Solly Benjamin’s contribution to the academic literature, the concept of ‘Occupancy Urbanism’ centers forms of land tenure in shaping land’s situated histories reflecting entangled logics. This analytic is shared into the life worlds of electronic refurbishing and repair.  Engaging their mostly self taught and evolved specialists, their fluid understanding of property is spatialized via trans-national traders connecting ‘china bazzars’ in various Indian cities’ to Shenzhen, but onto Dubai entering Europe, Africa and Latin America. Such ‘urbans’ are constituted by ‘thick’ tenurial arrangements – in land’s property blurring divisions between tenants and landlords, mirroring refurbishing electronics of a reworked brought to life — patents and copyright remain illusionary, constructed and deconstructed. He has been a regular presenter at the East Asian Alternative Geography symposiums (EARCAG).  As an academic he is professor at the Humanities and Social Science Department, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, earlier at Bangalore’s NIAS that followed being at the University of Toronto’s Dept. of Political Science after teaching at Bangalore’s National Law school of India university. His PhD from MIT’s Urban Studies and Planning (1996) focused on land centered material histories of small manufacturers as they turned parts of East Delhi to be Asia’s largest industrial cluster of eclectic cables and conductors. His master’s from MIT’s Dept. of Architecture (1985) connected the incremental consolidation of a refugee block housing Punjabi refugees in central Delhi in 1952 that by three decades later had evolved a complex web of small firm economies that provided surpluses to fuel intense upgrading of their homes. Benjamin remains an avid baker of sourdough, experimenting with cabinet scaled carpentry inspired by George Nakashima, the Japanese master craftsman. From his Himalayan treks inspired water colours moved onto ceramic art where he presently co-invents with a new low smoke and ash wood fired ‘rocket’ ceramic kiln.