“Democracy’s Crises” as relevant to most of the world can be framed through what Simone (2016) usefully terms  ‘majority spaces’. This is when cities increasingly sited with institutional architectures that facilitate mega-expressways, ports, and vast territories of river and coastal regions climate proofed with new infrastructure initiatives. To move beyond the usual (and easy) critique framed around participation, data-needs, three interconnected realms focus the majority as a political space. First, complex tenurial forms anchor land as a polito-institutional space. These pose historicity of overlapping claims built around meanings that entangle mythic spaces with real estate value. Second, constellations of groups across ethnic and class lines shape the societal embedding of land into particular state spaces. This in turns municipal administration into a Porous Bureaucracy (Benjamin 1996). This democracy looks ‘messy, chaotic, fluid’, reflecting ever-shifts of ethnicity and inter-class alliances. Democracy here is seemingly ordinary: everyday constellations of practices mediate through lower and middle level administrations, liaison agents, political workers, thick with regional accents; their tentative glances shape behind the scene negotiations. Bureaucratic materiality lies in internal notes, ‘municipal’ or Govt. Orders set in a language calling for deeper reads. At election time, mobilizing elected councils lobby higher levels of administration for basic upgrading of infrastructure and services, restricting surveys to the outer perimeter to avoid ‘outside politics to break unity’, and tweak procedures of policy and schemes that otherwise fund high end infrastructure. Third, land embedded into the porous bureaucracies mediated tenurial practices territorialize close to 90% of shelter spaces; but also many evolved into ‘Neighborhood as Factory’, real estate surpluses fuel small shops and manufacturing economy (Benjamin 1996) provide 95 % of jobs and close to 56 to 60% of economic value addition. Today, much of this economy is trans-national, witness the India’s ‘China Bazaars’ that connect with that other giant. Rather than liberal framings of ‘state-society’ that frame this as ‘anarchic’, an analytic of spatiality drawing on institutional and legal pluralism helps better to problematize uneven political and economic spaces between the elite and ‘majority’ groups. “Good Governance” in contrast, sanitizes and frames the everyday as ‘messy and corrupt’ to facilitate mega infrastructures, smart cities, new airports and ‘sea walls’ and riverfront renewal. Land tenures in India since 2016, are subject to extensive drone based digitization to reduce ‘corruption’. Such ‘sanitized smartness’ simplistically promises “efficiency and social justice” where as, it masks an “anti-politics” modernist machine of seductive rhetoric around participatory planning, transparency and accountability. Witness the restricted space to local politicians and leaders, lumped as informants or ‘beneficiaries’ and patronizingly subject to child like games of ticking boxes. “Democratic debate” remain fronted via plush conference rooms embracing policy Oxbridge - Harvard English, and evidenced in satellites enriched data maps to target chaotic peri-urban growth fortified by technical reports projecting climate terror justifying large project infrastructures that remove the majority from their land. The ‘crises’ of Democracy, then, lies in the contested framing of cities. 

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Images: by the author