The Riddle of Kerala: How radicals secured water rights where capitalists have failed

In Kerala, there are standing ruins of state-organized production cooperatives for local handicrafts and terra-cotta tile and coir, once organized with a vision of deploying newly-Independent India's richest resource, labor, in the form of that most free and egalitarian and beneficiary of institutions, the worker-owned cooperative.  The cooperatives are rotting now, their letters faded, hidden behind chained fences, their long modernist horizontals in reinforced concrete besmirched by lacrimal black stains of mildew weeping down the facade.

The ruins are victims, my local friends tell me, of Kerala's success.  A program of mass education was begun in the early twentieth century here by Kerala's benevolent ruling elite. After Independence in 1947, the freely-elected communist party, the world's first, continued the tradition of strong local schools, and began touting another problem: the "unemployed literate," found everywhere in Kerala.  Free-wheeling capitalism does not necessarily reward virtue; it employs the poor only where wages are smallest and restrictions the least, and leaves the learned behind unless they take the initiative to make their own future.  So the Keralans did just that.  Worker-owned cooperatives sprung up, organizing local production into units that generalized profits to the workers themselves.  Then famine hit in the 1970s, and Kerala's new cooperatives were too poor to generalize profits.  So Kerala turned to that other tool for generalizing wealth implemented by left-wing governments across India and South America in the 1970s, land reform.  

The sweeping Keralan land reforms were a more progressive measure than those executed in Mexico in the 1910s or Peru in the 1960s.  Rather than concentrating on the breakup of traditional feudal land-holdings, Kerala broke up all concentrations of land, even some considered merely middling or grand only by local standards.  This "land ceiling" created a province of smallholder farmers.

Land ceilings in other parts of India were ringed with corruption and left behind a legacy of resentment.  Elites with large estates transferred the land before its seizure into the names of cousins, while Americans muttered about how such dispersals were stymying the progress of Green-Revolution-style industrialized agriculture.  

But in Kerala, dispersed land-holding combined with high rates of education prompted an economic miracle.  Within a generation, Keralans became among the richest of the Indian provinces.  They joined the service sector, sending legion nurses to work in Dubai.  The worker-owned cooperatives of yore have been updated, transferred away from the main road.  They still sell homespun silk and matted coir for the roofs of traditional houseboats .  But now Kerala's major net export is labor: it sends highly-educated labor to other parts of the world, importing workers from other parts of India to run its booming construction industry. 

It's routine for economists to dismiss the history of land reform as a failure, pointing to corrupt militarized land distribution under dictatorships like Peru and Ethiopia at the same time.  Democratic land reform, however, has a historic record linked to economic development and education. 

The longer legacy of Kerala's democratic project remains in its success with providing water to a majority of its people.  With its history of democratic experimentation, Kerala has become the site of some of the most successful experiments in mass water provision in all of India.

One such experiment is Mazhapolima, a north-Kerala-based consultancy to the district collectorate of Thrissur, whose name means, "the richness of water."  Mazhapolima is the project of Jos Raphael, an LSE-educated PhD in Development Studies, who concentrates on "water literacy" classes where he preaches the benefits of recharging groundwater through connecting the traditional open dug wells, found in every plot in Kerala, to rainwater catchment roof systems, arrays of tarp and pvc pipe that local plumbers install for around $60 a house.  

Another such experiment is a groundswell political organizing effort for lake-water management at Vembanad Lake organized by Dr. Priyan Rajan, a biologist and native Keralan at ATREE foundation in Bangalore.  The Vembanad Project has successfully organized fishermen, clam-collectors and farmers to organize a new, democratic entity for governing salinity and pollution in their lake.  Now, with the help of the Delhi Institute for Rural Research and Development (IRRAD), they're looking into systems of sand filtering for water appropriate for mass, decentralized adaptation across south Kerala.

Rainwater catchment experimentation is nothing new to India, where investigating indigenous techniques of rainwater harvesting and water recharge has been a national agenda since the 1980s.  Kerala's experiments, however, are stamped with the democratic imprint of its long experiment with communist and socialist politics.  By contrast, in Rajasthan, Tarun Bharat Singh's experiments with water harvesting commandeered the unpaid labor of landless peoples to dig wells.  In some cases, charismatic leaders hinted that the poor would have access to water after the wells were dug.  It didn't work out that way.  The wells became the property of local elites, and the poor, for their labor were promised seasonal jobs in lieu of water.  Insecure water rights were a product of being nomadic workers, with no rights on the land.  The ordinary burdens of itinerant labor worsened in the case of water.  

Kerala's experiments with water have been more democratic.  Because of the land reform, even poor Keralans whose landholding is the size of a single bedroom, have rights of access to groundwater through their ownership of land.  Unlike in other parts of India, where the poor are dependent upon public wells or enormously overwhelmed public utilities, the poor in Kerala have private water rights, made secure by the egalitarian redistribution of private rights to land under a communist government in the 1970s.  Land reform did for Kerala what decades of water-pump-distribution and charismatic organization could not do for other regions in India: land reform secured the people's rights to the water below the surfaces they walked.  

Moreover, the distribution tradition in politics continues to insure that Kerala's experiments with water harvesting reach the region's poor. Kerala's socialist government continues to take seriously its mandate to participation in land and water.  At the moment, that's done by the government delivering clean drinking water by truck and by boat to Kerala's many remote residents, an expensive and unsustainable stop-gap expression of a government convicted of its responsibility to provide water to all its citizens.  In embracing the mandate of land and water for the people, Kerala stands apart from other districts in India, including the slums of Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, where the poor have to purchase water delivery by truck from private vendors.  But the land and water mandate also means that Kerala is dedicated to exploring other avenues of water provision.  

An unintended consequence of land reform has been another form of water security as well, one linked to buying power.  Economic success means water dominance, the net importing of products of water farming elsewhere.  One of the most fertile regions in India, Keralans have themselves largely left agricultural production behind, becoming importers of mangos and coconuts from drier and rockier Tamil Nadu.   With broadcast economical success as the result of decentralized development and land reform, a majority of Keralans can afford to import their water in the form of mangos and melons from far away.  

With its inheritance of systems of rights securing the power of people over their land and water, Kerala's radical traditions have succeeded around water security where capitalists have failed.  

That connection between land reform and economic development is the hinge of a moral paradox.  In some sense, Kerala's progressive image is falling victim to its own success.   Birth rates have fallen, in keeping with economic development in many places, even as Kerala's educated worker-citizens migrated around the world to high-placed jobs in medicine and research.  Fisherfolk, farmers, and migrant construction laborers remain.  But will future generations be able to benefit from earlier land reform?  The answer is unclear.  In a booming market, land prices for the many broken-up smallholder plots have escalated.  Kerala is becoming a province of rich, secure retirees, occupying sumptuous new houses, boasting carved teak brackets in the traditional style of temples.  Around Lake Vembanad, some of the most expensive resorts and spas in all of India have risen up, their soaring buildings dwarfing nearby temples.  The success of education and land reform has meant development, and development, to a large degree, works against the decentralizing effect of land reforms. Land, in Kerala, has become expensive as a measure of success, and no one speaks of breaking up such precious land again with another land reform.  

There's a paradox here that's emblematic of the experience of democratic legislation in land around the world.  In nineteenth-century western Massachusetts, transcendentalists decided to pursue a policy of welfare-for-the-poor, education, and agrarian development that froze the place in time.  Later, Community Land Trusts set aside large plots of the region for cross-class housing development, securing the houses against higher property taxes and insuring the continued ability to thrive of the people who lived there.  Rather than pursuing industrial development at scale, it gradually improved its nineteenth-century clock towers and eighteenth-century white-washed church steeples.  Those from poor families who stayed continued to thrive.   Land prices rose around them, but western Massachusetts stayed stuck in time.  Outsiders could only move in at great expense.  

Are examples like Kerala and western Massachusetts examples of success?  They insured the development, education, and welfare of a generation of their own poor with greater success than regions characterized by rampant industrialization and exploitation.  In the end, they close their doors to outsiders; the land becomes too expensive.  Land reform is a victory for economic development, but is it a victory for moral welfare?  That question remains open.  On the other hand, the question of land illuminates the problem of water.  There are unintended consequences to an egalitarian ethos, a democratic attitude towards land and water, which are vital for us to learn about in a coming age of water scarcity.

Chennai Walkabout

Mapping produces unintended consequences. We go out mapping with some volunteers, undergraduate majors in social work and economics from a local women's college, who are fulfilling a credit requirement of work with a local foundation as part of their course. They're tired from an intense day of mapping the day before.

Today, we're counting shopfronts and apartment buildings, trying to get a rough count of how many residences are in an area so that they can make some informed assertions about community composting, waste collection, and water management. Matching the Google satellite views with houses on the ground, one of the researchers notice that the streets in the image don't line up with the streets on the ground. We do a little bit of detective work and realize that a dead-end has been filled in by a new building with a dress shop, and a through-street became a dead end when a new house was constructed. They interview the neighbors. Who remembers when these buildings went up?

Chennai has no mechanisms for overseeing the basics of community control of its streets. There is no centralized office capable of taking in the wealth of information generated by a rapidly expanding city. If Transparent Chennai becomes the arbiter of information for the city, then the NGO stands to replace many of the traditional functions of city government. Would volunteers be numerous or rigorous or committed enough for tasks as diverse as counting the census, or watching houses? Will Transparent Chennai be replaced by private city accounting firms, watching over water points and manholes? We spend the evening talking about the future of government, wondering what the experience of other mappers will tell us about their successes.

Volunteers go into the ward for 2-8 hrs every day. The 8 hr days are exhausting in Chennai's damp heat: three hours from 8 to 11 in the morning, a break for lunch, another three hours in the afternoon, and two more after a break in the evening.

The paper maps are printouts of satellite photography available via Google Maps. The volunteers draw directly onto the maps, noting uncollected garbage, water points, toilets, the number of dwellings on every building on a street, or shop fronts. They've conducted "walkability" surveys of neighborhoods in Chennai, where sidewalks are broken and huge holes gape into unsculpted pits of mud beneath, where loose electric wires hang from the trees above, where scooters and cars parked on the sidewalk force pedestrians to walk in the busy carriageway, facing down auto-rickshaws and scooters and busses flying by a few inches away. They note the speed of vehicles, the number of obstructions, the materials used in making sidewalks, the condition of the walking path, amenities such as seating, trashcans, and toilets, parking on the sidewalks, crossing points, and so on. They map the distance that people are walking to cross the road. They mark trees, storm water drainage, the number of driveways, manholes, utility boxes -- which in Chennai are in the middle of the sidewalk. Their questions are ultimately urban planner questions. Paper maps are then inputted to ArcGIS.

That morning at the office, the staff of researchers and activists have questions about the scale of mapping appropriate to different kinds of political action. When are paper maps appropriate, and when is GIS appropriate? When is it enough to map water for the neighborhood, and what sorts of questions require them to map the whole of Chennai, or the region, or indeed India, to draw together the sort of argument they need? They are in the process of matching technology to larger questions.

These are exactly the sorts of problems that the next generation of infrastructure will have to answer, questions about mobilizing political will, using information to do so, and the appropriate scale for working in such a way as to include all the constituents of a community. (Photo credit and further reading: "Civic Sens(E)itivity" by Zara Khan and Tanya Thomas.

Taking Land and Water Public: Interventions In and Outside the Academy

At the forefront of many disciplines, a dialogue is emerging about the concept of common property.  Converging conversations in the social sciences, applied sciences, humanities and arts have been driven by contemporary political questions like the urbanization and simultaneous water crisis in the global south, the decline of public investment in infrastructure and flood control in the global north, and more recently, more recently, the financialization of land and water as commodities as expressed by the American subprime crisis and the African land grab.  At the same time, new technologies of GIS and crowdsourced mapping have driven scholars to experiment with plotting their data on a map.   In fields diverse as economics, psychology, history, anthropology, and literature, a “spatial turn” has been heralded where abstract theory has centered around questions of our common responsibility for land and water and the techniques by which we come to knowledge of the space around us.  Disciplinary discussions have included histories of cartography and land surveying, economic debates over the uses of land titling to enfranchise the global poor, anthropological studies about the deracination of indigenous societies from control over their land and water, archival investigations about how GIS-located archives can be mined for information about nineteenth-century cities, and technological explorations around the possible application of GIS to creating self-governing commons in land and water.  

I firmly believe that abstract philosophical understandings of property, economy, and land are at their most powerful when in conversation with the creative expressions of art, technology, and activism, interacting with the public across a range of mutual interventions.  For that reason, I'm in the course of organizing a conference and edited volume that would bring together some of the technologists, activists, archivists, and artists at the forefront of mapping practices and spatial activism.  The list of invited participants includes activists like Liz Barry of Public Laboratory, who trains environmentalist neighborhood groups to map instances of polluted rivers around them, as well as archivists like Matthew Knutzen of the New York Public Library, whose many mashups of nineteenth-century maps allow historians to identify all sites of toxic pollution from centuries past.   The academic, artistic and activist practices represented at the conference will refract ideas of common responsibility for land and water through bridging abstract ideas of joint responsibility for land and water with ordinary experiences of the everyday lots and yards of the city around us.  The weekend workshop, where participants will meet each other and review drafts, will produce an edited volume of scholarly work, an online video series bringing informal versions of the papers to the public, and a series of material interventions engineered by Brown public humanities’ masters students.   The edited volume, workshop, online videos, and material exhibits will directly relate socially-engaged scholarship to the ordinary urban places around us, thus generating a powerful series of exchanges between the university and its public.  

 

Psychogeography -- conceived of as the exploration of land use through physical walking, interdisciplinary conversation, and creative exchange -- has deep roots in several avant-garde revolutionary movements in mid-twentieth-century Europe.  Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur (saunterer), the Letterist International’s unitary urbanism, the Situationist International’s ideas of dérive (wandering) and détournement (reappropriation), among others. However, the word itself was first coined by Guy Debord in his 1955 essay “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” where he defined it as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.

In the decades since Debord and his situationist colleagues walked Paris together, scholars have been grievously unable to keep pace with the spatial thinking that has flooded popular culture. Google Maps, emotion maps, social media geotagging, and a broadening culture of outdoor protest, art, performance, and urban farming. These phenomena, driven largely by the world of technology startups, art practice, and activism, have much in common with themes explored in urban history and the history of cartography. However, scholars in the social sciences have been slow to make clear connections between their work and the emergent possibility of crowd-sourced mapping of the urban environment, with the result that important questions have gone unasked. What does it mean to attend to the emotions of people displaced by interstate highways, or to notice the spirituality of activists following GIS across a landfill?  How will the ability to crowdsource oral history in the city change the collection of data within the disciplines of sociology and history?  What does it mean to walk through a city while also walking through an iPhone tour of its radical history? How may these new experience change our fields, and who we conceive of as the audience for our books and articles about cities, land, and the public?

Brown’s Public Humanities Center makes a natural home for the Psychogeography conference asn experimental dialogue between abstract scholars of land use and activists in the field.  The program in Urban Cultural Heritage & Creative Practice, with its commitment to helping the public understand relationships between economic and technological growth in the city fabric.  So, too, the many scholars at Brown whose scholarship focuses on the exclusions of the working poor and racial minorities from access to housing and infrastructure in the urban environment.  If the conference is able to secure funding at Brown, we will expand the initial draft of scholars recruited to an edited volume to especially target Brown scholars whose ideas interface with questions of land use and responsibility.   We intend to specifically target social scientists such as Robert Self, Seth Rockman, Linford Fisher, John Logan, and Hilary Silver, powerfully involved with conversations about social justice and the city, as well as new media scholar Wendy Chun and other scholars at the forefront of exploring spatial experience through the use of new technology.

The notion of a “dream field” invokes, in poet Jorie Graham’s turn of phrase, a unified field where the abstract sciences of philosophy, law, and mathematics meet the down-to-earth observations of poets walking the surface of the earth and musing about personal responsibility for nature in the tradition of William Wordsworth and Wendell Berry.  Our “dream field” too will bridge abstract conversations with down-to-earth investigations, inviting students, members of Brown’s faculty, and the local public to join academics, activists, and artists working broadly on the question of land use, its exploration, and common responsibility.  The meeting of strangers upon common ground, will, we hope cross-fertilize many adjacent practitioners, arming cultural practitioners like artists, journalists, and activists with the documented social science of anthropologists and historians, exposing  both to new technologies in the participatory, digital mapping of common land.  

Students will be invited to participate in taking the scholarship back into the landscape, working directly with scholars visiting Brown for the occasion of the workshop to foster a radical new experience of land that draws out the themes of land and water responsibility through an intervention in some public site around Providence.  For example, we might invite a Brown masters student to collaborate with property law historian David Armitage at the site of Roger Williams' homestead, putatively the "first fence" in Rhode Island. The public humanities student might think about how to rebuild the fence, in some symbolic way.   A public humanities student might reconstruct the first fence (with warning labels?  with invitations to reinscribe the commons?  with yarn boundaries suggesting the previous, alternative, indigenous songlines and common field lines that were displaced by the coming of the fence?).  Or they might gather a crowdsourced, digital map of contemporary fences that matter to the Providence public, using the conference as an opportunity to explore the legacy of exclusions from land.

Such public interventions, with students and senior faculty working together on a single site, give an opportunity for redacting emergent scholarship and drawing out its implications for nearby fields.   Armitage has argued that seventeenth-century property law meant a fully embodied, psychological, and environmental intervention in the context of contemporary experience —a charge that has never been fully taken up in the context of British history, which is disciplinarily bound to diplomatic and intellectual historiography. Arguments about the historical and constructed nature of the boundary line around personal bodies and personal property, however, bear far more weight in the context of material history and new media theory.   His scholarship is all the more relevant when read in conjunction with contemporary debates over the future of the commons in public land and the environment.   In presenting a legal history in the form of a new media intervention for the public , a senior scholar like Armitage will have the opportunity to catapult his theories out of their disciplinary setting and into a place of direct relevance for adjacent fields.    

The expertise of Brown’s Public Humanities and S4 students in community-based curation of humanities resources and in understanding spatial contexts will be key to the success of this conversation. We expect this interdisciplinary conference, together with the video and student collaborations, to push theoretical ideas from the university disciplines into an even more articulate, engaged, and interdisciplinary level of expression.

Water Temples and the Romance of Participation: India's ancient heritage?

Running parallel with this history of participatory surveying are interrelated stories about other technologies that raise similar questions about when and how participatory self-governance becomes a reality.  India's historical experience with infrastructure has provided stark examples of both redistribution and exclusion.  In the nineteenth century, British engineers plowed the Deccan Plateau with canals that protected many communities from drought, while simultaneously netting food distribution into centralized networks of railroads, markets, and taxation that penalized local communities and proliferate famine.  In resistance to the British pattern of exclusion, post-independence intellectuals labored to invent a form of governance characterized by participation.

In the 1970s, a number of anthropologists sympathetic with notions of indigenous or ethnic wisdom began working on material relationships under the influence of E. F. Schumacher and Gandhi wondering about historical precedents for a small-scale, village-based political economy in the control of self-directed communities.  One of these anthropologists was Steve Lansing, an American anthropologist whose work in the 1970s on Balinese water temples was taken up by Elinor Ostrom as a source of inspiration for her work on the commons.  In 2012, Lansing's presentation, retooled from a thesis in the history of archaeology to a metaphor for the spontaneous emergence of order on the internet, spiralled to the top of the Poptech talks.

When this work was new, in the 1970s, it was embraced by civil engineers and nonprofits rather than internet startups as a possible guide to resilient, decentralized systems.  Many drew inspiration from these romantic accounts of India's village past.  In the 1980s, Indian environmentalists like Anil Agarwal began to lobby for the revival of medieval temple tanks for water storage, drawing on a British anthropological tradition of describing India's heritage as an ancient commons dedicated to protecting the rights of all.

The power of this myth had a profound effect on legislation.  By the 1990s, most major towns in India had passed laws mandating rainwater catchment on all buildings.  By 1996, participatory organization was officially mandated for all activities supported by the Indian state.  These acts enshrined the conception of the ancient commons, as revived by British anthropologists, Gandhian political economists, and modern-day environmentalists, as a fundamental good.

 Powerful though this commitment is, however, its results in practice are questionable.  Recent observers have reported that decentralized interventions like temple tanks, rainwater catchment, and local neighborhood groups had problems in recharging a groundwater table on a regional scale.  Temple tanks were revived sporadically and rarely maintained; unfunded mandates were insufficient to provision the city with rainwater catchments. Neighborhood groups spend their energies currying favors with local political parties to maintain water connections, rather than lobbying for broadcast change in the water allocation system at large.  These stories suggest the challenges of negotiating resources at different scales.  What can we learn from India's massive experiment with participatory technologies?  Are decentralized water collection mechanisms capable of creating meaningful environmental interventions on a regional and national scale?

A Brief History of Participation

         For all that we speak of Web 2.0, peer-to-peer dynamics, and interactive everything, the nature of participation remains quite elusive.  Indeed, even its basic timeline remains shrouded in mystery, for instance, the origins of the participatory map.

       One author presents an origin story of participatory mapmaking that begins with participant research methods invented by anthropologists in response to postcolonial movements during the 1970s, and the first maps were invented by Herlily in the 1990s. Another emphasize the role of the internet in interactive maps tend to date a participatory mapping revolution to the advent of the "mashup" in 2004, associated with the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in that year, and nearly simultaneous appearance of Open Street Map (2004) and Google Maps (2005) soon thereafter. 

         In fact, the idea of participatory governance has its origins long before the internet.  Experiments with decentralized governance extend backwards over the twentieth century, and indeed crowd sourced mapping appeared first in the early 1970s.  Indeed, since the 1980s, political theorists have urged the adoption of participatory measures and succeeded in legislating the adoptation of participatory organization since the 1990s.  The current boom in crowd sourced maps, characterized by startups and NGO activity around the Ushahidi and Taarifa platforms, rides atop a far longer movement invested in seeing participatory mechanisms transforming the state.  In that climate, the arrival of mashed-up maps in 2004 was looked to to cure a host of ills, including government corruption, homelessness, famine, and water shortage.   

         This story is strewn with the wreckage of technologies for participation past.  Many are the mapping projects that sent faciliators and programmers to the developing world, produced a trial run showing where a few toilets should be located, then called the program off. They include a history of legislation without mandate and maps in the service of price sensitivity or other data collection on behalf of elites.  All of them, originally, made similar claims -- to create a more informed citizenry, to free expertise from the constraints of disciplinary prejudice, to incorporate the poor and disenfranchised in the political process, and to thereby enliven society. 

        Remembering the long trajectory of this process is important to discerning the difference between the hopeless reiteration of bad methods past and radical tools for transforming society.

         The roots of suspicion towards centralized government are long.  The early medieval church's policy of subsidiary, or putting culturally-inflected decisions in the hands of the local bishop rather than the papacy.  Criticism of centralized bureaucracies typical of the modern nation-state is at least as old as the centralized state itself.  In the 1830s and 40s in Britain, a mere generation after that nation saw the appearance of the first modern Post Office and Highway system, a counter-movement appeared calling for a revivification of decentralized government. Authors like Joshua Toulmin Smith called for  a localist uprising against the centralized bureaucrats, questioning the nature of civil engineers' claims to authority, and extolling the virtues of face-to-face government in the traditional parish.

       In the late nineteenth century, the expansion of the vote and mass education generated many questions about how the knowledge of the many could find its way to the organs of administration.  In Britain, for instance, the advent of the vote for working people (1867 and 1883) and mass compulsory education (1880) was accompanied by the rise of populist politics that insisted on the creation of socialist measures like land reform and health insurance designed to distribute the benefits of industrialization to all the nation's citizens

      Self-rule had been theorized by anarchists and syndicalists like Peter Kropotkin, who recognized in the working men's unions of Switzerland a resilient form of local politics characterized by the active equality of all its members. In Mutual Aid (1902), Kropotkin urged a vision of decentralized, small-scale economic production coordinated by local political bodies.    In Words of a Rebel (1904), he denounced banks  and the civil service as a parasitic form of centralized authority that prohibited peasants from realizing their full political potential.  "The taxes that crush you are devoured by bands of bureaucrats who are not merely useless but positively harmful," he clamored.   "Therefore we must suppress them."  He urged his readers, "Proclaim your absolute independence, and declare that you know better how to manage your affairs than these gentlemen in gloves from Paris."  Kropotkins denunciation of bureaucracy and his praise of local knowledge was mirrored later by many intellectuals on both the right and the left, reappearing in postcolonial contexts to condemn the exploitation of authority by empire.  The positive aspect of Kropotkin's vision, however, consisted in observations about the power of local community to come up with solutions that expanded upon the potential of all of society'e members.    The vision was embraced by Patrick Geddes, who encountered Kropotkin during the latter's stay in London.

         By the 1960s, these precedents for retooled governance,  influenced a body of thought rethinking governance assimilated into a holistic political theory of self-rule applicable to urban planning and the administration of everyday life. Driven by mass youth movements, enormous gatherings in public, the dissemination of ideas through mass media, and contentious political ideas around civil society in an era of racial integration, a new theory of "democratic participation" drew out old ideas about decentralized governance into a renewed vision of democracy.  A participatory democracy was one in which the many would have a voice.  it would depend upon inclusive definitions of citizenship and a commitment to decentralized self-governance.

         

         Through the action of new institutions like the World Bank, the developing world became a laboratory for these participatory methods. In the young discipline of development economics, open-minded scholars adopted the 1960s' theories about political life, reinterpreting them into a call for newly nationalized former colonies to include their poorest citizens in the production of a truly democratic state.  At the University of Sussex, economist Dudley Seers argued that the practice of foreign aid, with its traditional linkage to charity and to the corporations favored by western empires, did little to build up local industries at home.  Seers' complaints echoed those of Gandhi and Gandhi-influenced economists in India, who complained that British industries had drained resources from the country without building up a resilient economy that enriched the poor.  Beginning in the 1970s, another member of the Sussex faculty, Robert Chambers, began to develop techniques for creating a crowdsourced map.  The crowdsourced map was thereafter used to protect territories by indigenous people from logging

            Participatory maps thereafter had a long and complicated trajectory.  Chambers was sought out in the 1980s and 90s by Indian students who saw in his methods the possibility of retailoring Indian democracy in the shape of participation.  Chamber's student Neela Mukherjee became a consultant for the World Bank, working first in Thailand and the Philippines on plans to help poor farmers come to their own discernment about which crops to plant and when.  Eventually, Mukherjee returned to India and began training students in the principles of making participatory maps and authored a textbook called Participatory Methods.  Chapter 5 on walking foregrounds walking territory as a key to participatory learning about farming, local plants, local history and infrastructure for farmers in the developing world seeking greater control over their own land and especially food sovereignty.  In the 1990s, a team of American geographers centered on the University of West Virginia used GIS and mental mapping to facilitate community conversations about equitable land decisions, land access to water, and ethnic memory of customary land rights in post-apartheid South Africa.

          The theme of participatory ownership of the city, pioneered in discussions about urban planning in the West, remained strong in the context of the developing world, and even grew in a context of spiraling urbanization.  In India, the Philippines, and much of Africa and Latin America, postwar economies pushed peasants off of the land into cities, where the poor availability of housing required the poor to squat on land and build their own homes out of cheap building materials.

           At first, the governments of these towns collaborated with the World Bank to take out loans to provide expensive, high-rise public housing units.  But increasingly, the World Bank drew upon the advice of western advocates of squatter settlements, who saw in western squats the potential benefits of self-governance without interference from the state.  In the hands of the World Bank, this theory of self-directed, self-built, self-governed housing projects became a justification for defunding public housing.  From 1972 forward, World Bank reports commended squatters for their ingenuity and resourcefulness and recommended giving squatters titles to their properties, which would allow them to raise credit and participate in the economy as consumers and borrowers.  

           These activities were not always congenial to the program of government reform towards democratization.  Many of them used participatory methods instead to net poor peoples into networks of debt and reliance on hierarchical authorities.

         

         The reasons for the failures of participatory technology are actually quite specific.  

         Participation was appropriated during the 1970s as a means of cheap development without commitment of resources from above. The theme of participatory ownership of the city, pioneered in discussions about urban planning in the West, remained strong in the context of the developing world, and even grew in a context of spiraling urbanization.  In India, the Philippines, and much of Africa and Latin America, postwar economies pushed peasants off of the land into cities, where the poor availability of housing required the poor to squat on land and build their own homes out of cheap building materials. At first, the governments of these towns collaborated with the World Bank to take out loans to provide expensive, high-rise public housing units.  But increasingly, the World Bank drew upon the advice of western advocates of squatter settlements, who saw in western squats the potential benefits of self-governance without interference from the state.  In the hands of the World Bank, this theory of self-directed, self-built, self-governed housing projects became a justification for defunding public housing.  From 1972 forward, World Bank reports commended squatters for their ingenuity and resourcefulness and recommended giving squatters titles to their properties, which would allow them to raise credit and participate in the economy as consumers and borrowers.  

          Participatory mechanisms installed by the Indian government to deal with water tanks after nationalization depend on principles of accountability at the local level that were invented under colonial rule.  They install the duty of the locality to take care of people without necessarily providing the means with which to do so.  

          We need developers who can learn from the history of futility, and historians who have the courage to constructively encourage a more informed kind of development.  

I Miss Delicious.com

"The people, and the collective sense of the commons, were in the end more reliable than the market."

After years of keeping my links there, I managed to tune out in the six months during which Yahoo bought the company and the accounts were wiped.  I didn't migrate my links.  I've made peace with the fact that they might be gone forever, but on occasion, when I've told this story, geek friends have urged me to contact the company, reminding me that there's always a backup *somewhere.*  But rounds of emails and tweets have gone nowhere so far.

I'm about to publish a bunch of essays I wrote back in the day under your influence about the importance of social networking sites, some of which hold up Delicious as a model for how academics and members of the public should work together --- BUT my examples were largely about stuff that was in my own account, http://delicious.com/joguldi, no longer functioning.  For the moment I'm just deleting those parts of the essay, but I'd rather be able to use my account and talk about Delicious as a happy story rather than a sad one.

Obsolescence is a reality on the internet, and we all have to choose the software we use and how we share our data carefully.  Zotero makes a more trustworthy case, as their cloud-based storage is mirrored on any computer on which one downloads their software, stored in text-files, pdf's, and my-sql databases that should remain interoperable for some time to come.

Once upon a time, I wrote:

 Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence as an academic these days. It's where I make my friends, how I get the news, and where I go to trade. All this from a little server that does nothing but share bookmarks in public.
...For two years I've been using Delicious as an information organizer. It's produced an impressive encyclopedia of the most interesting information, images, articles, citations, books, and subjects on the internet to which I might want to refer. Consider my dissertation tag, under which are a wide variety of online images and Google books that I'll be using for my research. Not only can I come back to them, but I can also find related subjects—dissertation material related to walking—and navigate seamlessly from one to another. As an improvement on the index card system—or on my own terrifying piles of articles, even now ornamenting my bookshelf, or even on the folders within folders within folders of word documents—this represents a definite improvement.

-- and so on.  filled with enthusiasm for a culture of sharing that I saw emerging, for the strangers I met and the bibliographies I pillaged there.  Delicious was, for many years, my much-preferred place for wisdom over Google.  If you were looking up hot springs, for example, Google returned the most obvious result, but only Delicious would get you to Tim Wu's list of the best hot springs in the world. 

But it takes time to build up one's participation in such a community.  Delicious worked so well for me in part because of a network of connections I'd built up carefully over time, from reading other users' annotations and connecting myself to the most insightful among them.  Could I find them again?  Perhaps. But broken trust -- like the wiping out of accounts -- goes against the trust necessary to make that commitment to finding a community and sharing things with them.  Having lost my own history, now I mistrust the service.  

In theory, an active community of users is the most important economic foundation of the sales of Facebook stock or any other company.  But what's to prohibit the evaporation, overnight, of all we've placed on Flickr, Instagram, or Facebook?  Our data is not ours, as privacy activists keep reminding us.  And market wisdom was not enough, in the case of Delicious, for Yahoo to protect the community of users.  

Instead, a valiant attempt was made at the grassroots.  Delicious users heard about the coming purge and instructed each other on rescuing their bookmarks.  One of them launched an alternative, free site called Pinboard.  The people, and the collective sense of the commons, were in the end more reliable than the market.

Where was I when users were helping other users transfer their accounts and save their links and notes, where was I?  Finishing a dissertation or a book manuscript?  Moving house, again, to a new city?  Probably.  I missed the boat, half-aware that something was going on.  I knew better, even at the time.  I'd blogged about obsolescence and data before.  But I didn't heed the warnings... the flood came... so sad.  I understand the warnings about markets, data, sharing, all of it.  But I find myself regularly returning in thought to that intelligent community that once was.  

The corporations can have my data.  I want my community back.  I just miss waking up to the news the way we did together in 2007, annotating the most interesting articles with people I'd chosen purely for the beauty of the kinds of sites they liked, sharing them intelligently in a place where we could find them again.  Those are both qualities that Facebook has never offered.  

There is nothing like Delicious out there in terms of an community for finding grass-roots curators and beholding their careful, discerning brilliance over time.  Not twitter, where we all snark meaninglessly; not tumblr, which buries precious information beneath a flood; not Zotero, where it's nearly impossible to browse strangers or follow them from afar.  

In the end, I don't care that the people were more reliable than Yahoo, or that corporate America destroyed my intellectual commons.  I miss you, Delicious.  Give me my library back.  

Audience-Driven Storytelling

When you write an abstract for a project, retweak it every time you tell someone about it. That way the story gets retooled at the speed of thought, matching your community and all the information you take in from them. Every time you retell the story for someone just on the edge of your social circle, you entertain another body of knowledge.  How would this story sound to scientists? to working-class folk?  Try to hear their thoughts in advance and tell them a story they'd find meaningful.  Then see how they actually respond, and take on what they know.

This advice particularly applies to graduate students at the end stage of a dissertation.  Retooling your methods won't work, but once you have your data, it can speak to many questions. Most book manuscripts that come out of dissertations suffer by responding to too shallow a literature, too narrow a public.  When you sit down to write the introduction and conclusion to a project, remember the best books you've read, the smartest people you've talked to, the most compelling conversations about changing the world.

Project Summary: "Learning From India: The Modern Commons in Land and Water", May-June 2013

"Learning from India" is the collaboration between a historian of infrastructure, Jo Guldi, and an environmental engineer, Zachary Gates. Because of its traditions of decentralized self-governance and appropriate technology post-Independence, India is arguably the nation in the world with the widest experience of rainwater harvesting, DIY-sanitation, small-scale irrigation, participatory mapping, and other coordinated small interventions, reproduced at scale, that seek self-directed, community-governed, participatory solutions to market and government issues of the allocation of scarce resources like land and water. Our research trip will seek out cases where community map-making has been successfully applied to the allocation and self-government of limited natural resources.

Radical political theorists in the West like Colin Ward and David Graeber suspect that the small-scale, decentralized solutions formulated by local communities in lesser developed nations may hold solutions more egalitarian and sustainable than the top-down, centralized solutions devised by centralized states in the modern era.  Meanwhile, observers like Ananya Roy and John Harriss have been more skeptical, pointing to the cooptation of poor peoples' movements by middle-class NGOs, and the increasing alienation of poor people from state-protected rights to land and water.  Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of community organizers, NGOs, and inventors, India has a rich experience with community map making, DIY technology, and participatory organization going back through the 1970s.  On our travels, we're hoping to learn about systematic small interventions from rainwater catchment to community self-governance, collecting the best set of tools to promote a genuinely self-governed, sustainable urban ecosystem.

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Our travels are motivated by questions about truly participatory governance of scarce resources, a problem not limited to the developing world.  As a foot-soldier in the battle to restore New England's industrial landscapes, Zachary Gates witnessed first-hand the limits of private-sector initiatives to channel investment against future flood and water shortage to the benefit of all.  Facingthreats of both flood and water shortage, America's cities have much to learn about the possibility of self-governance.  Can maps and community meetings really promote egalitarian consensus around the administration of land and water?  Where have modern efforts to effectively allocate land and water at scale represented the community as a commons?  In the tradition of Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Elinor Ostrom, we look to the power of history to help us design resilient environments that enable natural instincts towards community, mutual aid, and the preservation of natural resources.  

Our choice of India is the culmination of ten years of historical study on modern administration of land and water.  In her first book, Roads to Power, historian Jo Guldi concentrated on the rise of the professional civil engineer and the infrastructure state and its role in mediating access to trade for communities that became increasingly dependent upon centralized bureaucracy for their well-being.  Guldi's work in "Learning From India" will form a part of her next research project, The Long Land War, which concentrates on the problem of people's movements to restore local control over land and water, from the Irish Land War of the 1870s through the Latin American and Indian land reform movements of today.  Chapters include the creation of a global consensus around rent control c. 1890, the post-1946 attempt by the UN to engineer a global land reform movement as a peaceful path midway between capitalism and communism, and the rise of an international financial market in real estate after 1974  and the creation of global squatterdom. These stories concentrate around the  global swarm of radicals, intellectuals, and activists moving between Ireland, Scotland, India, California, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, whose movements created a global flow of technologies for the allocation of land, including surveying, financial instruments, and forms of political organization. 

A key chapter in this story highlights the development of participatory mapping as a tool for community self-government and awareness of land ownership, tracing its origins from the  walking tours organized by British radicals in the 1920s through the promotion of Rural Rapid Appraisal and participatory mapping by development expert Robert Chambers at the Institute for International Economic Development in Sussex and his Indian followers.  In their work, participatory map-making was championed as a way of giving sovereign land-rights to indigenous communities, of promoting self-government through egalitarian forms of consensus, and of holding outsider experts responsible to the realities and desires of the local community.  By the 1980s, participatory mapping was spread to India, where economic scarcity and Gandhian ideologies of self-governance prepared elites to embrace decentralized tools for self-direction.  By 1998 the World Bank itself was promoting training in participatory map-making.  Since then, progress in GIS and map-making online has provided the backbone for community self-mapping of forests, toilet allocation, water availability and squatter settlements.  For these reasons, India has become the site in the world where participatory surveying has the greatest institutional support and the widest array of precedent.  On our visit, we will be collecting and curating a representative range of maps, from hand-drawn maps of indigenous peoples' forest territory to GIS-enabled maps for allocating urban water distribution.  We will be asking the maps' organizers about the intentions for which the maps were assembled, the degree of participation encouraged, and the maps' successes as instruments of political consensus and political reform.

Many of these forms of participation are, in practice, extremely corrupt and their actual involvement of communities limited.   Maps have been used in some instances merely to collect information on how much a community is willing to pay for a pump installation, rather than as a tool for questioning the allocation of water between industrial agriculture and the urban poor. Elsewhere the aims of map-making are rather more grand.  In Bangalore, a Public Laboratory-affiliated mapper has been creating maps of GMO's and their relationship to traditional crops.  Can those community-sourced maps be used to generate a broader conversation about ownership, responsibility, and the public good?  Is the map by itself a technology for creating ongoing debate and resolving issues of management and maintenance? 

Sample Teaching Module on Participatory Mapping

Some time ago I had a great Skype call with Thomas Steele-Maley, one of the great forces in the deschooling movement. He was interested in some of my historical work on the uses of participatory mapping since 1920, and we started talking about what an out-of-the-box starter kit for kids (7th grade to 12th grade) (or for that matter undergraduates) might look like.

Meeting one:Discussion of landscape as an object of made history. Chapters on following "lines" (power lines, railways, roads) to understand the geometry of power from John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic.

Meeting two:1-page handout on radical walking tour. The radical walking tour invites people of different generations and at least two different economic classes to participate in walking through a one of the city's older neighborhoods together, collaboratively building a story of what used to be there, who owns the land, who used to live there, who lives there now, and why. Participants should expect to tell the story based on particular buildings, using clues such as brick work, stone work, cemeteries, infrastructure, and property lines to talk about how the place was divided and by whom. In preparation for the radical walking tour, the teacher should acquire at least three different maps of the neighborhood from three different points in its history, teaching the students basic skills of map reading and providing some. Teacher should read Henry Randall, History in the Open Air (hard to find), or his article "History in the Open Air" (gated access), as well as perhaps the chapter I wrote, "Landscape," in Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire, eds., Research Methods for History (2011). Also consider the two-paragraph summary of the Boston group of Interested Critical Explorers of Publicly-Owned Private Spaces, "About Walking Tours."

Meeting three:
Students use walking papers and/or their cell phones to tinker with the technologies of changing a collective map. They might then upload their traces to Open Street Map, the shared, open-source version of Google Maps, which allows communities to annotate in enormous detail the parks and community gardens and other recreation spaces around them (check out Berlin for a really well-annotated city). The "hello" moment is typically one like the one I had a few years ago, where in an hour-long ramble with some librarian colleagues, I downloaded a new program onto my cell phone and used it to map three of the ornamental gardens at the University of Virginia campus. Two hours later I was gobsmacked to realize that putting a squiggle on a map, indeed a public and shared map, was as easy as writing a paragraph for a blog entry.


The red squiggles here were ornamental walkways actually walked by me, cellphone in hand. Here they are, and you can look them up and glimpse them for yourself by looking up the University of Virginia at Open Street Map.

Technologies such as these are a new form of writing, a new means of communication, and ease with them is one of the defining features of literacy of the digital age. It's experiences such as these that allow the teenager vaguely aware of urban policy issues to turn into a Bill Rankin, for instance, accomplished mapper of race in America's cities, among other things, who got his start as a boy scout sketching maps of the encampment for his fellow scouts to use. Map literacy is the tool of those who have it, and in their hands it becomes the means of entering conversations about privilege, access, and poverty in ways that put to shame more unwieldy forms of textual description.

Meeting four and after:
a collaborative project w Mapping Main st or million dollar blocks

Two courses for Brown University, Fall 2013

This summer I will close up shop at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where I've enjoyed three years of uninhibited research time, and return to the life of teaching as Assistant Professor of Britain and its Empire at Brown University in Providence, RI.  I'm immensely looking forward to the transition.  Research time is fantastic, but teaching is generally where our best ideas and most rigorous thinking comes from.  Students, even more than colleagues, challenge us to remain relevant, to take opposing points of view seriously, and to witness directly to voices from the past.

The History Department at Brown takes its undergraduates seriously, and I've been urged by my colleagues to offer courses that will attract non-majors from a variety of fields, and to overtly engage with my commitments to land and water use and the history of capitalism.

In my time as a researcher, I've visited leaders in land reform and international infrastructure investment and worker cooperatives who have emphasized how hard it is to find undergraduates sensitive to both ecology and governance, and how important the lens of history is to their work.  In particular, I've found myself in conversations about the future of land use around the globe, which entertain the challenges of driving investment towards clean water and sustainable cities (consider this map of coming water crises prepared by NASA).  Investors, governments, NGOs, and community groups all need to hire students prepared to understand how flows of capital and participation have failed to serve communities in the past.  History majors, far more than economists, political scientists, or area studies majors, are prepared to understand the wider shape of institutions, the long legacy of colonialism and bureaucracy in general, and the challenges of capitalism, both its potential to reform and its potential to exclude.  I hope to raise up an army of undergraduates who understand how to look at contemporary crises, from the environment to economic breakdown, from the perspective of institutions in our shared past.

The traditional categories of the history discipline are at work here in an emphasis on the story of institutions, social movements, capital flows, how their nature changes over time, and what resources are necessary to understand them.  The History of Britain and its Empire remains a subtext in the range of examples that will appear in both classes.  Examples for the histories of cities and the rise of infrastructure and back-to-the-land movements and environmental and organic successes and failures will be drawn disproportionately from the realm of British historiography, which remains, for reasons of geographical spread and political innovation, an excellent place to examine transitions to modernity in all its forms.  Digital history will be urged in the form of text-mining and mapping exercises, which will support student-driven explorations of aggregate movements over time, for instance, geoparsing World Bank reports with Paper Machines to show how patterns of intervention in infrastructure vs informal development have progressed over time.  There will be a lot of critical reading in the history of economics as well -- Adam Smith is almost always a figure on my syllabi -- and a good deal of recent reading in the history of recent flows of capital, likely including Nicholas Shaxton and Wendy Wolford among others.  I hope to instrumentalize the traditional tools of historical analysis to look at the world around us now, to understand how it differs from the challenges of environmentalism in Rachel Carson's era, or the challenges of floods in the early modern Netherlands -- and to give students the confidence and tools to commit similar forms of analysis themselves.




Utopias and Other Wastelands 

Advanced undergraduate/grad student seminar.

 Radical thought has urged upon us a return to utopias and alternative geographies, both in the form of living movements like the MST (Landless Workers' Movement), World Social Forum, Occupy, or StrikeDebt, as they proclaim, “Another World is Possible,” and in the form of intellectual treatises affiliated with this movement that explore the agency of “heterotopias” or “Temporary Autonomous Zones” as geotemporal sites of utopian agency. In general, historians have been skeptical about the role of utopias to trigger social change, viewing them at best as escape valves for privilege during economic downturns, at worst dangerous experiments in surveillance. Yet from generation to generation, social movements have challenged the world around them, imagining the transformation of particular retreats, cities, and nations as a laboratory for experimentation with the future.

 What factors are necessary for a social movement to grow? Where have international coalitions of reformers or rebels exempted themselves from the contemporary world system, or forged tools for reform and resistance, or carved out a temporary autonomous zone for critique? We will look at the international Progressive movement, appropriate technology, trade unions and cooperatives as examples of modern movements that, doomed in one nation, occasionally flourished elsewhere. Themes will include the esoteric and geographically isolated examples like back-to-the-land movements and psychological/sexual reform movements, as well as mainstream movements that began as utopian plans for remaking the world: democratic reform, scientific collection and curation of a more abundant or sustainable agriculture, Fabian socialism, and the welfare state. We will interpret the conservative utopias of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman alongside the radical utopias of Theosophists. Twentieth-century stories will trace the fates of these utopias through the rise of organic farming, cooperativism, civil rights, Gandhi’s Satyagraha, the Green Revolution, and human rights. We will be looking into the alliances of professionals, experts, national legislators, capitalism and the organs of world government, trying to understand the alignments of power that caused some of these movements to flourish and others to falter. The class will raise questions of agency, asking when individuals and collectives have the opportunity to change the world around them and how we measure their success across the grander sweep of historical time.



 Land Use and Capitalism, 1350-2060 

 Undergraduate introductory lecture course, no prerequisites.

 We live in an era of enormous storms, ecological genocide, evictions, and pollution. While all cultures interact with the territory around them, modern political institutions have developed the means to transform landscapes at an unprecedented scale for the purposes of political security and economic growth. How are the failures to relate to our environment continuous with those of earlier civilizations? 

This course offers an overview of major traditions for analyzing landscape in political economy, theology, literature, and anthropology, asking how the imaginary landscapes of the mind become the material realities of farm and highway. Themes will include the rise of modern, surveying, engineering, cities, infrastructure systems, and land reform. It will ask how historic models of government have played out in an era of environmental disaster, famine, mortgages, and evictions. The course will explore tensions between political centralization and heterotopias, nomadic and settled people, peoples' movements and finance, exploring questions about the spiritual, economic, aesthetic, ecological, and political relationship of people to their territory.