The Story of My House: and many others in Delhi by Manas Murthy A dissertation accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture Dissertation Committee: Howard Davis, Chair Hans Neis, Core Member Gerard Sandoval, Core Member Sangita Gopal, Institutional Representative University of Oregon Fall 2024 2 © 2024 Manas Murthy This work is openly licensed via CC BY-NC 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 3 DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Manas Murthy Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture Title: The Story of My House: and many others in Delhi This dissertation examines the emergence of ‘builder floors’; a new housing type that has proliferated across residential neighborhoods in Delhi, India in recent decades. Drawing on case studies, interviews, spatial documentation, archival research, and personal reflections, I trace how the phenomenon of builder floors intersects with, and makes legible, the economic, social, and morphological transformations of Delhi’s middle-class neighborhoods. Builder floors, as architectural type, draw on precedents of elite private dwellings such as havelis and kothis while offering upward mobility to the middle class. As multistoried buildings, they have drastically altered ground floor sociality, connection to greenery, feelings of privacy and security, and wider social relationships in neighborhoods. Builder floors have also reconfigured social relations within households: for instance, the return of joint family living alongside the hyper-privatization of individual spaces; the emergence of new forms of neighborliness and issues of management of common areas within buildings. As stilted buildings with parking on the ground, they have further prioritized automobile use and contributed to a growing parking crisis in Delhi. However, most crucially, following Karen Barad’s (2007) ‘agential realism’, the study of builder floors helps bring together seemingly disparate urban processes and disciplinary ‘lenses’ that have been critical to Delhi and its development since India’s independence; specifically, the changing relationship between land and property, housing mobility and 4 migration of the middle class, the establishment of automobility, speculative capital and real estate, and the evolving conception of ‘home’. The research takes a post-qualitative approach with concepts from new materialism and posthumanist philosophy and deploys ‘plugging in’ as a method (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023) that dissolves rigid boundaries between theory, data, and analysis. In doing so, my research engages with a wide range of disciplines and bodies of literature, tantamount to a thickening of ‘fields’, where the empirical and the theoretical, the material and the discursive, are juxtaposed without privileging either. Rather than presenting a comprehensive model of Delhi's urbanism, this dissertation offers partial, embodied narratives that speak to broader processes while remaining grounded in lived experience. The dissertation itself takes the form of an assemblage – following Deleuze and Guattari (1987) – with each chapter acting as a plateau generating its own intensity while connecting to others like a ‘rhizome’. Ultimately, this dissertation illuminates how interventions in housing, mobility, or infrastructure inevitably reshape other domains in complex ways, calling for more integrated planning approaches. It highlights the fundamentally entangled nature of the economic mobility of Delhi's middle classes, the evolution of its land-property regime, the workings of speculative capital, and changing domestic imaginaries. Builder floors, I argue, have emerged through multiple ‘parallel becomings’ that reinforce and make each other legible. The significance of this research, in foregrounding the builder floor, lies in the connections it makes between homeownership and a land-property regime; between car ownership and ‘automobility’; between house form and class relations; between statecraft and speculative capital. 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have happened without the substantial support, guidance and labor of my Dissertation Chair, Dissertation Committee, my research participants, various research collaborators, colleagues, peers and family. First, I would like to thank my homeowner participants who gave their time, opened up their homes, shared family documents, and at times even fed me. The builders I spoke with were very generous as well, often letting me observe their practice and, at times, shared deep trade secrets. I want to thank the architects, planners, and mobility experts with whom I had long and engaging discussions about the predicaments of Delhi. Among those I want to specially thank Dr. Anumita Roychoudhary, Mr. Ashok Bhattacharjee, Mriganka Saxena, Amit Sarma, Gaurav Shorey, Abu Talha Farooqi, and Abdul Bari. A special thanks to United Residents Joint Action (URJA) for their instrumental support in disseminating my surveys across Delhi. I am most grateful to Professor Howard Davis for his free-range approach to guidance and the long conversations we’ve had across vast scholarly (and geographical) terrains. His patience and optimism have got me through the toughest of times. I am also thankful for my interdisciplinary team of Dissertation Committee members, Dr. Hajo Neis, Professor Gerard Sandoval, and Associate Professor Sangita Gopal. Hajo has always been very supportive and a warm, reassuring presence. My conversations with Gerard opened me up to scholarship on insurgent and radical planning approaches, as well as urban informality. And without Sangita’s course on ‘Media in the Global South’, I would not have explored Deleuze and Guattari and half a dozen other key thinkers. A special thanks to Lisa Mazzei for her mentorship through the years and for introducing me to the world of posthumanism and post 6 qualitative inquiry. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my mentors in Delhi. Mr. Sudhir Vohra is a goldmine of inside knowledge when it comes to matters of urban law, planning histories and bureaucratic systems across India, and specifically Delhi. Mr. Ashok Lall gave me an opportunity to discover sustainable mobility and community engagement through the Aapki Sadak project, for which I will be forever indebted to him. I am grateful for the unflinching support and care from my friends Kellum Tate Jones and Jacob, Mary Cartee, Samuel Thornton, Joseph Moore, Abigail Leeder and the rest of the gang at Rehearsals for Life. A special thanks to my emotional support twin - Bhavya Chitranshi. This thesis would not exist without the unwavering and constant support of my parents Professor KV Bhanu Murthy and K Sarada Murthy, who are also my first participants in this study. Thank you to my parents-in-law Rajeev and Vandana Arora for always cheering me on. And finally, this entire journey would not have been possible without my partner Dr. Vanicka Arora. We embarked on a strange and challenging journey of pursuing our PhDs together across multiple continents. It is her intelligence, courage, humor and vision that I often draw upon, especially when my own reserves run low. Our shared curiosity and propensity for academic conversation, as well as the built environment, has regularly fed into this piece of research. She has sifted through the primordial versions of this work, helped me clear the fog, make cogent and accessible arguments. I can only hope to be the rising academic star that she is. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page DISSERTATION ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................... 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................ 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................. 7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .......................................................................................................... 10 GLOSSARY .................................................................................................................................. 12 LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ 14 LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................................... 17 CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 18 Narrativizing Delhi – and this dissertation ................................................................................. 22 Builder Floors – an emergent phenomenon .............................................................................. 28 Research Questions ........................................................................................................................... 33 Methodology - and some notes on Post Qualitative Inquiry ................................................ 35 Agential realism and why it must be intersectional ...............................................35 What comes ‘after method’? And what are the methods I have used? ...................38 The field and myself ............................................................................................45 Chapterization and Narrative Structure ................................................................49 CHAPTER 2 : THE STORY OF MY HOUSE ................................................................................ 54 The Quintessential Single-family Home ..................................................................................... 56 Social Life in a Plotted Colony ........................................................................................................ 63 Growth, Densification and the Inevitable .................................................................................. 67 Living in a Builder Floor ..................................................................................................................... 79 CHAPTER 3 : MIGRATION AND MOBILITY OF THE MIDDLE CLASS .................................... 86 Post-independence History of Migration and Settlement ................................................... 88 Plotted Colonies and the Emergence of a Land-Property Regime .................................... 96 Personal Choices and Force of History: Case Studies in Migration ............................... 106 8 Case 1: Daryaganj ................................................................................................................................ 108 Case 2: Nizammuddin West ............................................................................................................ 112 Case 3: Safdarjung Enclave ............................................................................................................. 116 CASE 4: Karol Bagh .............................................................................................................................. 120 CHAPTER 4 : BUILDERS AND SPECULATIVE CAPITAL ....................................................... 123 Some Notes on Social Roles and Becoming ........................................................................... 126 Colonisers and the Upwardly Mobile Classes ....................................................................... 130 The Public Architect and the Speculative State .................................................................... 135 Building Trust and Capital .............................................................................................................. 141 Mr. Joshi (Homeowner – Paschim Vihar): ................................................................................... 142 Mrs. Ghosh (Homeowner – Safdarjung Enclave): ................................................................... 145 Mr. Bansal (Builder – North Delhi): ................................................................................................ 146 Mr. Malik (Builder – South Delhi): ................................................................................................... 150 CHAPTER 5 : THE EVOLVING TYPOLOGY OF THE HOME ................................................... 153 Some Notes on Typology ................................................................................................................ 156 ‘Traditional’ Private Living ............................................................................................................. 159 Private Living for the Masses ........................................................................................................ 164 Housing Choice: Online/Mobile Survey Results .................................................................... 170 Group Housing / apartment: ............................................................................................................ 175 Plotted Housing / builder floor: ...................................................................................................... 176 Loss, Gain, Hyper-privacy, and Class Relations.................................................................... 179 Mr. Joshi (Homeowner – Paschim Vihar): ................................................................................... 181 Ms. Saxena (Homeowner/Entrepreneur – East of Kailash): ................................................ 183 Ms. Chadha and Parents (Homeowner/Entrepreneur – Greater Kailash II): ................ 185 Mr. Arora (Homeowner – Inder Enclave): .................................................................................... 188 CHAPTER 6 : AUTOMOBILITY & THE CONSTITUTION OF A PARKING CRISIS ................. 190 Some Notes on Automobility ........................................................................................................ 193 The Master Plan and Transit-Oriented Development .......................................................... 195 Car Ownership and Builder Floors .............................................................................................. 198 The Emergence of a Crisis .............................................................................................................. 202 Ontological Crisis – Supply and Demand ................................................................................. 207 9 CHAPTER 7 : SPECULATIONS: HOUSING FUTURES OF DELHI ......................................... 213 Living in Builder Floors (as they age) .......................................................................................... 215 Further Vertical Subdivision ......................................................................................................... 218 Consolidation of Plots ..................................................................................................................... 219 Commercial Retrofit and Subdivision ....................................................................................... 222 Final Reflections: Reading as Assemblage .............................................................................. 223 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................................ 228 10 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AAJ Anand Aptay and Jhabvala CGHS/CHBS Cooperative Group Housing and Cooperative House Building Societies CPR Centre for Policy Research CPWD Central Public Works Department CR Park Chittaranjan Park DDA Delhi Development Authority DIT Delhi Improvement Trust DLF Delhi Land and Finance DUEIIP Delhi Urban Environment and Infrastructure Improvement Project ECS Equivalent Car Space EoDB Ease of Doing Business EPCA Environment Pollution (Prevention & Control) Authority for the National Capital Region FAR Floor Area Ratio GPRA General Pool Residential Accommodation IPT Intermediate Para Transit MCD Municipal Corporation of Delhi MIG Middle-Income Group Housing MPD Masterplan for Delhi NCR National Capital Region 11 NCRPB National Capital Region Planning Board NMT non-motorised transport NHAI National Highway Authority of India NOIDA New Okhla Industrial Development Authority OBS Online Building Sanction PIL Public Interest Litigation POA Power of Attorney PPMP parking management plans RERA Real Estate Regulatory Act / Authority RWA Resident Welfare Association TOD Transit-Oriented Development UAC Unauthorized Colony URJA United Residents Joint Action UTTIPEC Unified Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure (Planning & Engineering) Centre 12 GLOSSARY Term Description abadi a term often used to describe a rural location, typically a settlement in a rural environment, or informally as a town or city. baithak Sitting-hall bangaldaar Bengal-roofed bangla bungalow baniya is a mercantile caste. Traditionally, the main occupations of the community are merchants, bankers, moneylenders, and owners of commercial enterprises. barsati A small dwelling built on top of a home in Delhi, India, typically with a large terrace. The word barsati comes from the Hindi word barsaat, which means "rain". chowk courtyard colony A colloquial term applied to neighborhoods of varying sizes, either informally settled or planned for the resettlement of communities or groups. These became common parlance since colonial times, often referring to British planned settlements around existing indigenous formations. Delhiite A colloquial term used for an inhabitant of Delhi. Dilliwallahs The term used to refer to the original inhabitants of Delhi, as opposed to the newer migrants or 'Delhiites'. diwankhana A reception hall or a room in a traditional haveli where men conducted business. haveli A mansion type with inward-looking courtyards (chowks) most prevalent in precolonial north India. Typically a few stories tall, varying in scale depending on status of occupant from noblemen and feudal landlords to merchants. 13 gully A narrow lane. Jats Pastoral and agrarian communities. Kayasth A dominant Hindu caste in India. kothi Refers commonly to a large free-standing dwelling. The kothi is a mansion with hybrid East-West spatial characteristics”, that was succeeded by “the bungalow, which replaced the kothi in the nineteenth century as the epitome of British colonial domesticity” (Sharma, 2019) lal dora Literally translates as ‘red thread’. It was first used in 1908, when the land revenue department used to tie a ‘red thread’ (lal dora) around the village to differentiate the settlement (abadi) from the agricultural land. murdana The space in a haveli designated for men. mistri Traditional master craftsmen or skilled laborer. mohalla Neighbourhood or urban quarter. Nabob Nabob is a term specifically ascribed to “acculturated [or Mughalized] European mercenaries who served a variety of rulers in the north of the subcontinent” during the 18th century. The word itself is “an Anglicized version of the local appellation nawab.” nazul Land and properties formerly belonging to the Mughal rulers which was transferred to the colonial government. pol Similar to mohallas, these were tight formations of havelis in Ahmedabad, Gujarat that would share common facilities and fortify themselves with gates. tajurba experience verandah A roofed, open-air porch or hallway that is attached to the exterior of a building. zanana The space in a haveli designated for women. 14 LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Map of the urban area of Delhi showing significant neighborhoods/settlements. INSETS: Location of the National Capital Region (NCR) in India and Delhi within the NCR. .................. 21 2. Typical transformation of plotted neighborhoods. Single-story houses (LEFT) being converted into builder floors (RIGHT). .................................................................................................. 29 3. Rudimentary sequence of events leading up to the emergence of builder floors. ................... 32 4. Floor plans of a typical mixed-use building in Khirki Village (urban village in South Delhi), documented as part of a seminar course I taught in 2015. .................................................... 33 5. Screenshot of the welcome screen for the online interest survey distributed to recruit participants for the study. The text is bilingual (English and Hindi) throughout the survey and was mainly distributed via WhatsApp, a commonly used messaging platform in India. .......... 40 6. Ongoing construction site for builder floors in South Delhi. Typical condition where the trench dug out in one property causes sheer forces (shown in red) to act on the adjacent buildings. . 55 7. Chronology of events through which my single-story childhood home was converted into five- storied builder floors. .......................................................................................................... 56 8. Location of Vaishali Enclave in Delhi. RIGHT: Layout of Vaishali Enclave. .............................. 58 9. Layout and photographs of the original house. ..................................................................... 60 10. TOP LEFT: A newspaper advert for new plots in South Delhi; BOTTOM LEFT: Postage stamp promoting the family planning programme; RIGHT: My parents with their two children. .......... 62 11. Immediate surroundings of my home, indicating my social network and activities. ................ 64 12. Temporary subdivision of property for renting. The front portion highlighted in red belonged to our family, and the back portion highlighted in yellow was rented out. ................................... 65 13. Section of our single-storey house showing the front and back yards, as well as the relationship with the street, with a low boundary wall. Even the terrace space was actively used for clothes drying and other activities and had a close relationship with the street as well. ........................................................................................................................................... 67 14. LEFT: Out first car; a Maruti Omni, 1988. RIGHT: One of our two-wheelers in our verandah. ... 68 15. LEFT: Layout of our house showing the extent of damage. RIGHT: House in context with the builder floors next door. ...................................................................................................... 73 16. Proposed designs under the additions/alterations model. .................................................... 74 17. Clipping from the 2011 Administrative Order enforcing the inclusion of a stilt floor in all residential plotted development. ......................................................................................... 76 18. TOP: Diagram highlighting the various thresholds in the building and the sequence of access. BOTTOM: Sketch showing the location of the inverter units and the power outlet for the video doorbell which was switched off for the robbery. .................................................................. 82 19. With the tragic legacy of an uncertain future, a young refugee sits on the walls of Purana Qila, transformed into a vast refugee camp in Delhi. Source: BBC News Archives. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/south_asia_india0s_partition/html ....... 90 20. Spatial Expansion of Delhi before and after independence. Adapted from maps presented in (Alluri & Bhatia, 2010). [Map does not include the resettlement colonies in East Delhi, such as Shahdara, which has been an established municipality since 1931] ...................................... 94 21. Delhi Urban Area projected development plan. (Delhi Development Authority, 1962) ............ 95 15 22. 1911 map of Shahjahanabad and the beginnings of modern Delhi, showing early suburbs and the new planned areas. Source: Wikipedia, John Murray, distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license. ............................................................................................................................... 98 23. Section of a “more detailed indigenous plan of Shahjahanabad (perhaps under European supervision)”. Source: (King, 2007, p. 190) ........................................................................... 99 24. ‘Company Towns’ Otto Koenigsberger: Neighbourhood Planning for Bhubaneswar. 1948. ... 101 25. Clarence Perry’s neighborhood unit concept. Source: Perry, C. 1929. Regional Survey of New York and its Environs, Vol. VII, p. 88. ................................................................................... 103 26. LEFT: List of registered cooperative housing building societies approved by the Registrar of Societies in Delhi. RIGHT: Layout plan of typical South Delhi residential neighborhood (Malviya Nagar). SOURCE: Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) Town Planning Department. .......... 105 27. Case studies in intergenerational and communal migration across Delhi. ........................... 108 28. LEFT+MIDDLE: Mr. Agarwal’s ancestral home with a central courtyard. RIGHT: Redeveloped commercial buildings along Ansari Road (see Figure 29). .................................................... 109 29. Layout of Daryaganj area. The area highlighted in green is often referred to as Old Daryaganj alluding to the original street pattern and morphology of Old Delhi. The area highlighted in orange was occupied by British military following the Revolt of 1857, and eventually redeveloped. ..................................................................................................................... 111 30. TOP: Photographs of a two and a half story traditional kothi in Karol Bagh. BOTTOM: Floor plans (not to scale) of a kothi highlighting the barsati floor. .......................................................... 118 31. Sketch showing the fungibility and mobility across ‘professionals’ involved in the residential construction industry in Delhi. ........................................................................................... 129 32. "Figure I.1 Advertisement for DLF, 1956 Source: Delhi State Archives." (Srivastava, 2014, pp. 8– 9) ...................................................................................................................................... 133 33. Piece of terrazzo flooring from my childhood home; example of an increasingly diminishing form of highly skilled labor. ................................................................................................ 137 34. Location of Kundli relative to the rest of Delhi. .................................................................... 140 35. Webpage from dlfhomes.co.in that advertises ‘independent floors’. Source: https://www.dlfhomes.co.in/dlf-floors-phase-3-gurgaon/ (Homes, n.d.) ............................. 149 36. Home page for Prithu Homes. Source: https://www.prithu.in/ ............................................ 152 37. ‘What does home mean to you?’ Responses from third-year undergraduate students taking ‘Geographies of Home’ at Queen Mary University of London in 2020/21. Source: Created by Deepti Prasad. (Blunt & Dowling, 2022, p. 2) ....................................................................... 154 38. Haveli in Daryaganj set to be demolished and replaced with builder floors. LEFT: External Facade. RIGHT: Central courtyard covered over, leaving only a skylight. .............................. 161 39. Haveli in Ajmer, Rajasthan with a working textile mill. LEFT: Internal courtyard (Chowk 2). TOP RIGHT: Machine loom in one of the rooms on the second floor. BOTTOM RIGHT: Rough layout of the haveli (sketched on site). ......................................................................................... 161 40. “LEFT: Sector 12, RK Puram, RIGHT: RBI [Reserve Bank of India] Quarters, Sarojini Nagar” SOURCE: https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-186385 PHOTO CREDITS: Randhir Singh. ...... 166 41. "Plate VIII (b)" (Bopegamage, 1957, p. 172). ........................................................................ 167 42. Sample from Household Mapping Survey conducted in 2015 for Aapki Sadak project. ......... 168 43. Two options shown to my parents for their approval by the builder. ..................................... 178 44. LEFT: Mr. Joshi’s single-storey house with an active terrace and trees in the verandah. RIGHT: The house after the builder added two floors above, where the trees disappeared along with Mr. Joshi’s access to a terrace. .......................................................................................... 182 45. Floor layouts for Ms. Saxena’s family residence cum office building. ................................... 184 16 46. Floor layouts for Ms. Chadha’s family residence cum office building. INSET: 3D view of courtyard space with walkway at the office floor. ............................................................... 187 47. LEFT: Front elevation of the Chadha residence compared with the builder floor next door. RIGHT: Exploded axonometric of the building showing division of uses. .............................. 188 48. Various news articles reporting on the parking crisis in Delhi. ............................................. 192 49. Illustrations by Leon Krier emphasizing the various problems associated with zoning and automobile-centric planning. LEFT: [original caption] “Not the car but the suburban home is the deadly weapon; Daily suburban mortar fire against city centers”. RIGHT: [original caption] “The industrial city is DECOMPOSED into zones”. .............................................................. 194 50. Car ownership trend in Delhi, 1965-2005 [Emphasis added to show impact of economic liberalization since the 1990s]. (Datta, 2010). ..................................................................... 199 51. Typical parking conditions in many colonies of Delhi. On-street parking is often a major issue on the internal roads of colonies where pedestrians and other NMT users lack accessibility. ......................................................................................................................................... 202 52. LEFT: Back of plot ‘grill cage’ at my parents’ new builder floor. RIGHT: Grill above stilt floor. This is also placed at the top floor to block roof access through the courtyard. .................... 216 53. ‘Antilia’- Mukesh Ambani’s mansion in South Mumbai. Source: AD Insider (2023). .............. 219 54. Plots consolidated along the main road in Greater Kailash, South Delhi. ............................. 220 55. Two different configurations for the consolidation of plots. ................................................. 220 56. Back-to-back plots under the same ownership in South Delhi. The property owners plan to build a ‘bridge’ across the service lane to integrate the two buildings. ................................. 221 57. Boutique hotel with an automobile showroom on the ground floor in Lajpat Nagar. Source: Project Architect (anonymous). ......................................................................................... 222 17 LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Housebuilding costs for my father in 1981. ........................................................................... 59 2. Building control norms for Residential (Plotted) development under each iteration of the Master Plan for Delhi. .......................................................................................................... 71 3. Financial considerations in choosing various options for the redevelopment of my parents’ home. ................................................................................................................................. 77 4. Comparative table showing the vast difference between each development option on the same plot. .......................................................................................................................... 78 5. Population growth in Delhi Area from 1901 to 1971. Source: (Datta, 1994, p.288). ................. 89 6. Flowchart of questions within the online/mobile survey. ..................................................... 171 7. SURVEY RESPONSES: Q1 - What kind of accommodation do you currently live in? .............. 171 8. SURVEY RESPONSES: Q2 - How many vehicles do you own? .............................................. 171 9. SURVEY RESPONSES: Q3 - Could you describe your household situation? .......................... 172 10. SURVEY RESPONSES: Q4 - Which part of Delhi do you live in? ............................................ 174 11. SURVEY RESPONSES: Q5 - Why did you choose a flat in a society instead of a plotted house or independent floor (builder floor)? ...................................................................................... 175 12. SURVEY RESPONSES: Questions about housebuilding ....................................................... 177 18 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 19 This chapter will introduce ‘builder floors’ in Delhi, India (Figure 1); an emergent housing phenomenon that has profoundly transformed the city's residential landscape over recent decades. Rather than presenting a linear historical account or policy analysis, I aim to weave together multiple narratives that expose the complex entanglements between urban processes, built form, and socioeconomic forces that have shaped Delhi's development trajectory. By focusing on builder floors as a ‘diffractive lens’, this research seeks to illuminate broader dynamics of housing mobility, property speculation, automobility, and evolving conceptions of ‘home’ that have been central to Delhi's post- independence urban story. Crucially, this research does not claim to present a comprehensive or generalizable model of Delhi's urbanism. Instead, it offers partial, embodied truths (Ahmed, 1999) that emerge from specific stories of individuals, families, and buildings. These narratives are woven together to form what Deleuze and Guattari (1986) call a "collective enunciation" - a polyphonic account that speaks to broader urban processes while remaining grounded in lived experience. By foregrounding the incremental, informal, and speculative nature of much of Delhi's residential development, this work aims to complicate dominant narratives of urban transformation and reveal the complex negotiations between policy, market forces, and everyday spatial practices that shape the city. The opening section of this chapter will present the formidable challenge of narrativizing Delhi. Drawing on the work of a wide range of scholars and briefly introducing the empirical and conceptual terrain covered across the dissertation, this section identifies key gaps in the telling of stories of middle class and post-independence histories of planned neighborhoods. In this context, I find that any attempt to narrativize Delhi must grapple with its inherent contradictions, acknowledge the limitations of singular perspectives, and embrace the city's fundamentally pluralistic nature. The second section introduces builder floors as a significant, yet under-explored phenomenon in Delhi's urban fabric. These structures, typically four- or five-story residential buildings with raised first floors and ground-level parking, embody a complex interplay of factors including middle-class aspirations, real estate speculation, and evolving urban 20 policies. The section goes on to contextualize the research questions or lines of inquiry that the dissertation hopes to address. Finally, a section on methodology not only presents the various data gathering techniques used during the research, but also situates them within a post-qualitative framework which imparts structure to the overall dissertation. Methodologically, this dissertation adopts a post qualitative approach that moves beyond conventional case study and grounded theory methods. Drawing on concepts from new materialism and posthumanist philosophy, I employ what Jackson and Mazzei (2023) call "plugging in" - an experimental mode of inquiry that dissolves rigid boundaries between theory, data, and analysis. This allows for more fluid engagement with diverse sources including interviews, spatial documentation, policy archives, personal reflections, and theoretical texts. By attending to the emergent and entangled nature of urban phenomena, I aim to produce "diffractive" readings (Barad, 2007) that generate new insights through the juxtaposition of empirical and conceptual materials. Following this I briefly describe what the reader might expect in each chapter, outlining the major arguments and the narrative flow of each. 21 Figure 1 Map of the urban area of Delhi showing significant neighborhoods/settlements. INSETS: Location of the National Capital Region (NCR) in India and Delhi within the NCR. 22 Narrativizing Delhi – and this dissertation Yet Delhi’s universes are ripe for the plucking (or writing about). Where is the three- generation Delhi Kayasth novel, for instance, with its beginnings in a haveli in the Chelpuri mohalla, with a middle section in Civil Lines and a triumphant end as a top government official in Lodi Estate? If the defining moment of today’s Delhi was Partition (and few will disagree with that), despite the flowering of Indian authors writing in English in recent decades, the fictionalized refugee saga, tracking the terrible journey from Lahore, the early years of adversity in Malviya Nagar, and ending in a farmhouse in Chhatarpur, is still unwritten. (Sengupta, 2008, p. 7) Given that Delhi (Fig. 1) has been called a ‘Colossus’ (Chakravorty & Sircar, 2021) and the ‘City Improbable’ (K. Singh, 2004), there is a largely held belief about its inscrutability, both loved and loathed (Dasgupta, 2014) by its residents and academic narrators alike. As Vidal, Tarlo, and Dupont admit, reporting on the historical development of Delhi can make narrators feel a range of emotions, “from deep frustration and concern to occasional bursts of optimism” (V. Dupont et al., 2000, p. 25). Consequently, the most daunting task for this project has been to narrativize Delhi’s history, diversity, size, ever-changing landscape, and rapid growth, especially given that it has been thoroughly researched in many aspects already. From historical scholarship on colonial Delhi and as the capital of a freshly independent nation (V. Dupont et al., 2000; Frykenberg, 1994; Gupta, 1981; Hosagrahar, 2012), to contemporary analyses of its neighborhoods, communal, class and development politics (Baviskar, 2020; Ghertner, 2015; Pati, 2022; Srivastava, 2014a; R. Sundaram, 2009), there is an overwhelming pressure to do justice to Delhi and its ‘story’. One of the recurring themes across existing scholarly analyses on Delhi is a focus on its heterogeneity. Ranging from its fragmentary histories of successive capital cities that make up the metropolis, to the class, caste, religion, occupation demographic diversity that characterize its resident population, much has been written on the multiplicity of Delhi. Dupont et al. (2000) for instance draw from broad comprehensive narratives of Delhi’s 23 chronology, juxtaposed with fine-grained engagements with different peripheries and margins that make up the city; ranging from the spatial margins of Delhi’s peri-urban areas and its informal settlements. They emphasize the impossibility of drawing together a singular portrait of the city without necessarily suppressing multiple contradictory narratives. Substantial research into Delhi’s urbanization processes has tended to focus on the critical role of informality in shaping the city's urban fabric. For instance, Baviskar (2020) critiques the ways in which informal settlements and the urban poor are marginalized by elite-driven environmental policies, highlighting the persistent tension between social justice and urban beautification efforts. Sanjay Srivastava (2014) has described the interconnectedness of urban life across class divides looking at how settlements coexist and interact with gated communities. Dupont et al. (2000) emphasize how informal sectors, particularly through economic intermediaries and squatter settlements, are essential to understanding the dynamics of the city's development and its residents' adaptation strategies. Across literature, informality is presented not as an anomaly but as a vital, albeit marginalized, component of Delhi's urban evolution, revealing the city’s inherent contradictions between the formal ambitions of a "world-class" city and the lived realities of its inhabitants. The emergence of the middle class in Delhi as an urbanizing political force, with increasing agency, has been a focal point in recent work, with scholars examining its complex role in shaping the city’s socio-spatial dynamics. Srivastava (2014) highlights how the middle class negotiates its identity through consumerism and spatial strategies, particularly through an increased emphasis on creating gated residential communities. Baviskar has argued that while the middle class advocates environmental reforms, such as pollution control, this advocacy is always restricted; prioritizing self-interest, while increasingly marginalizing the urban poor. This selective environmentalism often results in the displacement of informal settlers and reinforces socio-economic inequalities. Meanwhile, Sengupta has discussed how state policies have facilitated middle-class growth, with urban colonies, parks, and social spaces reflecting a collective aspiration for upward mobility and modern living at the cost of reinforcing the stark spatial divides in the city. The middle class in Delhi is always 24 presented as navigating a dual role—driving modernization and urban development while simultaneously reinforcing socio-spatial inequalities. Their influence is both direct, through political engagement and environmental advocacy, and indirect, through the shaping of consumerist and residential patterns. Yet there are gaps in the telling of post-independence and late 20th century histories of Delhi and its built environment, specifically with regards to planned plotted1 colonies2 and the middle class3. Both these terms have deep historical genealogies that have evolved materially and discursively over the course of the 20th century and are, at times, more colloquially applicable than technically accurate. On the one hand, given the increasing securitization and gating of inner-city neighborhoods, as well as the widening gap between the elite residents and the working class within such gated enclaves, the term ‘colony’ might be more practically applicable now than ever before. On the other hand, while describing themselves, my research participants insisted on identifying themselves as ‘middle class’, despite their elite social status, their purchasing power in a metropolitan economy, and the fact that they own land in the capital city. And owing to such strong self-identification the term has more generally come to signify an upwardly mobile class of people that have invariably accumulated wealth over generations, often own property within the inner-city neighborhoods of Delhi and may, realistically, be considered the urban elite. And though I will elaborate on what it means to identify as ‘middle class’ in later chapters, I will continue to use the term provisionally and for narrative 1 The term “plotting” may be used in India to describe the process of formal survey and subdivision known in the USA as “platting.” A plat map typically shows the division of a new neighborhood into various private lots or parcels, as well as areas set aside for streets, parks, school sites, utility easements, etc. In the case of post- independence planning in India, this type of spatial planning was almost exclusively termed “plotted development”. 2 A colloquial term applied to neighborhoods of varying sizes, either informally settled or planned for the resettlement of communities or groups. These became common parlance since colonial times, often referring to British planned settlements around existing indigenous formations. 3 While deploying the term middle class throughout this dissertation, the reader should be keenly aware that the statistical limits of the term describe a different class of people in India, with significantly lower household income. This recent news article speaks to the ever-widening gap and income disparities between classes: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/income-of-poorest-fifth-plunged-53-in-5-yrs-those-at-top-surged- 7738426/ https://indianexpress.com/article/india/income-of-poorest-fifth-plunged-53-in-5-yrs-those-at-top-surged-7738426/ https://indianexpress.com/article/india/income-of-poorest-fifth-plunged-53-in-5-yrs-those-at-top-surged-7738426/ 25 effect across this dissertation, precisely as a way to emphasize the historical and discursive construction of the middle class and its incongruity with academic discourse. A significant proportion of urban scholarship on Delhi draws attention towards informal settlements and plights of the urban poor, such as dispossession and displacement through the deployment of eminent domain, evictions, enclosure, and even gentrification (Bhan, 2016; Routray, 2022), or towards the aestheticization and securitization of elite enclaves by the civil society (Baviskar, 2020; Ghertner, 2012). This scholarship has been instrumental in highlighting the neoliberal development politics, the class and communal conflicts that shape contemporary Delhi, and explain the inequalities across geographies. However, the dynamics of house building and home ownership that propelled middle class homeowners into gaining political and economic power, and have fueled the real estate and construction industry, have been somewhat underexplored. Dominant narratives on the informal proliferation of Delhi’s morphology and property markets (Pati, 2022), have also not sufficiently explored the incremental densification, commercialization, and informalization of planned plotted neighborhoods, specifically through the incremental transformation of individual homes. While ‘elite informality’ (Roy, 2009) is powerful in explaining and situating informal practices of the landowning elite, as well as, the state’s informal tactics in the production of inequalities, it falls short of exploring the incremental nature of upward mobility. Similarly, ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ (Baviskar, 2020) effectively links civil society action and judicial urbanism (Bhan, 2016; Bhuwania, 2018) to the power wielded by the urban elite, but grants the landowning class with an a priori status, missing out on the historical entanglements of the middle class, speculative capital, and the built environment, that produce civic power. Instead, through this dissertation, I intend to show that these entanglements developed gradually over time, and are indicative of the parallel ‘becomings’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of homeowners, their neighborhoods, the markets and agents that capitalize on their growth and densification, and larger urban development politics. On the other hand, an attention on the peripheral urban/rural extensions and the development of townships and satellite cities project a specific narrative of speculative 26 capital within the city and the building construction industry, that misses out on the intricate links between small-scale builders, land developers and financiers that bankroll everything from individual houses in South Delhi’s posh colonies to large townships in Noida and Gurgaon4. As one of my participants highlighted, “capital moves and shifts, to wherever it is most profitable”. As such, a deeper, more historical look at the emergence of both residential property markets and the middle class, is needed, to explain present-day development politics and the relationship between the city and its hinterland5. Another critical aspect that is overlooked within dominant narratives of urbanism, is the role of automobility, specifically its rise to prominence within the Indian metropolis, in shaping the much of the residential fabric, and in influencing citywide transport and landuse priorities over the decades since independence (Gopakumar, 2020; Sheller & Urry, 2000; Urry, 1999). And while several scholars have brought attention to the relationship between landuse and automobility (Joshi et al., 2016), or ‘cities as movement economies’ (Hillier, 1996), in shaping urban form, stationary vehicles and parking beg deeper investigation as the driver for development policies that have transformed neighborhoods (Spurling, 2018a). This is especially relevant in the case of Delhi, where a rampant parking crisis has gripped the residents’ and media attention in the recent past, eliciting drastic measures for parking management from the authorities, that have in turn exacerbated the growth and densification of neighborhoods. And though I argue in this dissertation for a closer look at larger urban processes such as migration, single-family housing, mobility, and property markets, that have shaped planned plotted colonies, what happens within these colonies has also had a reciprocal impact on the overall development trajectory of Delhi. The densification and vertical growth of planned plotted colonies, their parking crises, the real estate pressures they are under, have shaped 4 Planned satellite towns of Delhi extending into neighboring states that were intended to absorb much of the residential expansion after the projected saturation of Delhi. 5 According to Narayani Gupta, 'hinterland' in the historical context of Delhi’s spatial expansion since colonial interventions began, refers to “an area roughly seven miles in radius around Shahjahanabad.” (1994, p. 138) This, as she explains is based on “the average distance a man could travel with a cart-load of goods in a day…” (1994, p. 144) 27 residential construction markets across the National Capital Region6 (NCR) and have heavily influenced the mobility profile of the city spurring debates around car dependence. The gating and increasing securitization of these colonies challenge the rights, labor practices, and accessibility of the urban poor, putting a strain on the already tenuous relationship between the working class and elite. And the recent trends of densification and sub-division of property within these colonies have far-reaching consequences for urban retrofitting, and the future of new housing models such as Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) (Cervero, 2013; Phani Kumar et al., 2020). According to Abdoumaliq Simone, “urbanization conventionally denotes a thickening of fields, an assemblage of increasingly heterogeneous elements into more complicated collectives” (2020, p. 69). Building on this proposition, any account of urbanization is similarly a thickening of ‘fields’, in terms of disciplinary discourses, theories of urbanism, and empirical evidence of practices. It is my objective in this dissertation to juxtapose the empirical and the theoretical, the material and the discursive, without privileging either. As such, the literature I draw on is diverse and helps to bolster my arguments both theoretically and empirically by offering historical and argumentative evidence. This research is empirically situated within the domain of urban scholarship on Delhi and its postcolonial development history, and for its empirical substantiation I will draw on the work of several scholars such as Narayani Gupta, Veronique Dupont, Jyoti Hosagrahar, Anthony King, Amita Baviskar, Asher Ghertner, Pilar Maria Guerrieri, Sushmita Pati, Jyoti Pandey Sharma, Sanjay Srivastava, Ravi Sundaram, Anne Waldrop, Llerena Guiu Searle, among others. Meanwhile, each chapter also engages with a ‘field’ and body of knowledge with its own set of conversations. These, I will independently engage with in a format that Lisa Mazzei and Alicia Jackson call “plugging in” (2023) – such as the concepts of ‘migration and belonging’ in Chapter 3 from Sara Ahmed (1999); the notion of ‘home’ in Chapter 5 following 6 The National Capital Region (NCR) is a planning region around the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi. It includes Delhi and several districts surrounding it from the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. 28 critical geographers Alison Blunt and Robyn M. Dowling (2022); or the concept of ‘automobility’ in Chapter 6 (Gopakumar, 2020; Sheller & Urry, 2000; Urry, 1999). Returning to the issue of narrativizing Delhi, this dissertation, therefore, does not attempt to explain in any generalized sense, the urbanism of Delhi, or in any way present a systematic or holistic model for its development history or future. Instead, having observed a specific phenomenon, an emergent housing type, I will tell stories of individuals and families, their migration and mobility, their aspirations and actions, that approximate a ‘collective enunciation’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) relatable to many, and that present ‘partial and embodied truths’ (Ahmed, 1999) about Delhi’s history and trigger speculations about its future. Consequently, this dissertation is an attempt at piecing together, the socioeconomic, geographic, historical, and inter-generational conditions of the emergence of a new housing type. One that, I believe, brings together urban processes that have been critical to Delhi and its development since independence; specifically, the changing relationship between land and property, housing mobility and migration of the middle class, the establishment of automobility, speculative capital and real estate, and the evolving conception of ‘home’. Builder Floors – an emergent phenomenon The phenomenon/building type that I have observed over the course of my doctoral research, and is the central concern of this dissertation, is colloquially called ‘builder floor(s)’. The term ‘builder floors’ is broadly used today to describe a four- or five-story residential building, where the first living floor is raised on stilts, such that the ground floor can be given over entirely to parking and service use. The term, however, also describes the arrangement behind its financing and construction. Typically, in such projects, a builder either purchases land from, collaborates with, or buys-out an ‘undivided’ share of the property from an existing homeowner, in exchange for investing their own capital to cover the costs of construction and build the property. The newly built four- or five- story structure 29 Figure 2 Typical transformation of plotted neighborhoods. Single-story houses (LEFT) being converted into builder floors (RIGHT). is then vertically subdivided, with the builder often receiving one of the floors, which have been made into individual dwelling units (Murthy, 2023, p. 58). These properties offer more privacy, most modern amenities, and customization options to their elite residents compared to traditional apartment buildings, an aspect many of my participants emphasized. Each floor is typically owned by a different individual or family, providing a sense of ownership and exclusivity. Builder floors in plotted colonies can range from simple two-bedroom units to luxurious penthouses with private terraces and elevators. However, builder floors have also helped transform neighborhoods once characterized by single-family homes into informally and incrementally developed apartment complexes (Figure 2). As might be expected, this also increases the local demand for parking, sewage, electricity, and other services, putting a strain on the already overburdened infrastructure in such colonies. 30 In the recent past builder floors have been prolific and have significantly transformed, not just planned colonies, but the built environment of Delhi as a whole. A brief survey of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s (MCD) ‘Citizen Search’ Dashboard data shows that over 26,000 building sanction (permit) plans have been released/issued for residential plotted development since the Online Building Sanction (OBS) process began in 2011, of which nearly 1,000 cases were processed in 2023 alone. If we follow the typical builder floor model, this means that in most cases a single-family home is being transformed into 3-4 dwelling units, amounting to approximately 100,000 housing units (or 75,000 new units) over the past decade or so. This does not account for all the houses built outside the OBS process. This is a significantly larger number than the most ambitious government schemes to deliver new housing. For instance, the largest comprehensive development scheme since the 2010 Commonwealth Games Housing has been the General Pool Residential Accommodation (GPRA), approved in 2016, being developed across 7 sites7 in Delhi. With an outlay of INR 32,835 crore, the scheme promises to deliver 25,667 dwelling units in all. Of course, both these statistics pale in comparison with the number of housing units produced informally. For instance, according to the Delhi Development Authority’s (DDA) own estimates “only 53% (excluding squatter housing)” of all residential development in the city is institutional or planned (Delhi Development Authority, 2007, p. 18). Similarly, drawing on a study by the Delhi Urban Environment and Infrastructure Improvement Project (DUEIIP), the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) estimated that “only 23.7 per cent of the city’s population [reside] in what are designated as ‘Planned Colonies’”(Centre for Policy Research, 2015, p. 6). According to another study, the number of unauthorized colonies (UACs) — which the DDA defines as “residential areas where no permission of (the) concerned agency has been obtained for approval of layout plan and/or building plan” — had increased from 118 in 1961 to nearly 1,800 by 2012. (Zimmer, 2012, p. 90) Essentially, as I have pointed out elsewhere, unregulated settlements account for a far greater 7 Including Sarojini Nagar, Nauroji Nagar, Kasturba Nagar, Netaji Nagar, Srinivaspuri, Mohammadpur and Thyagraj Nagar, where existing government employee’s housing colonies are being razed and redeveloped. 31 percentage of housing in the city, when compared with planned neighborhoods. (Murthy, 2023, p. 51) However, this is not the focus of this dissertation. My point here is that, even discounting the sizable contributions made by the so-called informal sector in meeting the overwhelming housing demand in the city, incremental, organically developed (yet legally built) housing driven by individual interests and financed through small-scale builders, sufficiently overshadows the most ambitious government housing schemes. Given these statistics, much of the housing being produced in the city looks very different than the fast-paced, high- rise, global transit metropolis, that the big -infrastructure and -investment driven political imaginary would have us believe. As prolific as it has become, the builder floor has still to feature among the residential types officially acknowledged by the planners of the city (somewhere between plotted residential and group housing), or in architectural design studios at the academy that often feature gated group housing societies and even Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs). If it is ubiquitous now, it is only because people, both property owners and speculative builders have made it a reality, not the state or its planning machinery, nor experts and academic pontification. It is ‘common knowledge’ that the left-over sum of money, after subtracting the construction costs, from the sale of one of the floors to the builder, is a way for the builder to offload their ‘black money’ (K. Sundaram & Pandit, 1976) - a kind of money laundering system. It is ‘understood’, that in the process of maximizing floor space and number of bedrooms, often bye laws are violated. It is also common for the stilt floor to accommodate servant quarters for maids and drivers or a small shop at times, even though the stilt is strictly meant for parking only. The combined vehicle count for such buildings is often far more than may be accommodated within the stilt floor, thereby ‘forcing’ people to park their surplus vehicles on the street. Yet from an aesthetic perspective, these buildings ‘look’ legitimate, unlike the informal settlements of the city. The underlying land and street patterns of such planned neighborhoods camouflage the extent to which they are informal. With the prolific development of builder floors, neighborhoods of single-family dwelling units have been gradually transforming into what are effectively group housing societies with 32 woefully lacking infrastructure and utility services. The so-called parking crisis does not seem to abate in the face of the builder floor revolution and its machine of (re)production only creates more demand rather than mitigate its consequences. Most neighborhood streets are now bereft of a ground floor or front porch, given over entirely to parking and service use. Where there used be chance encounters, conversations, and social interaction between residents of colonies, there exists a liminal space occupied by service workers, guards, and other temporary residents that constitute a new social life of the street; one that intimidates the elite residents, incentivizing further capital and resource investment into security and segregation. As an introductory explanation and as a starting point for a discussion around the emergence of builder floors, I offer the following diagram. In the typical plotted colony, the emergence of builder floors follows, and is closely linked to, several specific historical processes broadly summarized below (Figure 3): However, any account that claims to trace the evolution of this housing type must contend with intersecting processes, and parallel emergences, that may only be read in conjunction with each other. For instance, though much of my research focuses on builder floors in plotted planned colonies, there have been precedents, antecedents, and variations of these Post-independence residential expansion following the 'Neighborhood Unit' model Incremental development and inhabitation of plotted colonies (1950s-80s) through Cooperative Housing Societies Economic liberalization (1990s), the vertical growth of neighborhoods, and subdivision of properties Increasing vehicular ownership, personal wealth, and civic power of the upwardly mobile middle class Resurgence of builders in the property market, circulation of speculative capital Parking crisis leading to Administrative order enforcing Parking Stilts in all residential redevelopment Construction boom in Builder Floors across the city Figure 3 Rudimentary sequence of events leading up to the emergence of builder floors. 33 Figure 4 Floor plans of a typical mixed-use building in Khirki Village (urban village in South Delhi), documented as part of a seminar course I taught in 2015. in every other category of colony in Delhi, especially, urban villages and UACs. In many of these other cases, multistoried housing goes beyond the neat and clean subdivision I have described above, offering complex tenancy and tenure arrangements to migrant workers, manufacturing units, and new families in the city, such as room rentals, partial floor sales, etc. Similarly, the role of the stilted floor shifts, depending on the geographic location of the building and the effective control of the state in enforcing land use regulations. The diagram below (Figure 4) shows one such case, where multiple tenants, users, and tenure arrangements occupy the same building. Research Questions For the purposes of immediate comprehension, the diagram shown on the previous page necessarily simplifies and sequentializes the emergence of builder floors, linking it to specific historical events beyond the control of individuals, in a unilineal causal chain. However, I believe, it also obfuscates the complex and parallel emergence of multiple phenomena/processes that shape the built fabric of neighborhoods, the lives of its residents, and planning/policy responses to development in the city. In this vein, builder floors are not simply the resultant of a singular chain of events, but rather have emerged at 34 the intersections of urban processes with longer trajectories, and as one of their repercussions and catalysts. As a study of emergent phenomena, this dissertation therefore seeks to present parallel narratives of urban processes that reinforce and make each other legible, without making claims of unilineal causality or beginning and endings. In keeping with this approach, my research questions for this enquiry do not follow a causal logic and are not deterministic. I ask, instead, how things and processes are related, how progression in one makes another more visible or potent within the urban milieu. Therefore, my research questions reflect the emergent nature of this and other associated phenomena: What urban processes are made legible through the study of builder floors? There are, of course, a number of secondary questions that emerge out of the same central inquiry: • How have histories of migration, economic and housing mobility, of the middle class in the city, supported the emergence of builder floors? • How has the relationship between residential property and land ownership evolved since the introduction of single-family subdivisions and plotted neighborhoods? • What is the relationship between the rise in prominence of builders, speculative capital, and real estate market regulation? • How have the lifestyles and aspirations of middle-class families shaped and been shaped by the evolving conception of ‘home’? • How has automobile dependency and the present parking crisis in the city taken root? The chapters that follow will substantiate and explore different aspects of the emergence of builder floors, each demonstrating its entanglements with larger urban processes that both create the conditions for its emergence and are impacted by it. However, like many stories, this dissertation begins from a personal perspective. Therefore, Chapter 2 of this dissertation will follow the Story of my House, which provides the personal context for this dissertation and explains my own motivations for this research, beginning with the story of 35 my own childhood home. It also presents a simple starting point for this inquiry, which will subsequently be complicated through each chapter that follows. The following section in this chapter, however, offers a guide to reading the rest of the dissertation. I propose that the writing of this dissertation, its reading, the fieldwork and methods involved in data collection, are all part of the same relational continuity. Methodology - and some notes on Post Qualitative Inquiry These are practices in which some entity is being sliced, colored, probed, talked about, measured, counted, cut out, countered by walking, or prevented. Which entity? A slightly different one each time. Attending to enactment rather than knowledge has an important effect: what we think of as a single object may appear to be more than one. All the examples in this book concern atherosclerosis. But a plaque cut out of an atherosclerotic artery is not the same entity as the problem a patient with atherosclerosis talks about in the consulting room, even though they are both called by the same name. The loss of blood pressure over a stenosis is not the same thing as the loss of blood vessel lumen that radiologists make visible on their X-ray pictures. (Mol, 2002, p. vii) Agential realism and why it must be intersectional Over the course of this research, I have found that the phenomenon of builder floors and their emergence is similar to the study of atherosclerosis, that Annemarie Mol - in her book, The Body Multiple (2002) - is describing in the quote above. Much like the various ‘entities’ that atherosclerosis ‘may appear as’, the endeavor to define builder floors has also produced a loose agglomeration of results. Ranging from typological features such as the vertical subdivision of dwelling units, the presence of parking stilts, and snap aesthetic judgements about their ‘tiered cake-like’ appearance, to their peculiar economic model and ‘anything that a builder builds’, have all been used to characterize builder floors by my 36 participants. The more I insisted on triangulating a set of defining features, a finite tracing of their origin story, the more it evaded capture. Following Mol’s suggestion, I eventually decided to shift my focus to the ‘enactment’ of my research and what it produced, instead. This shift in focus - the optical metaphor here being crucial – proved productive, generative, of further research, such that it allowed me to ‘read’ other urban processes ‘through’ the phenomenon – much like a diffractive pattern. A diffractive reading method as Karen Barad suggests, in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), is useful in “reading insights through one another [and] in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference” (Barad, 2007, p. 71). According to Barad, diffraction is unlike reflexive or reflective critique, where ‘reflective’, as far as optics are concerned, is mainly a deflection and deferment of meaning8, while critique is “all too often not a deconstructive practice … but a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something down…”. Instead, following Donna Haraway, she calls for “reading diffractively for patterns of differences that make a difference… the sense of it being suggestive, creative and visionary” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 49). Here she makes an ethical argument for positive critique, that can (and always does) change the world that we are entangled with. ‘Agential realism’9 – another term she uses - understood this way questions the possibility of ‘distanced’ research and calls to the front, the ethical responsibility of the researcher in the enactment of research itself. Barad explains further: Diffraction, understood using quantum physics, is not just a matter of interference, but of entanglement, an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. This difference is very important. It underlines the fact that knowing is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart, where cuts do violence but also open up and rework the agential conditions of possibility. There is not this knowing from a distance. 8 Différance here is a coinage which combines ‘difference and ‘deferment’, and is that attribute of language, by which meaning is generated because of a word's difference from other words in a signifying system, and at the same time, meaning is inevitably and infinitely deferred or postponed. For more read: Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 13. 9 To read further on agential realism and intra-action coined by Karen Barad refer to ‘Posthumanist Performativity’ by Elisa Fiore in the Posthuman Glossary (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018) 37 Instead of there being a separation of subject and object, there is an entanglement of subject and object, which is called the “phenomenon.” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 50) In this sense, the triumvirate of researcher, object, apparatus are always already entangled, and research is not about ‘using’ one or the other ‘lens’ to debunk or corroborate one version of reality and validate another from a transcendent position. Instead, every act of research and the apparatuses used for that research transform the studied ‘object’ – make ‘agential cuts’ through it – to produce multiplicities entangled with each other and with the researcher and apparatus. These ‘agential cuts’, then, produce new entities, albeit entangled with the object being studied, the apparatus, and the researcher. This is also what Mol is referring to in the quote above. Much like how, “a plaque cut out of an atherosclerotic artery is not the same entity as the problem a patient with atherosclerosis talks about in the consulting room” (Mol, 2002, p. vii), builder floors are not the same entity when studied through different disciplinary apparatuses. Depending on the ‘lens’ used – urban history (of Delhi in particular), urban studies, architectural typology, development studies, housing studies, mobility studies, cultural studies, or postcolonial studies – different entities are produced. Builder floors as the culmination of private dwellings following the bungalow-kothi-floor typological evolution, are not the same entity as the parking stilts under them and their relationship to the growing parking crisis within colonies and the city at large. However, since “knowing is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart”, according to Barad, these so-called different entities produced by making disciplinary cuts, also bring these seemingly diverse disciplines into conversation and extends knowledge across all of them. And so, “diffraction allows you to study both the nature of the apparatus and also the object”, which includes our devices for measurement as well as ourselves (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 52). The following sections will elaborate on the instruments and methods for data collection that I have used during the course of this research while keeping in mind that the ‘data’, the instruments, and I, have all transformed through the research itself. 38 What comes ‘after method’? And what are the methods I have used? This dissertation does not make claims on any unified theory for the explanation of the emergence of builder floors. Nor does it come up with answers to solve major issues with regards to Delhi’s development and environment as a consequence or fallout of builder floors, which impacts multiple disciplinary domains. It is, instead, an attempt at weaving together narratives that both, expose and produce new entanglements between these disciplines. Such a method, then, necessitates not just a radical mix of data collection, but also an approach that prioritizes intersectionality above all else. I will first elaborate on the logistics of data collection and the specific instruments I employed for identifying, recruiting, interviewing and observing. Then I will contextualize these within the framework of post qualitative enquiry (Lather, 2013; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013) and what that means for this dissertation and its chapter structure. My fieldwork involved collecting ethnographic data through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, as well as conducting spatial mapping and building documentation. The fieldwork itself was planned through four phases. Two were about establishing the contextual parameters and historical background around builder floors mainly through secondary sources, while the other two were about engaging directly with and investigating an appropriate selection of case studies. And while there was originally a sense of chronological ordering across the secondary and primary data collection phases, in practice, the process was more cyclical and iterative than strictly sequential. The secondary data I collected involved archival study as well, specifically the text from relevant acts, laws, court cases, and policy documents that helped substantiate the discursive context. Of course, a plethora of media reports, newspaper articles and op-eds informed my secondary research as well, but those will be referenced throughout the dissertation as needed. A brief list of the archives I have referred to are as follows: • Significant acts, laws, and policy documents: Societies Registration Act (1860); The Co-Operative Societies Act (1912); The Delhi Co-Operative Societies Act (1972 - amended 2003); The Transfer of Property Act (1882); The Real Estate Regulatory Act (2016); the Delhi Master Plans (1962, 2001, 2021, 2041-draft); Administrative Order 39 (No. J-20011 /12/77-LII, dated 14th February 1992 – hitherto called the Freehold Order); ‘the parking stilt’ Administrative Order (No. CE(B)/2011/D-79, dated 27th April 2011 – hitherto called the Parking Stilt Order); Delhi Maintenance and Management of Parking Places Rules (2019); National Urban Transport Policy (2014). • Relevant court cases: Delhi High Court Writ Petition (C) No.4598/2010 - Sh. P.K. Chatterjee and Ors. [Others] v. Union of India and Ors.; Supreme Court Writ Petition 13029/1985 – Sh. M.C. Mehta v. Union of India and Ors. (both available via the online case history database of the respective courts) • Municipal records: Building activity monitored by the MCD, permits granted, and under review, have been digitized and made publicly available since 2015, as part of their Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) reforms (https://mcdonline.nic.in/eodb/). The case study research entailed recruitment of participants through an online (and mobile- based) broad interest survey (Figure 5). The survey asked participants to identify the type of residential building they reside in, their reasons for choosing either plotted or group housing, if they have recently undergone redevelopment, and whether they dealt with builders or architects during the process, among other questions. Of the 151 responses received, approximately 60 responses yielded complete data, which I will discuss in a later chapter. However, in order to recruit participants for my study and essentially help disseminate the survey, I sought the support of the United Residents Joint Action (URJA), a non-profit association of around 1500 Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) across Delhi. Their network is widespread and proved to be effective in reaching out to a large base of homeowners across the city. Through this phase I identified the specific building cases to document and sought consent for participation, from the respective homeowners. I interviewed a total of 23 participants, both individually and collectively (at times other family members sat in on interviews and added to the discussion), mainly divided into three groups – homeowners, builders, and experts. While I recruited experts through the previously existing professional networks I have in Delhi, I made contact with builders mainly through the homeowners I interviewed. https://mcdonline.nic.in/eodb/ 40 The interviews themselves were semi-structured and open-ended, focused more on building rapport with my participants and coaxing them to open-up as much as possible. In the case of homeowners, I asked them about their life-histories, inter-generational migrations, material conditions and economic mobility, as well as their relationship with cars and transportation in the city, their engagement with their neighbors and the neighborhood environment, etc. Builders, on the other hand, were asked about their personal journeys to become builders, their business development, operational, and organizational models, and their views on the larger real estate and residential construction market. Finally, the questions I asked experts varied depending on their expertise, though I also asked them several questions about their views on the emergence of builder floors and development in the city, in general. While some of the experts I interviewed chose not to remain anonymous and spoke from their official position and title – Mr. Ashok Bhattacharjee Figure 5 Screenshot of the welcome screen for the online interest survey distributed to recruit participants for the study. The text is bilingual (English and Hindi) throughout the survey and was mainly distributed via WhatsApp, a commonly used messaging platform in India. 41 (Transport and Planning Consultant + Former Director of UTTIPEC10), Dr. Anumita Roychowdhury (Executive Director of Research and Advocacy, Centre for Science and Environment), Mriganka Saxena (Architect and Urban Designer and Founding Partner, Habitat Tectonics - Architecture & Urbanism + Former Senior Consultant at UTTIPEC) – a few of the others I spoke with decided to remain anonymous. Building-level documentation: In addition to interviewing homeowners, I documented the floor layouts and official building sanction (permit) drawings, of their previous residence and the buildings they are currently residing in. This analysis was intended to trace transformations at the scale of the individual plot, based on available and recreated maps of the building as it is now, and it once was. I also asked homeowners and their families about design choices, use of spaces, changes in family structure, involvement of architect/builder, material and aesthetic choices, financial considerations, peer and cultural influences, to produce thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of domestic life before and within builder floors. But somewhere in the middle of interviews and with each set of building drawings that were produced, the sense of each story being a ‘case study’ seemed inadequate and unjust. During some interviews there was a longer discussion about the childhood home of the participant, some focused on their inter-generational migration, while others brought up completely new concerns with life in builder floors. The story of my own house and those of others felt more like a loose agglomeration of stories, rather than a ‘set of cases’ with pre- defined parameters ready for comparison. Not every story spoke to the same set of ‘aspects’ about domestic and neighborhood life, development woes, financial concerns. Instead, each story had a uniqueness, each brought something different to the metaphorical table, while still bleeding into other stories, inducing connections, breeding familiarity and solidarity across families and situations. Before undertaking fieldwork, I had proposed to follow an interpretivist framework that combined the case study method with grounded theory. According to Halaweh, Fidler and 10 Unified Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure (Planning & Engineering) Centre within the DDA 42 McRobb (2008), this is possible since “the chief characteristic of case study research is the specification of the boundary and the scope of the research cases and the unit of analysis …[which is] compatible with the grounded theory concept of theoretical sampling”. Additionally, within such an approach, “the criterion for selection of the cases and the unit of analysis in the case study is relevance, and theoretical sampling serves to seek in-depth information from the cases, and to discover and develop the concepts and theories” (2008, p. 7). This approach, then, is contingent on the synchronicity between the ‘unit of analysis’ (or criteria) of the case studies and the emerging ‘conceptual categories’ or ‘themes’ within grounded theory. Moreover, both methods aim for generalizability as a feature of the output of research. However, as I focused more on the specificity of each narrative, attended to the organic intensities within each story and the emphasis placed by each participant at different parts of their telling, I questioned the primacy of voice and meaning in conventional qualitative research. Often, therefore, in an attempt to impart conceptual consistency, and to allow room for comparative analysis later, the researcher in conventional (humanist) qualitative research sacrifices the present and curtails potential lines of flight that might emerge during the enactment of the interview. Lisa Mazzei, in her paper ‘A voice without organs: interviewing in posthumanist research’ (2013) addresses this precise problem. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’ in ‘Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia’ (1983), Mazzei develops the concept of a ‘voice without organs’. Here, Mazzei builds on posthumanist and post-qualitative research to move beyond the notion of a thinking subject as a “bounded organism, the body, of the humanist subject… [to] a posthumanist body that exists in a complex network of human and nonhuman forces” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 734). This allows one to think of the ‘voice’ in an interview as both unbound from a specific thinking humanist subject, but also the interview as a fully embodied experience, where the “researcher-data-participants-theory-analysis” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 732) is itself an emergent voice (without organs). Such an approach accounts for the always-present entanglements between the triumvirate of researcher, object, apparatus, following Barad’s agential realism. Blurring these artificial 43 boundaries also attends to the problems within conventional qualitative research. For instance, in his book ‘Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods’, Robert K. Yin admits that within case study research the “boundaries between phenomenon and context may not be clearly evident” (Yin, 2018, pp. 45–46). Similarly, according to Yin, there are situations where “there will be many more variables of interest than data points, and as one result benefits from the prior development of theoretical propositions to guide design, data collection, and analysis…another result relies on multiple sources of evidence, with data needing to converge in a triangulating fashion” (Yin, 2018, pp. 45–46). Essentially, there is a constant struggle within conventional qualitative research to look for sequence, rigor, and triangulation. In posthumanist and post-qualitative research, on the other hand, there is no sequence (theory first or data first) and rigor does not amount to triangulation. There is, instead, an emphasis on emergence, diffraction, and production. Instead of defining a phenomenon and asking, ‘what it is?’, we ask, ‘what else is there?’ and ‘what is being produced?’ Moving beyond an ‘inductive-deductive method’, where concepts lead to themes, which under repeated scrutiny and testing in the field, eventually tend towards theory (Corbin & Strauss, 1990; Halaweh et al., 2008), post-qualitative inquiry simultaneously engages data, analysis, and theory. While Corbin and Strauss suggest that it is okay if “literature directs the theoretical sampling, and is helpful for theoretical sensitivity” (Halaweh et al., 2008, p. 4), post-qualitative inquiry assumes an emergent causality where neither is privileged or comes before the other. In terms of method, this means that each method cuts across other methods such as interview data, field notes, drawings of the spatial observations, secondary and empirical sources, analysis, and even ‘theory’. In 2011, Elizabeth A. St. Pierre wrote a chapter in The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (4th Edition), where she used the term post qualitative research to “mark what [she saw] as the impossibility of an intersection between conventional humanist qualitative methodology and ‘the posts’” (Pierre, 2014, p. 3). This impossibility was born out of the increasingly restrictive and regimentalized political economy of ‘scientifically based research’ within the social sciences that could not contend with the various ‘post’ 44 theoretical frameworks such as “Foucault’s archaeology, genealogy, and power-knowledge reading; Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizoanalysis’ and ‘schizoanalysis’; Derrida’s affirmative deconstruction; Lyotard’s ‘paralogy’” (Pierre, 2014, p. 3). Similarly, in After Method (2004), John Law critiques traditional social science methods for failing to capture complex, messy realities. He argues for broader, more flexible methodologies that embrace ambiguity and multiplicity and proposes new forms of knowing through embodiment, emotionality, and situated inquiry. Therefore, to attend to the myriad possibilities for knowledge production that theories have to offer and to allow multiple readings of ‘reality’ to co-exist, the boundaries between theory and data, subject and object, material and discourse need to be dissolved. Posthumanism and the ‘ontological turn’ offers such a possibility. Within such a framework, it is no longer necessary for a ‘theory to be applied’ to a data set to ‘explain’ an ‘empirically observed reality’. Epistemology is thus not alienated from ontology. But simultaneous engagement with theory, data, and analysis is easier said than done. Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei – in Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research (2023) – provide a practical guide to achieve this, or more precisely, to practice an experimental, speculative and productive method which follows such an emergent onto-epistemology. Jackson and Mazzei call this ‘plugging in’, where they “position plugging in as an emergence of ‘thought in the act.’ Plugging in is a production of the new: the assemblage in formation. This is a dramatic, profound shift from social science knowledge with its hierarchical, empirical demands for recognizable representation to an ontology in which experimentation is privileged” (2023, p. 2). In contravention to the conventional sequence of humanist qualitative research, Mazzei and Jackson engage with philosophical texts alongside interview excerpts – what they call ‘performative accounts’ – and their own insights, to do things. “Cassandra’s and Sera’s (their participants’) accounts of life and the theorists’ philosophical concepts encountered each other in a ‘bloc of becoming’ to co-constitute the outside of thought” (2023, p. 4). These performative acts of becoming-thought – since they are always in the middle of changing – constitute a relational text with the continuous desire to ‘plug-in’ to other texts, other thinkings and doings. This, of course, as Jackson and Mazzei emphasize follows the 45 concept of the ‘literary machine’ by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book, A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (1987). There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore, a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages …We will ask what it functions with, in connection …A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine… (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 4) This dissertation is then, similarly a “between-book” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023). Not only in its chapter structure that plugs in different bodies of literature, interview excerpts, personal reflections, drawings, field notes, etc., but also in that the seeming ‘object’ of this dissertation – the builder floors – are an assemblage themselves, a machine, a go-between other assemblages. The field and myself One cannot ''be" either a cell or molecule - or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on - if one intends to see and see from these positions critically. "Being'' is much more problematic and contingent. Also, one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement. (Haraway, 1988, p. 585) The question of positionality is central to narrativization and storytelling, in general and in this dissertation, especially where the position of the researcher is entangled with the social and material reality of what they are studying. Due to my own roots within the ‘middle-class’ community of North Delhi, my professional and academic networks, my entanglement with property owners and builders in plotted colonies, and their affiliated Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), this research is in many senses, an auto-ethnography of my life-world – particularly highlighted in Chapter 2: The Story of my House. Builder floors themselves are very well-known colloquially and most of my participants and scores others who I encountered throughout the duration of my fieldwork were confident in their opinions, interpretations and synopses about the emergence and impacts of builder floors. My typical 46 middle-class upbringing in a plotted colony, my immersion in the development politics and the cultural milieu, put me in an emic position even before I began fieldwork. As a researcher, this - I felt, initially - also put me at a disadvantage in terms of the lack of distance I felt from the ‘field’ and my resultant ‘bias’. Corrine Glesne, in her book ‘Becoming qualitative researchers: an introduction’ (1999), interrogates the origins of qualitative research, specifically the positionality of the researcher herself. According to Glesne, ‘fieldwork’ – as we now know it – originated in the 1920s with the Chicago School, when sociologists such as “Robert Park and Ernest Burgess… began applying participant-observation techniques to the study of groups within their own culture” (Glesne, 1999, p. 7). However, even before sociologists used it to study cultures, anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski had already established ‘ethnography’ as a legitimized form of cultural study. “[Malinowski] carried out long-term fieldwork (which he called ethnography) in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands between 1914 and 1918. Typically, anthropologists sought to study a group of people who lived in a culture that was remote and quite different [emphasis added] from their own” (Glesne, 1999, p. 7). Early practitioners of ethnography, thus, considered themselves ’outside observers’, and despite best efforts at immersive accounts over long periods, the work of anthropologists such as Malinowski was received problematically by the people he was describing (Erickson, 2018, p. 92). More recent efforts at mitigating the asymmetrical power relations between the researcher and researched, and in consciously addressing “the personal standpoints, the positionality” of researchers stemming from feminist critique (Erickson, 2018, p. 102), techniques such as ‘auto-ethnography’ came to be. Yet, most of these techniques continue to operate purely within the domain of epistemology, rather than engaging with ontology seriously. Classical anthropological conceptions of ethnography and fieldwork, thus, necessitate a separation between epistemology and ontology. Philosophically speaking, this entails an abstraction from, or a stratification of, what Deleuze and Guattari would call ‘immanence’ (1987) – or what Henri Bergson would call ‘pure duration’ (1991 - original text 1896). Both Deleuze and Guattari, and Bergson, are arguing against dualist conceptions of the world and 47 all its knowledge: a transcendental ontology which necessitates positions and conditions of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. They argue against metaphysics that emphasize ‘distance’ between the observed phenomenon and the transcendent position that an observer may occupy. Pure duration, for Bergson is thus the totality of lived reality (1991, p. 205). Thus, post positive epistemology, much of which still drives qualitative research, necessitates etic or emic positions, separates categories such as researcher, participant, informant, etc. This approach also leads to the consequent bounding of the ‘field’ in and as distinct space- time. These acts constitute both space-time(s) and bodies, as arborified11 forms, discrete from each other. Ethnography, then, typically entails studying cultures originating elsewhere that must be studied by outside researchers through immersion in the field (as if they were distanced from each other), with the assistance of informants who are inside the culture being studied. These stratifications then also inform the ways in which academic inquiry is structured. The logistics of research produce ‘academic space’, ‘domestic space’, ‘writing space’, and ‘research field’ as abstract and arbitrary delineations of space-times, imposed for purposes of convenience, mitigating researcher bias, and regimentalizing labor within the academy. These space-times, seemingly independent, always located elsewhere, are however, ontologically part of the same immanence: a ‘fieldwork duration’, as I will explain. In ‘Matter and Memory’ (1991), Bergson argues that any analysis of ‘duration’ necessarily spatializes it, as the verb ‘to analyze’ implies a cutting into parts. Similarly, when time is conceived of as having periods or moments of discrete passing, when we count it, we spatialize it. We unfold it, lay it out in front of us as a map in abstract Euclidean space. Pure duration, on the other hand, is a qualitative multiplicity, immeasurable, non-discrete, and non-quantifiable. The abstract spaces, of and around conventional research and the ‘field’, are then, not impenetrable or a priori, laid out neatly and distinctly in numerical space, but perpetually interpenetrating, entangled, and becoming ontologically, irrespective of the epistemic imperatives of the academy. 11 Read more on this and the rhizome in (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) 48 As a corollary, when conducting fieldwork, the researcher and th