Knowledge Actors Engaging in “Everyday Planning” in Rapidly Urbanizing Peripheries of the Global South

This article presents original research based on the premise that inclusive urban planning is about different types of knowl‐ edges coming together, a process that enables the participation of diverse knowledge actors. In India, the urgency of peri‐urbanization is reflected in the massive transformation and roaring real estate speculation that is being unleashed through the conversion of agricultural land into profit‐making urban zones. It is the praxeology of an everyday planning modality by actors that interpret the possibility of real estate speculation at different scales that drive the rapid emer‐ gence of the peri‐urban built environment around the metropolis of Bangalore in Southern India. At the outset, I present a conceptual framework that articulates territorial‐financial mechanisms at the macro‐level with the praxiology of plan‐ ning actors and their networks at the meso‐level through spatial knowledges. Then I describe the methods used. In the empirical part, this article first describes a particular site at the periphery of the city of Bangalore. Then, I delineate the prescriptive knowledge given by the local planning law. I present the praxiology of the different knowledge actors that explain the modality of peri‐urbanization, followed by a discussion of the rationales of the actors that shape everyday practices of planning. Finally, I discuss how social workers could get more involved in the urban planning process and con‐ tribute to shaping more inclusive cities because of the profession’s grounding in principles and ethics that supports human well‐being and development in cities for people and not for profit.


Introduction
"The cities' core have been botched, but we at the peripheries are doing a better job at planning": This was the statement delivered by the assistant director of a local planning authority of peri-urban Bangalore (also called Bengaluru)-a South Indian metropolis with an estimated population of 11 million people living in a dense area of 2196 km2 (Census of India, 2011). Can India plan its peri-urban areas when Roy (2009) has explained "why India cannot plan its cities"? Roy has argued that despite colonially inspired planning laws and regulations, India's planning regime was in itself an informalized entity in a state of deregulation, ambiguity, and exception. Rapid urbanization in the Global South, poor land use control, and increasing pressure on cities to accommodate new residents have led to sprawl into the peripheries (Venter et al., 2021). Here, in cities yet to come, will an urban crisis marked by rapid economic growth, increasing societal inequality, and inadequate infrastructure provision and growth management (Venter et al., 2021) repeat itself? It is crucial to understand how different types of spatial knowledges come together to understand a politics of anticipation of urban development that presents both opportunities and challenges. What is the scope of action for state actors and current rural inhabitants to co-shape the emerging built environment toward more inclusive urban peripheries? And how can social work facilitate the shaping of the "city yet to come" and promote inclusiveness? I argue that a shift has been taking place in the rationale of urban governance of large metropolises through a territorial moment (Schindler, 2015), which creates particular incentives for a praxiology (Schatzki et al., 2001) of urban planning. Bridging the macro-level rationale and an everyday conception of planning are knowledge actors that shape the emerging built environment in periurban areas. This article aims to reveal the everyday praxiology of the following knowledge actors that are involved in shaping peri-urban areas: (a) the master planners, (b) the street-level bureaucrats, (c) political actors and real estate brokers-builders, (d) the common local peri-urban farmers and inhabitants, and (e) the prospective role of social workers in facilitating a more inclusive planning process.
It is generally understood that urban planning activity operates at the interface of knowledge and action, between "is" and "ought." To underpin the work of planning at its most basic level one must address four basic questions that suggest this interface's nature (Campbell, 2012): 1. What is going on here (descriptive)? 2. What to do (prescriptive)? 3. Why is it like that (analytical/explanatory)? 4. What ought to be done (normative)?
These four guiding questions structure the argument put forward in this article. At the outset, I propose a conceptual framework to articulate territorial-financial mechanisms at the macro-level with the praxeology of planning actors and their networks at the meso-level through spatial knowledges. Then I present the methods used. In the empirical part (Section 4), this article first describes a particular site at the periphery of the city of Bangalore. Second, I delineate the prescriptive knowledge given by local planning law and jurisdiction. Third, I present the praxiology of the different knowledge actors that explain the modality of peri-urbanization followed by a discussion of the rationales of the actors that shape everyday practices of planning. Finally, I discuss the role of social work from a normative vantage point to assert participation and inclusiveness and be more involved in shaping inclusive peri-urbanization processes.
I argue that a technocratic understanding of planning as taught in textbooks stemming from geographies of authoritative knowledge is being transformed on the ground and that the practice begs for a redefinition of how cities are being extended and the role of urban plans, planning professions, and social mediators in the process. In this potential redefinition, social workers have a crucial role to play in facilitating the knowledge of the inhabitants to shape their own environment.

Conceptual Framework: Governmentality of Territory, Spatial Knowledge, and Praxiology of Everyday Planning
The theoretical argument presented in this section is that the governmentality of territory unleashing capital gains is interpreted differently according to the types of spatial knowledge that involved actors hold and that, in turn, shapes an everyday praxiology of planning. The discussion of such a mechanism shifts the gaze from technocratic understandings of urban planning to everyday practices of planning mediated through power structures and particular knowledge actors that consolidate everyday planning practices.
If planning is an activity at the interface between knowledge and action, both terms have to be specified. According to Pfeffer et al. (2012), spatial knowledge can be defined as a set of information that refers to a geographical location on the globe, or as a spatial "comprehension" of facts, interdependences, connections, and dynamics that can be mapped, conceived individually, or shared by a group. They distinguish four types of knowledges and the actors that hold them: 1. Tacit knowledge that is "known" by individuals or professionals but is seldom formalized; 2. Community knowledge held by communities of the surrounding, political, and social contexts; 3. Sectoral expertise derived from practice in a given context, held by professionals and political networks; 4. Expert knowledge stemming from accepted expertise from professional education, which is usually dominant in urban planning.
The fact that many types of knowledge are not laid down in written form, questions the role of possible mediators that facilitate the inclusion of those usually excluded. Planning, in other words, begs us to bring together these different types of knowledge. It is argued that it is in this capacity that social work based on its ethics and principles (IFSW, 2018) could have an important role in shaping the way that spatial knowledge is utilized to shape interactions based on agreement, conflict, cooperation, or contestation (Pfeffer et al., 2012). From a social work perspective, participation and inclusiveness are imperatives for the planning process.

Governmentality
Schindler (2015) argues that a subtle shift is occurring in cities of the Global South as there is an increasing focus on transforming urban space rather than "improving" conditions for populations. He argues that cities have abundant reserves of capital and labor but remain disconnected, the former being invested in real estate and infrastructure while a large section of poorer urban dwellers isn't able to sell their labor for a decent wage.
Capital isn't only circulating virtually in Bengaluru-the IT metropolis of the South: It has a very material face, as it flows into real estate and infrastructure (Halbert & Rouanet, 2013). Global firms, involved in global commodity chains, investing and blocking land in peri-urban areas for future factories, contribute to the dispossession of local farmers (Harvey, 2009). The logic goes like this: Dramatic increases in land prices through land use conversions (agricultural to other land use) present state actors with unique opportunities and challenges and lure the state to tap into real estate markets as a means to gain financial power. This is done by monetizing land, extracting revenue from land development, and distributing the profits to powerful corporate backers of the state (Shatkin, 2014). In this way the state manages to assert greater control over urban spatial change. In the real estate business, money is made through the differential gained between the buying of land when it is priced as an agricultural land use category and the value is unleashed through the conversion of agricultural land to a non-agricultural land use category (interview with real estate expert conducted in 2016). The shift from state landownership and regulations aimed at maintaining access to land for lower income groups, state provisions for infrastructure, and public services (Gherthner, as cited in Shatkin, 2014) to state-sponsored commodification of land to attract corporations, has forged a particular relationship between place and power. Stuart Elden (as cited in Schindler, 2015, p. 12) argues that the concept of territory emerges from practices that relate politics or power to place and forging territory as a political technology. There is an analogy between the latter and governmentality as described by Chatterjee (2004): Governmentality is a technology to administer populations, where certain welfare benefits are aimed at certain targeted population groups through a welfare bureaucracy that makes these populations legible. Chatterjee (2004) describes furthermore that as the demand for welfare benefits in the post-colonial world is always larger than the supply, turns this relation into welfare benefits becoming political currency. Such currency serves government officials and politicians to maintain networks of patronage (Chatterjee, 2004;Piliavsky, 2014) for their own electoral rationale. Stuart Elden (as cited in Schindler, 2015) argues that the same calculative techniques that allowed mapping and disciplining populations (Schindler, 2015; see also Chatterjee, 2004) could be transposed to the governmentality of territory. Then, one can draw on a linking mechanism between a territory and a targeted land use category through a planning regime that mainly works by preparing formal masterplans, though its implementation operates through entrenched informal networks seeking capital gains. As there is a larger demand for land use conversions (from agricultural land to a residential or commercial land use category) than the supply can offer, the capacity to enable land use conversions and the knowledge that land use conversions might be imminent becomes political currency.
The increased demand for land use conversions affects the restructuring of the space economy even before the "city" formally arrives in peri-urban areas and has very concrete repercussions on the ground for the "still" rural inhabitants, their livelihoods, and the practice of co-shaping the emerging built environment at the periphery level, in which various actors engage.

Praxiology
The macro phenomena (Coulter, as cited in Schatzki et al., 2001) of governmentality of territory exists in and through the praxiological instantiations engaged by different actors in urban planning with a certain rationale. Schatzki et al. (2001, p. 15) suggests treating "the social" as a field of practice understood as the total nexus of interconnected human activities. He defines "practice" as an interwoven activity in a social domain or a bundle of activities as an organized nexus of actions. Everyday practices refer to a group of practices that are "seemingly inconsequential, inconspicuous and mundane, but nonetheless essential to our day-to-day lives" (Strengers, 2010, p. 7). Everyday routines and underlying practices are embedded in a particular culture. Culture consists of both "shared meanings" and how these shared meanings are manifested in people's social interactions, as well as the results of those interactions (Othengrafen & Reimer, 2013). Ultimately the concept of culture can be defined as a "collective intelligible social practice" (Andreas Reckwitz, as cited in Othengrafen & Reimer, 2013), referring to a number of incorporated and (implicit) routinised recurrent regularities about how to behave and act in specific situations. In other words, culture is an organizing category (Othengrafen & Reimer, 2013, p. 1273. Ettlinger (2009) states that types of networks pertinent to knowledge creation (for example, about upcoming land conversions or urban development) are those in which members actively communicate with each other towards a shared performance. Such communication involves a meaningful exchange of different types of knowledge that requires a connection with everyday activities, permitting the externalization of tacit knowledge, but also the creation of new tacit knowledges. These activities often take place beyond public meetings, in micro-spaces of daily life and work (Ettlinger, 2009, p. 224). Articulating planning in the imbrication of the rationale of different knowledge actors, their practice, their associated knowledges, their networks, and the sites of exchange are instantiations of macrolevel mechanisms and promise to reveal the processes underway that are shaping the cities yet to come in peri-urban areas.

Methodological Approach
Qualitative fieldwork was carried out between 2016 and 2017, starting by investigating official planning procedures and ending up with frequent visits to the village, cumulatively during six months. The methods employed include the study of formal planning documents, procedures and maps and documenting the local built environment through photographs and oral histories of the urbanizing village Kaggalipura at the southwestern fringe of Bangalore. To investigate sites and modalities of information exchange sites of planning actors (local politicians and bureaucrats, real estate brokers, and developers) and practices, I engaged in qualitative interviews and observations identified by a snowball principle. To understand the conditions for the local "rural" inhabitants (of the yet-to-be-urbanized peri-urban area) and to learn how they make sense of the emerging built environment and the impacts on their livelihood, I conducted focus group interviews with local childcare workers, the cooperative of dairy farmers, shop-keepers, and youth. Coming across as a woman from a privileged societal position, not a journalist, legal person, real estate agent, nor technical government staff, my interlocutors were inquisitive about the purpose of my investigation. I had to explain the social science research process and the contribution it would bring in terms of documentation and knowledge. It was surprising that my interlocutors were rather open about the mechanisms of real estate developments in relation to official plans without disclosing individual names. The underbelly of land transactions that potentially lead to criminal networks was intentionally not investigated in the purview of this research. Interactions with the local village community left the impression of a certain apathy and resignation on the part of the inhabitants toward the urban development occurring in their village.

What's Going On at the Southwestern Fringe of Bengaluru
Kaggalipura village is a growth node within the Kanakapura LPA (local planning area) and is located along National Highway 209. The LPA is connected to the last municipal ward of Bengaluru at Thalgattapura that borders Anjanapura at the NICE Road junction, 4.5 km before the Art of Living International Centre in Bengaluru (see Figure 1).
These spaces of "individualized selfhood" attract the attention of real estate developers who construct spaces for new lifestyles and emerging constituencies (Srinivas, 2018). The narrow patch of the Kanakapura LPA is defined along National Highway 209, which is spotted with lifestyle bubbles such as retirement resorts, spiritual societies, the Maitreya Buddha Pyramid (Srinivas, 2018), and gated communities such as Brigade Meadows. When one continues on the road beyond these bubbles, one enters Kaggalipura, an identified growth node within the LPA. It is the first node among three more that are dotted along the NH 209. Kaggalipura growth node is characterized in a masterplan in the following way: "There is rapid urbanization in the area with the construction of residential apartments. International schools and spiritual institutions have come up in the area" (Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority [BMRDA], 2016b, p. 17). Kaggalipura counts 12,000 inhabitants (Census of India, 2011) and was projected to double by 2031 to 25,000. In 2017, 40.28% of land was marked as residential land use category. The residential density was very low and the households were sparsely distributed. Parks, playgrounds, and open spaces accounted for 2.83% of the total land use; 16.86% of the land was categorized under "transportation," and 12.10% was categorized as "public" and "semi-public," mostly distributed linearly along the Kanakapura Bangalore road passing through the village. The built-up area of 185.71 ha would increase according to Masterplan 2031 to 2211.56 ha, out of which 53% was earmarked for residential purposes (68 persons per hectares). The main road through Kaggalipura is the heart of the village's activities with temples, a police station, diary cooperatives, real estate bureaus, numerous shops, and hawkers studding the road. The Gram Panchayat (village council) office, the governmental daycare center, and a drinking water station are located just one lane parallel to the main road. At the beginning of 2017, it got widened and various facades got pulled down. Beyond the main road, some well-paved roads are bordered by mid-sized plots that house lavish multistory homes. Other areas have unpaved roads and smaller dwelling units and show more rural characteristics with cattle grazing and provision for the storage of fodder being visible. Historically, the political economy of this region allowed some scope for Dalits to hold land, but the structuring of the village economy by caste created relations of inequality and dependence, as well as place-embedded cultural identities that still find expression in the region (Upadhya & Rathod, 2021).

Blurred Boundaries Between Planning and Administrative Jurisdictions
Urban planning is considered a state subject according to the Constitution. The 1961 Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act forms the statutory and legal foundation for decentralized planning in Bangalore Metropolitan Region and is overseen and coordinated by the Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC). The BMRDA has established a decentralized planning system for LPAs within its jurisdiction. Under this system, LPAs are responsible for preparing their own development plans and submitting them to the BMRDA for approval.
The BMRDA has established 21 LPAs in the Bangalore Metropolitan Region and each LPA has its own planning authority responsible for preparing and implementing the development plan. These LPAs are divided into three categories: urban, rural, and intermediate. Kaggalipura is a node within the intermediate Kanakapura LPA and is located at the interface between the urban and the rural. The northern tip of the Kanakapura LPA is located within the Bangalore Development Authority jurisdiction which relates to the Bangalore Masterplan, which coincided with the jurisdiction of the MPC.
The 1961 Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act argues that spatial planning should precede economic planning to enable a happier and healthier living environment. Therefore, the Act aims to "provide for the regulation of planned growth of land use and development and the making and execution of town planning schemes in the state" (Government of Karnataka, 1961, p. 65). It intends to create favorable conditions for planning to provide full civic and social amenities for the people in the state, to stop uncontrolled development of land due to speculation, to promote balanced use of land, to improve existing recreational facilities and to direct the future growth of populated areas in the state (Sundaresan, 2014). In terms of integrating different types of spatial knowledge, the only provision for citizen participation within the Act is the 60 days window in which the planning authority must display the draft plan for public consultation and receive the public's objections and/or suggestions. The planning authority is then supposed to consider and revise the draft and ultimately submit it to the director of planning, who will then send it to the government for approval. The finally approved plan is communicated through a government order, a statutory legal document binding all actors.
Within the Bangalore region, and considering the projected population growth for the horizon of 2031, attempts were made to maintain the primacy of Bangalore while promoting a balanced growth in the rest of the region through the identification of the cluster and nodal development model. The basic premise of the population allocation strategy was to balance the share of the population between the core and the rest.
It is striking that planning conurbations have nothing in common with administrative census classification (rural, urban) of territories. This means that an area classified as rural can come within the planning conurbation to allow urban development according to the masterplan, but by doing so their classification doesn't necessarily change, hence the Gram Panchayat as a self-governance body remains de facto powerless regarding planning. When an area gets included in an LPA, it automatically means that it is "master plannable," despite its rural classification.
The gap between the classification adopted by the census and the changes promoted in terms of urban development and governance leads to a series of problems. For the census, urban areas are classified either based on demographic or administrative criteria, including both municipal or statutory towns and census or non-municipal towns. However, while all settlements under the ambit of municipal bodies are automatically declared urban, urban settlements identified as such by the census are not necessarily granted municipal status, as this is a state prerogative (Allen & Purushothaman, 2005). Therefore, it is possible to find settlements characterized by village features with municipal status and large settlements under the influence of large cities, the economy of which is largely non-agricultural; still governed by rural local bodies, "such towns are compelled to maximize their own revenue potential, and are, in fact, rewarded with funds from federal rural programs" (Allen & Purushothaman, 2005, p. 12). This situation amounts to a diversion of funds meant for rural development to areas that are not rural in the strict sense of the term. In addition, the revenue potential of these predominantly non-agricultural areas is not being realized due to the absence of municipal governance. The long time taken to readjust municipal boundaries, results in further loss of revenue (R. Bhagat, as cited in Allen & Purushothaman, 2005). I learned that when an area is marked within a planning conurbation, the Gram Panchayat that governs under the urbanizable area is overruled by the LPA and then the BMRDA for matters regarding urban development.

The Masterplanners
To understand the scope of Kaggalipura developing into such a projected growth node in the extension of the metropolis I spoke to the director of the private planning company, who kindly gave me the contact of a pertinent interviewee and told me to meet them in their office, west of the city: On their website, the office address was located in the city centre. When I called the announced phone number though, I landed up in the office in the west. The receptionist insisted that she wouldn't send me the office address by mail so I took note of it on a piece of paper. As I arrived, there was no indication whatsoever that a planning company was located at that address, no board, no tag. Nevertheless, I found their office and was seated near the reception until my interviewee came to fetch me and got me through the main door, which was secured through a biometric fingerprint sensor. I couldn't help feeling that, indeed, their business was top secret. Knowledge about upcoming urban developments in the peripheries meant dealing with potential financial gains that demanded discretion.
My interviewee kindly explained the different authorities involved in the planning process at different levels. Even though the company was also involved in the drafting of the BMRDA structure plan (BMRDA, 2016a) that specified population and service distribution, they did not have access to the draft's final version to ground their projections on. The LPA Masterplan for Kanakapura was in the public domain but the structure plan was only available in draft form and not accessible even when putting in an application for it. In a rather "politically correct" interview, the interviewee related this state of affairs to the pace that government works. Between 2006 and 2008, the BMRDA had taken up comprehensive work to collect spatial data and verify it "on the ground," that is, to map the village boundaries and colonial survey numbers, and also take into account the place's natural boundaries. Our interviewee regretted that there was no centralized spatial data center from where layers of data could be drawn to prepare the plans. Rather, the company, understanding itself as the "technical assistant" to the government had to request all government agencies to provide their databases and configure them.
When I asked the interviewee about the stakeholders of the plan, she did not mention the public but was immediately prompted to explain: "The public is extremely important." It was also confirmed that the main avenue for public participation was those 60 days of public consultation and that this opportunity was heavily used. Most suggestions for the Kanakapura LPA involved desired changes to road networks, access roads, and land plots being classified as "open" or "public" rather than as "residential" or "commercial" to generate more speculative value. The conclusion from the consultation process was that, clearly, the public was "pro-development, they welcomed urbanization."

The Street-Level Bureaucrats
To judge for myself whether the public was indeed inclined towards "development," I went to Kaggalipura, a village with mainly small-land holding farming, and sat in the Gram Panchayat office. Sitting there gave me the impression that I was in a builder's office. Non-residents of that village poured in now and then, shouting out the apartment complex's name and the number in which they had bought an apartment. Yes: "Gated urban development" had arrived. Along the road and towards the interior, Kaggalipura was dotted with compounds that gate many empty layouts, though some were just beginning to be inhabited.
The employees of the Gram Panchayat office were busy giving out documentation to the new future inhabitants or new property owners. These owners were speaking in Hindi and English and not the local language Kannada. There was an air of pride and efficiency. The efficiency of this office was well known: Many minority communities such as Muslims settled in Kaggalipura primarily because they could get their documentation done rapidly through this Gram Panchayat office. The members I spoke to all welcomed urban development because, according to them, it would help people with better facilities and offer plenty of business opportunities as the population rose. According to some senior members, it is up to the farmers to make money, especially those who own land: "If they are smart, they will invest it properly"; otherwise they lose out by spending the money on things that don't generate any recurrent income. Regarding responsibilities, members didn't see any lack of planning capacity. Planning for them was the business of higher forces, which they had to execute. Since the amendment to the Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act, the Gram Panchayat was involved in the delivery of patchwork urban services. The law required land developers to fully develop the layout in terms of security, roads, sewage and sanitary installations, and electricity before they could sell the plots. The Gram Panchayat was in charge of connecting these layouts to the rest of the administrative area in a patchwork manner.
Checking whether the layout was built within the allocated land use category was the job of the local planning authority office of the LPA located in Kanakapura town. Similar to the planning company's office, this governmental entity worked from a house that was tucked away in the residential part of town, away from the remaining administrative buildings with no board or signpost to the office. The members of that office had a hands-off attitude and confirmed that their job was only to check if urban development was emerging according to the land use plan. The aforementioned law states that 55% of the land could be built up and 45% was to be allocated to open spaces and public amenities. According to Gram Panchayati members in Kaggalipura, defaulting this ratio was due to transactions in the LPA office. When the LPA officers were asked about coordination efforts among different government departments in servicing the area with urban amenities and road networks, their attitude was very hands-off: They only mapped the developments according to the plans and, if necessary, aligned the plans with the imperatives of other domains. The LPA just made sure that the alignment was right and followed the plans, officers said. Asked about the LPA's relationship with political representatives, they said representatives did come up to them with suggestions, especially regarding road networks. If they judged them meaningful, they would integrate them, they said.

Political and Real Estate Actors
The 60 days window in which planning authorities must display their draft plan for public consultation had been futile for real estate agents, as they had not known about it. They had accepted the final version of the plan and kept a copy in their office. 2D plans, indicating land and their zoning allocations were accepted facts, but the emerging 3D urban landscape, the timing of it, the look, and deviations from the plan were all matters of networked and enmeshed relations of money and political power. I sought also to speak to political contenders and political representatives. Their connection to politics in most cases spanned generations and so did their ownership of land in the area. It was general knowledge in the village which representative or contender owned how much land and where. They made it clear that only those who were involved in land transactions could raise the money required to finance a party electoral candidacy.
As I was sitting in a local real estate office interviewing a real estate agent, a group of men rushed in. It took me a while to understand that this was the local zilla panchayat (district council) representative of the Congress party (majority) with his team, coming over to invite the real estate agent to a roadworks inauguration. He was a Muslim, executing a Goodli pooja (construction initiation ritual) performed by a Hindu priest. The exchange among office workers was short but efficient, with knowledgesharing about upcoming developments such as the new road that was coming up and their representative, who had built a beautiful drinking water station in a neighboring village. The district representative then proposed that he would do the same if he was given a plot of a certain size. Another man, whose wife was part of the Gram Panchayat, agreed immediately and said he would see that all necessary arrangements were in place. Interestingly, just a week earlier, a political contender (the then-current chairman of the dairy cooperative) had inaugurated a water station next to the daycare center with a BJP party (opposition) representative. On a later date, as I was waiting for the district council representative in his office situated above a bank on the main road, I discovered that he was a follower of Sri Sri Ravishankar, the Guru and founder of the Art of Living International Centre. The gates of the international center were just next door to his office, the center having acquired huge tracts of land and crucial services.
Votes, real estate opportunities, and finance go hand-in-hand. Real estate promoted political power and political power made it possible to assert land. A particular real estate agent had "made it big" by exploiting the relationship between real estate, finances, and politics as he hailed from a family with political ties: His grandmother had been a Gram Panchayat member and he too had ambitions to stand for the next local elections as a regional party candidate. He started by owning a cement shop and his business grew to be capable of building a 7 acres layout. According to him, it was simple to "make it big" in the periphery if one owned land. Landowners, having their plots two or three kilometers away from the main road, were selling two or three acres. The money they made from this sale, they spent it on immediate costs such as marriages in the family, buy a site in Kaggalipura, build a multistoried building-they would live in one unit and rent out the rest-invest about 10% in gold, and finally buy some land further away. With the prospect of urbanization, this land would raise in value at some given time. There was a strong faith in Bangalore's expansion. The same real estate agent predicted that, probably after a few years, such a loop of investments would hit a dead-end: Families grew and remaining agricultural land would get subdivided into much smaller plots, which would not allow room for such expansion.
Agricultural land in Kaggalipura is mainly composed of small land holdings. The shape of land layouts is thus determined mainly by the skill of the broker to get neighboring farmers to sell their lands. These brokers are local men who not only know to identify valuable land and bring it to the attention of developers but also have an intrinsic understanding of the fabric of kin and community. Upcoming marriages, debts, and family quarrels are more likely to push farmers to sell.
According to a real estate agent I interviewed in 2016, middle-class families living in Bangalore followed their own financial portfolio management. They approached brokers like him to buy a plot in the periphery when their kids were still in school. Once they paid off the land and the kids were independent (probably 15 years later), they would invest in building a house on their plot. By then, the area would be better developed and they could live a peaceful life at lower costs. He was also very well-versed in getting land conversions through. Going through the district commissioner (DC) is considered the silver standard, as this part of the process is not fully digitalized. Once land is applied for land conversion (for example, from the agricultural to the residential land use category), the application is sent to the DC. The DC sends a letter to the Kanakapura LPA and they check if that particular land comes under the agricultural zone. If this results in a positive answer, the conversion is done by the village accountant in the revenue department after the family hands over their family tree to prove their land entitlements or eligibility. The application then goes to the BMRDA, which issues a no-objection certificate (NOC), and is then shown to the Kanakapura office. Once the NOC reaches the DC, the latter issues the conversion letter. Land records and conversion letters have to be handed over to BMRDA. When BMRDA issues the e-katha (digital property document), the gold standard is reached, as now it is digital and original. In my interviews, members of the real estate office went on to narrate that developers of the highest league for high-end customers start to buy small pieces of land and accumulate them by accepting joint ventures or paying the farmers premium rates. They assert that their political connections are strong and make deviations from the LPA plans: "Those managing 100 acres will not have much ethics and politics is a matter of convenience." Clearly, this complex procedure demonstrates that a high level of procedural knowledge (Patel et al., 2015, p. 191) is required to navigate land conversions or aggregate developable land.

Those Excluded From Co-Shaping the City Yet to Come
What was the stake of the common peri-urban inhabitant, the landless, the farmer? To understand what they know and how they get to know about the impending urbanization of their village, I hung around the village for observations and conducted focus group interviews with existing organized groups. Talking to the members of the dairy cooperatives in focus groups, they complained that, suddenly, the grazing lands were compounded off into layouts that kept it unproductive for years to come. Most of them had sold their lands, could not plant the fodder themselves, and relied on getting fodder from 25 km away, for which they spent 2000 INR on transportation. The fodder lasted them for 15 days only. The decreasing water sources and underground water table only increased their plight. Overall the farmers welcomed urbanization for the increased connectivity and facilities it promised, but deplored the difficult conditions to pursue their livelihood activity. The younger generation seemed fully disillusioned by the city "coming nearer," especially as they didn't have the appropriate skills to sell their labor: "Dairy farming and maintaining cattle is the only thing we know," they claimed. The younger farmers also showed less trust in institutions such as the Gram Panchayat or their representatives to bring about any change. Older farmers believed in the Gram Sabhas (village assemblies) and their capacity to raise and resolve issues concerning their livelihood, even though members of the Gram Panchayat themselves observed that the community had less unity than before. The women's association of anganwadi (daycare) workers was acutely aware that the future urbanization and reclassification would considerably decrease their political influence by increasing the electoral distance through larger constituencies. They too welcomed urban facilities, especially expecting better options for healthcare, but worried about the loss of the "village way of life."

Where Knowledges Partly Come Together
During this research, I would sit and wait for my interviewees from both the political and real estate realms on many occasions and with little success. I would travel to the location of our interview only to be informed that my interviewee would not turn up. The reasons most cited for their absence were of a private nature: marriages, housewarming ceremonies, first-year birthday parties, etc. It delayed my research but I understood it, at first, to be a symptom of the busy, social Indian life. Then it dawned on me that a "cancelled interview" was also revealing data.
While I was sitting in the real estate office waiting for an agent, a party of young men entered and invited the broker to a pooja (worship ritual). The invitation card, in bright pink colors, showed the goddess Durga. The backside of the card contained the names of those who had sponsored the pooja and featured politicians and real estate agents of the local area. My interviewee was listed as a member of the regional political party. He later confirmed that he had sponsored the pooja and stated that attending such rituals was very important to understand development projects. They were places for knowledge exchange, to learn about upcoming developments and opportunities for land conversions. Attendance to these social gatherings was upon invitation only. While a priest performed the ritual with the family that was celebrating the occasion, the invitees were free to watch, network, and engage in informal conversation. Usually, food was served and provided opportune moments to engage in small talk about rumors concerning family clans, businesses, local developments, and probable land sales. These were informal micro-sites for knowledge transfers to engage in planning as an everyday activity. I understood that attending these social gatherings was very important work. As attendance was only upon invitation, it was highly exclusive, non-democratic, and non-deliberative. Everyday planning excluded those concerned with planning peri-urban areas: the common inhabitants. These got only cues of the emerging built environment when they saw it-a board announcing a construction, fenced-off land, road diversions, disappearing greenery, and tin sheets blocking off the view of the land being constructed on.

Discussion
Were the planners conceiving peri-urban Bangalore doing a better job at planning, as stated by the assistant LPA director at the outset of my research? It seems that, following the formal plans, gains in capital and convenience were the rationales of those involved in everyday planning.
To understand the emergence of the built environment in peri-urban areas, the lens of territorial governmentality provided a basis to conceptually grasp the rationale behind financialization of land that skews formal planning (Goldman, 2021). As Jeff Coulter (as cited in Schatzki et al., 2001) states, macro phenomena such as (a) financial capital circuits, (b) planning rationales and legislations, and (c) political imperatives and financial opportunities do exist in and through their praxiologicial instantiations. The empirical material shows that each of these macro phenomena was intertwined with the possibility of land conversion (from agricultural to residential/commercial). Land conversion represents political currency and can either promote opportunities or pose threats to different groups of people and actors co-shaping peri-urban areas.
Despite the decentralized planning prescribed by planning legislation-which should make provision for a bottom-up aggregation of plans by the Metropolitan Planning Committee-formal practices are managed topdown. The 60 days window is the only consultative period for individual inputs and does not foresee collective claims to the city yet to come.
While the urban features of Kaggalipura were fast emerging and clearly visible, the material facades of planning actors and their interactions were blurred into the built and social fabric of the place. Unseeming buildings housed them and micro-spaces for social functions led to clandestine connections that instantiate the nexus of land, money, and political power influencing planning in arbitrary ways. This research confirms Ettlinger's (2009) contention that the networks of pertinent knowledge creation are those in which members actively engage with each other in a shared performance around social and religious gatherings. The described planning activity embedded in the local culture corresponds to an everyday practice that is "seemingly inconsequential, inconspicuous and mundane, but nonetheless essential to our day-to-day lives" (Strengers, 2010, p. 7). These social sites brought together the tacit knowledge of political actors and real estate agents and the sectoral knowl-edge of street-level bureaucrats. "Community knowledge" becomes the "knowledge of those invited into the club." This is a subversion of the ideal of everyday planning practices redering everyday planning as a highly exclusive enterprise.

What Ought to Be Done: The Role of Social Work in Urban Planning
Social work is a creation of city life: It was born and nurtured in the city and has evolved in response to the multiple intersections that city life brings about. Social work is being reconceptualized in response to the modern city (Williams, 2016, p. 1). This is especially acute in rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South, where the speed of spatial and social transformation has been profound and daunting. The aim of social work is manifold, embedded in national policy contexts. At the same time, social work transcends these contexts by recognizing interdependencies that are transnational and have very local expressions. Similarly, the shaping up of the peri-urban environment is multi-layered through global financialization circuits that lead, potentially, to dispossession of peri-urban farmers locally. Social work is well-placed to advance self-determination and participation in urban planning processes to make them more inclusive (Williams, 2016), "leaving no one behind" by adhering to social work ethics and principles, in particular that of "promoting social justice," access to equitable resources, challenging unjust policies and practices, building solidarity, promoting the right to selfdetermination, and promoting the right to participation (IFSW, 2014).
In that sense, social work as a profession is concerned with creating "changes for the better" with interventions for a socially just present and future. Social work is highly contextual, questions dominant discourses, and supports claims of marginalized populations, with their values and knowledges (Williams, 2016), to contest "official" knowledge, when expert, techno-administrativelegal hegemonic knowledge is disputed by civil society (see Scott and Barnett, as cited in Pfeffer et al., 2012, p. 262; see also C. Grace Sutherland, on the same page). The most transformative form of participatory knowledge generation is counter-mapping to reveal lived realities in spaces (Pfeffer et al., 2012, p. 265).
What does it mean for social work to situate itself in a rural-urban flux? Social and community workers have been engaged in the provision of services and support communities living in disadvantaged areasclusters of poverty, unemployment, crime, and environmental pollution. Social work mostly incorporated the environment in terms of social relationships. It is only recently that social workers are called upon to conceptualise a "person-in-environment" (Erickson, 2018) in a green social work and environmental justice perspective (Dominelli, 2012). Environmental justice "occurs when all people equally experience high levels of environmental protection and no group is excluded from environmental decision-making or affected disproportionately by environmental hazard" (Dominelli, 2012, p. 10). The livelihoods of rural inhabitants in the periphery are largely based on access to and the nurturing of environmental resources. Thus, when they are left out of decisionmaking processes that impact their environment directly, they are experiencing environmental injustice. In the same way that social workers connect potential beneficiaries to existing welfare benefits, they could connect communities impacted by urban planning practices to planning systems by using democratic planning provisions, community development tools, and mobilization, making voices from such communities legitimate and legible, and integrating them in the co-shaping of their own environment. In this sense, social workers could intervene in the governmentality of the territory to make agricultural land use relevant in view of a more inclusive planning process that includes peri-urban inhabitants with rural livelihoods.

Conclusion
This qualitative sociological enquiry into everyday planning practices reveals the rationales of diverse knowledge actors in unlikely sites of knowledge exchange. The strong nexus between the (generational) ownership of land in peri-urban areas and the possibility to selffinance an electoral candidacy to then participate in arbitrary planning decisions could in turn influence the satisfaction of certain constituencies and voters. This also means that dispossessed populations have no chance of representing themselves, as they are financially dry to fund a party ticket. My research also showed a generational discrepancy in matters of trust in political and planning institutions. While the older generations still believed that rural governance mechanisms (such as the Gram Panchayat) were still effective, the younger population had lost hope in these institutions. This restructuring of the agrarian economy (Gururani & Kennedy, 2021) without an adequate skilling effort (Malik & Gupta, 2017), makes urbanization a false promise of prosperity for the aspirational young rural youth.