As a part of my professional development grant, I took up the opportunity to facilitate a workshop on local governance (Nagar Swaraj or City Self Rule) in the Khidki neighborhood of Delhi, a diverse locality that is in constant flux due to a large migrant population. We conducted a board game at a community library, engaging people of all ages and backgrounds in imagining a more resilient, inclusive neighborhood and city.
Democracy, at its most ideal, instills a sense of agency in citizens—that their opinions matter, their needs matter, and through collective exercises of debate and collaboration, a community can settle upon resource allocations that enable collective wellbeing. However, the context of Indian urban governance muddies this ideal. Multiple departments are responsible for overseeing services like water, transportation, electricity, among others, blurring the line of communication between communities and the bureaucrats who dictate a community’s access—or lack thereof—to resources. As the capital of the country, Delhi’s governance structure involves a unique division of responsibilities—where land ownership and policing fall under central jurisdiction, while other services are managed by the state government. This layered arrangement can sometimes make it challenging to establish clear lines of accountability between citizen concerns and institutional responses
When we consider the extent of migration to cities like Delhi, the relationship between citizen and state becomes even murkier, as many migrant communities, despite providing critical labor to Delhi, lack a clear entitlement to the city as newcomers living in either unplanned or unregistered localities, like Khidki. In such neighborhoods, access to a “patta” or the power of attorney for one’s homes is quite murky, sometimes it is completely missing, in some unregulated unplanned localities there is a “patta” but it is not registered in the name of the resident, and in other cases it is there. (Bhan 2020) The unclear state recognition of their place in the city places significant barriers in migrant communities’ attempts in obtaining basic needs like water; Delhi and most Indian cities are populated with localities that have to privately arrange water, as the state has let go of its obligation to provide this service. Moreover, when entire communities lack “pattas” they are at risk for displacement through demolition drives or redevelopments, as their residency is framed as “illegitimate” and thus fit for removal.
In this context of a fragmented state-citizen relationship, marginalized urban communities may tend to accept the status quo. When viewed through a lens of governmentality, citizens come to accept policies or decisions that go against their interests for the sake of a “better” nation, or “better city”, producing a diminished agency in bargaining for the betterment of their community, as this is seen as conflicting with larger “nation-building” ambitions (Lawlor 2014). This is not to say communities do not agitate and organize in their own ways, but that there are significant political and social barriers in thinking beyond one’s everyday survival, and a conditioning to diminish one’s own needs for the sake of a “greater good.”
This board game could in no way claim to stymie these larger structural forces that hamper democracy; however, our intention was to instill a sense of agency and a practice of imagining a better world for their community. This game is a pilot to spark conversations on urban governance beyond the formal, and into the casual dialogue of a community, serving as a template to foster more decentralized governance practices where communities have an active stake in their locality, rather than recipients of how the state has decided to treat that locality.
The game was relatively simple. The board was divided into six segments: housing, school, public space, workspace, markets, and municipality. Each section is overlaid with multiple propositions, and to advance, the entire group must come to a consensus on what three ideas they would like to implement. Connecting the different segments is a road, where solutions related to transportation were laid out and had to be deliberated upon. Players advance through each section, going from housing all the way to municipality, where they then reflect on the decisions they made regarding their neighborhood.
When the game first started, our intention was for participants to think of their community and their needs. However, the participants had difficulty imagining themselves and their community in the game, referring to the policies and their impact in an abstract sense, as if they were playing SimCity. It is precisely this mental approach to government that this activity seeks to undermine government works for us, not for an abstract other—everyone is entitled to rights and dignities, not just the few who we imagine government only working for.
However, this soon shifted once we as facilitators reminded the crowd that these ideas are for one’s own community. And once that clicked, the game became much livelier; people brought in examples of struggles they saw every day and those that struck a chord in larger city discourse. One girl lamented how a lack of shading makes it difficult for the neighborhood’s older folks to socialize in the summers when justifying her choice for more greenery for the public space section. Another brought up the example of the Delhi tuition center that flooded and killed three students as a reason to invest in drainage in the housing section.
Beyond the relation to their own lives, participants were acting on an empathy for folks other than themselves, suggesting that conversations in group settings can foster discussions that center overall community needs as opposed to simply self-interest. They understood a principle taught in urban planning schools intuitively—designing for the extremes—where accounting for the most vulnerable in a solution enables its use and access for the rest of the population.
The game became a vehicle for lively debate, bringing up contentions when it came to issues like bus services, where some favored a free service while others preferred an affordable but paid service. Participants were able to flesh out their views on government and entitlements in real time, fostering a connection between individual ideologies and collective responsibility.
In urban areas, neighborhoods are more transient, with people leaving and coming every day. Governance institutions and their responsibilities are scattered and less direct when compared to rural areas, resulting in our participants feeling disconnected from the decisions that impact their everyday. It suggests that approaches to community mobilization cannot be directly imported from rural playbooks into urban communities; new ideas must be created to account for the different relationship between individual, community, and state in urban neighborhoods like Khidki.
Though this game may not structurally change this relationship, it served as a platform for folks to articulate their needs and relate them to tangible asks they can make towards their elected representatives. It is this building up of agency and gathering of perspectives that empower communities to ask for their needs. A potential next step could be the integration of such workshops into an institutionalized format that relates to local government and can convert discussions like the one we facilitated into tangible changes in governance.
Bhan, Gautam “Informality, housing and work” in The Informal Economy Revisited, 2020
Lawlor, Leonard, and John Nale, eds. “Governmentality.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, 175–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
