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When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi

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  • D. Asher Ghertner

Abstract

This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents' everyday efforts to secure water, electricity, and building permission, the article proposes two topological figures that move beyond narrower spatial metaphors that read that state either as a fixed, hierarchically scaled entity or as a flat, wholly malleable assemblage without consequential spatial order or historicity. These are the topological state and the state outside itself. The analysis of the topological state centers on how real-time connections are forged between residents and key nodes in the bureaucracy, producing momentary reconfigurations of state form that allow low-level state actors to capture authority even as bureaucratic hierarchy is maintained. The analysis of the state outside itself focuses on how the routine actions of water engineers and municipal officers challenge the common conceptual mapping of the state as a surface with an inside and outside. Taken together, these figures reveal a temporally adept mode of political agency open to conjunctural possibilities and proximate connections but often dismissed as a near-sighted political disposition symptomatic of the poor and marginal classes' submission to clientalist politics.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:107:y:2017:i:3:p:731-750
    DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1261680
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    Cited by:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. Grace Carswell & Thomas Chambers & Geert De Neve, 2019. "Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 37(4), pages 597-616, June.
    5. Tak‐Wing Ngo & Eva P.W. Hung, 2024. "GRAY GOVERNANCE AT BORDER CHECKPOINTS: Regulating Shadow Trade at the Sino‐Kazakh Border," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(3), pages 488-505, May.
    6. 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.

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