IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ijurrs/v49y2025i3p609-631.html

EXPERT FIXERS: Bureaucratic Informality, Brokerage and the Politics of Land in Mumbai

Author

Listed:
  • Sangeeta Banerji

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork within the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), this article illustrates the ‘field of fixing’, a brokerage structure that operates alongside Mumbai's urban bureaucracy. Scholars of Southern urbanism have extensively written about the role of informalized state action in producing an unequal cityscape. Exploring a disaggregated view of this state space in the megacity of Mumbai, this article turns attention instead to the ‘paralegal’ or the ‘field of fixing’, a liminal space between the state, market and society dictating access to the city in postcolonial India. The expert fixers in this space manipulate and maintain the real estate industry's relationship with Mumbai's urban bureaucracy. This article highlights the practices of six such fixers—the follow‐up boy, the watcher, the paper expert, the regulation expert, the regulation strategy expert and the liaisoning architect by following the movement of files seeking bureaucratic approvals for land development in Mumbai, elucidating a predatory politics that ensures the success of real‐estate developers in the megacity.

Suggested Citation

  • Sangeeta Banerji, 2025. "EXPERT FIXERS: Bureaucratic Informality, Brokerage and the Politics of Land in Mumbai," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 49(3), pages 609-631, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:49:y:2025:i:3:p:609-631
    DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.13323
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13323
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1468-2427.13323?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brenner, Neil, 2004. "New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199270064.
    2. Ananya Roy, 2011. "Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(2), pages 223-238, March.
    3. D. Asher Ghertner, 2017. "When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 107(3), pages 731-750, May.
    4. Indivar Jonnalagadda, 2022. "Of political entrepreneurs: Assembling community and social capital in Hyderabad’s informal settlements," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(4), pages 717-733, March.
    5. Gandhi, Sahil & Tandel, Vaidehi & Tabarrok, Alexander & Ravi, Shamika, 2021. "Too slow for the urban march: Litigations and the real estate market in Mumbai, India," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 123(C).
    6. Sukriti Issar, 2022. "The financialisation of floor space, Mumbai 1880–2015," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(15), pages 3150-3166, November.
    7. Solomon Benjamin, 2008. "Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(3), pages 719-729, September.
    8. Tandel, Vaidehi & Gandhi, Sahil & Tabarrok, Alex, 2023. "Building networks: Investigating the quid pro quo between local politicians & developers," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 164(C).
    9. Sud, Nikita, 2014. "Governing India’s Land," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 43-56.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Monika Streule & Ozan Karaman & Lindsay Sawyer & Christian Schmid, 2020. "Popular Urbanization: Conceptualizing Urbanization Processes Beyond Informality," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(4), pages 652-672, July.
    2. Ebenezer F Amankwaa & Katherine V Gough, 2022. "Everyday contours and politics of infrastructure: Informal governance of electricity access in urban Ghana," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(12), pages 2468-2488, September.
    3. Malini Ranganathan, 2014. "Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 590-608, March.
    4. Gordon MacLeod & Martin Jones, 2011. "Renewing Urban Politics," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 48(12), pages 2443-2472, September.
    5. Harshavardhan Jatkar, 2024. "BODIES AGAINST MODERNITY: Politics of Slum Rehabilitations in India," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(1), pages 111-125, January.
    6. Tahire Erman, 2016. "Formalization by the State, Re-Informalization by the People: A Gecekondu Transformation Housing Estate as Site of Multiple Discrepancies," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(2), pages 425-440, March.
    7. Yang Zhan, 2018. "The urbanisation of rural migrants and the making of urban villages in contemporary China," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(7), pages 1525-1540, May.
    8. Tandel, Vaidehi & Gandhi, Sahil & Nanda, Anupam & Agnihotri, Nandini, 2025. "Do mandatory disclosures squeeze the lemons? The case of housing markets in India," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 247(C).
    9. Seth Schindler, 2014. "Producing and contesting the formal/informal divide: Regulating street hawking in Delhi, India," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 51(12), pages 2596-2612, September.
    10. Auerbach, Adam Michael, 2017. "Neighborhood Associations and the Urban Poor: India’s Slum Development Committees," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 119-135.
    11. Indivar Jonnalagadda & Ryan Stock & Karan Misquitta, 2021. "TITLING AS A CONTESTED PROCESS: Conditional Land Rights and Subaltern Citizenship in South India," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(3), pages 458-476, May.
    12. Brianna Castro, 2023. "BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Heterogeneous Governance, Claims Making and Forced Eviction in a Megacity," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(1), pages 23-38, January.
    13. Özgür Sayın & Michael Hoyler & John Harrison, 2022. "Doing comparative urbanism differently: Conjunctural cities and the stress-testing of urban theory," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(2), pages 263-280, February.
    14. Jesper Bjarnesen, 2023. "THE POWER OF IMPENDING ZONING: Governance through Inaction in a Secondary City in Burkina Faso," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(1), pages 39-53, January.
    15. Bert Suykens, 2015. "The Land that Disappeared: Forceful Occupation, Disputes and the Negotiation of Landlord Power in a Bangladeshi Bastee," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 46(3), pages 486-507, May.
    16. Yaffa Truelove & Natasha Cornea, 2021. "Rethinking urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 39(2), pages 231-246, March.
    17. Yi Jin & Yimin Zhao, 2022. "THE INFORMAL CONSTITUTION OF STATE CENTRALITY: Governing Street Businesses in (Post‐)Pandemic Chengdu, China," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(4), pages 631-650, July.
    18. D. Asher Ghertner, 2020. "Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(4), pages 561-581, July.
    19. Linda Peake, 2016. "The Twenty-First-Century Quest for Feminism and the Global Urban," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(1), pages 219-227, January.
    20. Thomas Cowan, 2021. "UNCERTAIN GROUNDS: Cartographic Negotiation and Digitized Property on the Urban Frontier," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(3), pages 442-457, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:49:y:2025:i:3:p:609-631. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0309-1317 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.