Necrosettlements: Life-threatening housing, necropolitics and the poor's deadly living in Mumbai

Abstract

Global megacities are rapidly transforming through slum redevelopment and alternative resettlements of evicted poor. Resettlement is broadly seen as enabling, a basis of improved housing and even a pathway towards urban citizenship. This article offers an alternative perspective on urban resettlement, whereby the urban poor are subjected to life-threatening housing interventions. It builds on Mbembe's (2003) 'necropolitics' through an ethnographic study of Mumbai's Mahul case to theorise state powers in unleashing life-threatening housing circumstances. In doing so, this article introduces the concept of necrosettlements to account for the particularity of necropolitical-economy, material reality, unfolding subjectivities, and political possibility of life-threatening settlements. First, it theorises a political economy that extracts economic surplus and creates urban growth from poor-exclusive housing in uninhabitable places and with a life-compromising built environment against general residential developments. Second, the material details of life-threatening housing comprise of place-based, local biosphere, township's architecture, infrastructural and constrained dwelling, and their cumulative effects. Third, subjectivities of living included physiological suffering, compromised survival, socioeconomic and political vulnerability, comorbidity and death. Fourth, and finally, rather than representing absolute sovereign domination, however, these settlements also emerged as potential sites for residents to invoke their right to life, question extractive urbanism and demand settlement justice.