Rent-seeking used to evoke the image of corporate lobbies whispering into the ears of the state, extracting the benefit without creating any value. Another variant has been developed today, more personal, closer—a variant that puts on the clothes of community, safety, and maintenance. In cities, community groups, neighbourhood committees, and resident welfare organisations are becoming increasingly important as gatekeepers of the public space, and in the process, altering commons into semi-private spaces.
These associations may seem innocent and even obligatory at first. They do the work of collecting garbage, lobbying the streetlights, and solving local conflicts much more quickly than any remote bureaucracies ever did. They match actual gaps in areas lacking the state or in areas that are inefficient. But slowly, a shift occurs. The sidewalk becomes “ours.” When it becomes dark, the park is locked. Street vendors are considered undesirable. Foreigners are not treated as citizens but as invaders.
This is rent-seeking in the absence of rent receipts. Associations do not charge money; instead, they take social and spatial advantage. Who gets to park? Who can protest? Who has the right to sit, to sell or just to live in a place? The right to access is also subject to selective dispensation, most of the time based on class, caste, or occupation. Guards are placed where they are not supposed to be. Obstacles are erected along streets that were previously communal roads. What is termed regulation can be termed exclusion, in other words. These groups have the strength of ambiguity. They are not entirely private, but not as responsible as public institutions. They resort to legality only when it is convenient to them and disregard it otherwise. A road can be under the legal possession of the city; however, when a residents’ association manages access, law becomes a far-fetched notion. Enforcement occurs through social pressure, intimidation, or informal sanctions, which are unfairly used against the least powerful to resist.
Fear is the key to this new rent-seeking. Concern about crime, concern about congestion, concern about decline. Such fears are not imaginary and, at the same time, they can be easily mobilised. The issues of rights and access are suppressed by the master argument of security. When fear is institutionalised, exclusion will be non-discriminatory but responsible. The gated street ceases to be selfish; it is “guarded.” The humour of it is that the privatisation of the public space does not occur in any dramatic way; in fact, it is a thousand and a thousand tiny forms of privatisation. One of the chai-stalls swept away, one bench over there, another stranger interrogated too frequently. Only the belonging people can get the city legible. All other people learn to move around but not through.
This is important since it is not only the physical but also the democratic spaces. They are the places of collision of difference, the places of freedom of anonymity, the place of sharing grounds of the poor and powerful in the short-term. Whenever community associations turn such spaces into controlled enclaves, they do not just control land but transform citizenship itself.
It is not the task of demonising community organisation, then, but the unchecked authority of community organisation. The challenge in the present day, however, is that without clear boundaries and responsibilities, the present-day stewards of the neighbourhood will become the future stewards of the public, who will collect rents not in cash but in access, silence, and exclusion.