Urban Negotiations and Small Scale Gentrification in Delhi’s Resettlement Colonies

Abstract

This chapter traces the making of a new resettlement colony 40 km away from the centre of Delhi that hosts people who lost their homes during a massive slum eradication drive before the Commonwealth Games in Delhi 2010. In order to survive and build a new home, the inhabitants of the new marginal location engage in multiple relationships with their environment. They build houses and pit toilets, cultivate gardens, hold animals, bore wells, dump garbage, clean improvised sewages. These various largely uncontrolled uses of the land bring into collision the different interests of personal survival, upward mobility, healthy living and future sustainability. The notion of “small-scale gentrification” captures the processes and ruptures that emerge when economically weak people begin to act in a situation that challenges them collectively to turn agricultural land into a functioning suburb. The analysis complements prior studies that explore how poor people’s lives are strongly framed by anti-poor activism and state neglect. Here I am interested in the agency of those who shape the margins. I argue that their vigorous negotiations about how best to exploit the life-giving quality of the land create tangible experiences of the finitude of resources. The subsequent making of boundaries between legal/illegal and legitimate/illegitimate forms of extractions invoke modernist discourses of order and hygiene. In the process legitimate extractive middle-class desires are delimitated from stigmatized forms of uses of the land associated with the countryside. While the distinction invokes the scientific knowledge of medicine and urban planning it remains at odds with other scientific calculations about long-term environmental sustainability.

Keywords: Resettlement Gentrification Delhi India Environmentalism Class politics Anthropology of the senses

Information & image source: Springer, Link (25 July 2017)

Biographical Note

Prof. Dr. Ursula Rao (Institute of Anthropology & SFB 1199, Leipzig U, Germany)
Ursula Rao is an urban anthropologist working in India. Her current work focuses on social transformation afforded through biometric technology and eGovernance projects in India. She has also contributed to the fields of religious anthropology and media anthropology as well as she has written about resettlement in the mega city of Delhi, Hindi and English journalism in North India, and contemporary Hindu traditions.