Promotionen: Helena Cermeño

Access to the city: Unravelling urban governance practices, access to housing, services, and resulting processes of social in/exclusion in Amritsar and Lahore

The research was focused on the Punjab province(s), on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, and specifically, on the contemporary cities of Amritsar and Lahore. For their vicinity, their common colonial past and shared socio-cultural context, Amritsar and Lahore, provided an exceptional setting for comparative empirical research on postcolonial urban governance and social transformations. Within this context, the research sought to understand to what extent urban governance practices (from above and below) influence the ability of urban dwellers to benefit from housing and services in specific neighborhoods and, in so doing, to what extent these practices contribute to the (re)production of urban inequalities and socio-spatial in/exclusions.

While housing has long been researched under a “property rights” perspective, such a stance often fails to provide a comprehensible picture of how urban dwellers de facto manage (or not) to benefit from urban resources. I suggested, therefore, an alternative approach drawing on Access Theory by Ribot and Peluso (2003, 2020), which conceptualizes access as the “ability” to derive benefits from things, including material objects, persons, institutions, and symbols. An “access approach” enabled not only to conceptualize inequalities in terms of access to (urban) resources (i.e., housing/services), it also guided the researcher into looking at governance practices by which actors gain, control, and maintain (or are able to transfer) these resources over time and the underlying power relations. Access theory expands this way the classical notion of rights to include a range of mechanisms that enable or hinder the capacity of different actors to establish access to housing (to gain), to mediate other’s access (to control), and to deploy power resources to secure access over time (to maintain). Such a standpoint does not entail legal rights to be irrelevant, though; instead, it posits that “rights-based” mechanisms (based on the observation or ignorance of law and property rights) operate along other “structural” and “relational” mechanisms (such as different sources of capital or authority) that also play a significant role in the distribution of benefits. Underlying access mechanisms are, therefore, sets of relationships (“bundles of power”) between the different involved actors.

While access constituted the primary theoretical lens guiding the research and cut across all papers and selected case studies in Amritsar and Lahore, the different chapters explored too theoretical mergers with access theory (such as access-assemblages, access cum evolutionary governance theory, or city-scapes). These theoretical mergers facilitated the investigation of so far neglected dimensions of urban processes while posing questions regarding human/non-human interfaces, networked interdependencies, and the production of socio-material infrastructures.

Ultimately, the research showed how by unraveling present contestations over access to urban land, housing, and services in these two cities, that manifest and produce different forms of in/exclusion, one can trace the governance arrangements at play, their underlying evolutionary paths and the different dependencies that structure potential future adaptations and governance trajectories. Understanding how governance practices operate and evolve in ever‐changing contexts, I argued, is crucial for envisioning future urban planning attempts and housing policies to steer more inclusive and just urban environments.

While the research generated situated knowledge(s) on inhabitation processes—complex, multifaceted, and conflictual—in Amritsar and Lahore, the context-sensitive findings have been scaled up to hold relevance for other similar border cities and post-conflict societies. Findings hold, therefore, relevance beyond these two cities, across South Asia and the Global South-East, in different geographical contexts, postcolonial border cities, and “divided” territories. From a theoretical perspective, the conclusions from the collected papers contribute therefore to current debates on South(east)ern urbanism and, in particular to questions of urban governance, access to urban land, housing, and services in postcolonial societies at the disciplinary crossroads of urban sociology, conflict and development studies, and urban planning.