representatives and advocates for their members, but they speak to a different sense of purpose or intention than the interests of a greater public. Rather, it is through other forms of networking that the roles and responsibility of planners have been taken up by citizen groups in Gurgaon, with the objective of improving the city at large.

The professional practice and institutional supports of planning are present in Gurgaon; however, their role is still quite limited. As residents take action to address planning issues, many have expressed concern over the effectiveness or sustainability of their efforts long term. They question how long how civil society can fulfill this role without the support of state actors or reforms in the governance of urban local bodies. While there is a constitutional justification for the devolution of governance to the city level, the structure of planning as an institution, and the prioritization of the rights of the land-owning over the transient and vulnerable populations in the city, means that even with more accountable local government, the kind of change residents are seeking requires a reorientation of planning’s role in place-making and as a service to the public domain. This requires tapping into and valuing the visions and imagination of residents, as well as considering the potential of cities, not merely as growth machines, but as places of collective identity and meaning. Interviews ultimately revealed a complex politics of place and place-making, in which residents have begun to take on many of the advocacy and communicative tasks of contemporary planning. However, the response of individuals and groups as self-advocates or citizen planners highlights anxiety and frustration over a lack of formal planning mechanisms to protect and recognize the rights of citizens from the platform of local government.