Slum Demolitions Research Articles

Making Space for the Better: Living by the Sacred Yamuna

Eviction could hold a different meaning if a home’s immediate surroundings contribute to its residents’ livelihood, especially for informal laborers. This paper explores the notion of the fragility of a home within an expanded space—the space on which a home stands and its surroundings when turned into a contested area. It specifically looks at the slum of Yamuna Pushta in Delhi, which was demolished in 2004. The act uprooted thousands of low-income families who were blamed for polluting the river. The demolition was fueled by new urban visions and planning strategies, political and capitalist ambitions, projections of national pride, and an event-driven approach camouflaged under an environmentalist concern attempting to “clean” the river. Using the photographic works of artist, curator, and activist Ravi Agarwal as a case study, this paper argues the presence of a counternarrative in the works, challenging the projected environmentalist discourse around the river, the slum dwellers. This study further states the dual marginalization of the Pushta residents and the Yamuna by critiquing the economic format of majoritarianism through the growing normalcy and agreeability of the slum demolitions by the urban non-poor disguised as the “greater good”.

Academic urban legend, Agbogbloshie: Sweeping away the "World's Largest E-Waste Dumpsite"

Agbogbloshie, once an internationally recognised toxic e-waste site, was thrust into prominence by sensationalised media and literature. Despite various e-waste initiatives by the government and development partners, the municipality unexpectedly demolished the site in 2021. This action can be attributed partly to the municipality's inability to effectively manage informality, and partly to the propagation of questionable ‘facts’ based on inadequate data, journalistic views, and distortions, which fueled an urban myth and intensified extreme perceptions about Agbogbloshie and its policy trajectory. The emergence and downfall of this academic urban legend are demonstrated through an examination of Wikipedia activity related to the Agbogbloshie page, Google citations, other digital traces, and publication patterns. The Agbogbloshie case highlights the risks of globalizing extreme urban cases, underscores the need for more consistent and aligned urban policies and actions in Accra that are not only consistent and aligned but also cognizant of the complexities of informality, viewing it as a manifestation of underlying socio-economic challenges. It also calls for strategies that avoid displacement and fragmentation, recognising the potential hazards of relocating informal challenges to other urban and peri-urban areas following slum demolitions.

Fixing Bhim Nagar: a new metonym for subaltern urbanism

This article investigates the processes and politics of slum demolitions in the megacity of Mumbai. Scholars of subaltern urbanism have celebrated the political agency and entrepreneurial ability of the metonymic slums in Mumbai. This article argues instead that paying close attention to the dynamics of the lived realities within informal settlements directs us to the limits of ethnographic and archival imagination where fixers operating within the ‘para-legal’ are practicing a new subaltern urbanism, one that is attentive to the complexity of community within the metonymic slum. Through a detailed analysis of the practices of two fixers, this article shows how, by placing themselves at crucial nodes in the demolition and rehabilitation process, the fixers, on the one hand, were able to delay the displacement of residents; on the other, they created hierarchies in the distribution of resettlement benefits. Focusing on the quotidian practices of fixers operating within the demolished informal settlement brings forth a complicated and contradictory politics that ensure the existence of diverse non-privatized land tenures in the city.

When the Powerpolis Paused: Representations of Political Trauma of Indian Emergency in Delhi Calm

ABSTRACT Indian emergency is a period that is often counted among the dark days of post-Independent Indian history. Apart from the repeal of fundamental rights, this period also witnessed an autocratic rule by state-aided machinery that mostly affected the underprivileged sections. While censorship prevented narratives of these twenty-one months, literature took up the task of producing counter-narratives of common man’s experiences like slum demolition, mass arrests, curfew and vasectomy. Political trauma related to the period is two-fold; the first one being the trauma of abandonment and second one being the trauma of revelation. The current study proposes to analyze how Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s graphic novel sketches the political trauma of Emergency in Delhi. Referring to Delhi as the Powerpolis and Indira Gandhi as Mother Moon, Ghosh has employed a number of techniques to narrate the tale of silence. With flex boards, newspapers, and slogans lining up the pages, this tale in sepia presents the reader with a rather disturbing version of emergency through the eyes of a group of young activists. The study focuses on Ghosh’s character selection, narrative techniques, caricatures to understand the dynamics of representation and how Ghosh’s choice of graphic medium aptly conveys the trauma of state-aided oppression during times of emergency. Jenny Edkins’ idea of the trauma of betrayal will also be employed to analyze how the autocratic regime destabilized the Indian ideal of a democratic nation.

Construction and clearance in Israel, 1960–1975: between the local and the international

ABSTRACT This article traces the development and crystallization of urban-planning-and-renewal outlooks in Israel in view of the tension between physical renewal and social rehabilitation. The focus on the coalescence of early Israeli policy (1960-1975) reveals a gradual and protracted process in which the concept of social renewal trickled into the agenda of policymakers and experts. We argue that in the Israeli case, the belated arrival of the ‘bulldozer approach', and the consolidation of the local urban-renewal approach at a time when policymakers and planners in Europe and North America were shifting away from slum demolition, combined with local social circumstances and changes in social policy, ultimately prompted Israeli policymakers to focus on preserving existing communities and favouring residents' co-optation into the process. This analysis of the encounter between Western perceptions of the city, and the consolidating urbanity of ‘new’ states that attained sovereignty after World War II, yields an additional point of view on processes that characterized urban renewal in the second half of the twentieth century. This analysis elucidates the international nature of urban renewal and the reciprocal relations between ideas and knowledge that took shape in the Anglo-American world and those of local legislators and experts elsewhere.

Urban Land Monetization-Driven Land Use Orientations: An Insight from Land Lease Prices in Addis Ababa

Urban land leasing is a land monetization strategy that was introduced in 1991 by the contemporary regime. Since then, urban center slum demolitions and their replacement by high-end commercial buildings and urban peripheral low-cost residential condominium expansions have been common occurrences in Addis Ababa. Land rentiers quote extreme land prices at the city center and relatively low prices towards the periphery. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that urban land supply and land prices are determinant factors for urban land use orientations, which have pushed low-end groups towards the periphery. Therefore, based on a lens of land rent theory, 1524 land lease prices and 1038 randomly selected land parcels using Google Earth were used to evaluate locational trends in land prices and land use orientations, respectively. This study revealed that there are significant variabilities between government benchmark land prices and actual quoted land prices. Because of the high rent gaps at the city center, significant land price quotations were recorded, and this overlaps with the urban center slum demolitions and slum resident resettlements at low-cost residential condominiums in the urban periphery. In the first 5 km from the urban economic center, land prices show a declining trend towards the periphery. The central business district is dominated by slums partially under demolition and high-end commercial buildings, while the periphery is dominated by high-rise low-cost residential condominiums. Therefore, the distance from the city center was found to be an explanatory factor of urban land prices. The contributions of other urban utilities to land prices, such as access to transportation routes, could be a future research area.

Politics of neutrality: Urban knowledge practices and everyday formalisation in Karachi’s waterscape

Formalisation in cities is commonly associated with top-down processes like slum demolition, land titling and economic regulation. By contrast, this article explores processes of everyday formalisation by considering how locally grounded understandings of formality and informality are reproduced. It thus theorises everyday formalisation as a process distinct from state-led formalisation in terms of both the scale (local) and mechanisms (everyday) through which formal/informal dichotomisation occurs. To explore the effects of such everyday formalisation, this article draws on a case study of water access in a low-income settlement of Karachi, Pakistan. Turning attention to everyday practices of water access in the settlement, this article highlights how residents and water board officials understand and enact distinctions between formality and informality through daily knowledge practices and meanings of neutrality. By focusing on everyday formalisation, this article makes two wider contributions to urban theory. First, it demonstrates that urban informality gives rise to diverse lived experiences, not all of which may be characterised as examples of subaltern agency. Secondly, it demonstrates that urban learning and local knowledge generation can be conceptualised not only as tools for urban ‘navigation’, but as distinctive practices that reproduce urban space according to hegemonic categories like formal and informal.

Understanding Homelessness in Neoliberal City: A Study from Delhi

‘Homelessness’ is the worst form of urban poverty, and in the wake of neoliberalism it has become more pervasive in cities across the world. Taking the case of Delhi, the study focuses on the making of homelessness, the connotation of being homeless, and the nature of responses from a governing institution to homelessness in the neoliberal city. The study reveals that large scale slum demolition in the last three decades has rendered thousands of people homeless. They are denied of basic human rights and human necessities. They are not even allowed to reside in the open spaces of the city. Governing actors have bypassed their duties by setting up only a ‘few’ night-shelters in the city, most of which remained unoccupied because of several adversities. The study also reveals that homelessness is the outcome of governance failure and the failure of the welfare state. But the structural problem of homelessness is completely overlooked both in policy and by ‘other’ sections of society.

A window into India’s development story – the 2010 Commonwealth Games

ABSTRACTSports mega-events tend to follow a top-down, increasingly neoliberal, developmental logic that reflects the aspirations and material interests of their host countries’ elites. The 2010 Commonwealth Games (CWG), held in Delhi, India, falls within this pattern. It also provides valuable insight into the country’s larger development trajectory. I locate the roots of the CWG’s troubling effects, such as slum demolitions and securitisation of the city, not within neoliberalism per se, but within a paradigm of ‘development’ that equates ‘progress’ primarily with catching up with the West. I emphasise the striking similarities between the CWG’s impact on Delhi, and that of the 1982 Asian Games, which India hosted while it was still following a state-interventionist development model. Much like the organizers of the CWG, the organisers of the Asian Games tried to convert Delhi into a ‘modern’ city cleansed of shanty towns and street vendors. Although this effort was ultimately unsuccessful, it produced many adverse consequences for the city’s marginal populations. When compared, the legacies of the CWG and Asian Games indicate that it is the larger paradigm of development at work in India that ought to be questioned, not only how it is actualised through state-interventionist or free-market (neoliberal) policy.

Cement citizens: housing, demolition and political belonging in Luanda, Angola

Slum demolition in the name of urban renewal is a common practice in contemporary African cities. Many organisations have tracked the rights violations that demolitions entail. What has been overlooked, however, is the political significance of slums, which this paper argues produce their own imaginations of ‘good urbanism’ becoming critical sites for the imagining of urban political belonging. Exploring the case of urban redevelopment and slum demolition in Luanda, Angola, this paper argues that in this megacity, quotidian notions of citizenship are mediated through the material and aesthetic worlds of slum housing construction, more specifically the cement-block house. It draws on theories that understand citizenship and belonging not simply as juridical categories but more substantively produced through shared imaginations and symbolic worlds. This paper shows that urban politics needs to be understood as mediated through deeply material struggles over emplacement and incorporation that hinge on competing normative visions of the urban.

Jihad at wartime?

ABSTRACTThis article examines Muslim anti-colonial populism, mass mobilizations, and individual initiatives in Calcutta between the Balkan Wars (1911–1912) and the early years of the First World War (1914–1916). Focusing on urban Urdu-speaking activists, multilingual spheres of print and jihadi pamphlets, it explores the international, national, and local developments that marked Muslim populism. The article argues that anti-colonial Islamic currents unfolded during 1910s when the city was undergoing major spatial reorganization, slum demolitions and wartime price rise intensified material hardship of the Muslim urban poor. Populist and pan-Islamist preacher leaders advocated militant opposition to colonial authority and resistance against demolitions and privations. Closer to the ground realities than other blocks within the anti-colonial forces, their appeal was democratic and touched the daily concerns of the people in the bazars and the slums. The article delves into the content of their campaigns and the extent to which they reflected and influenced popular concerns. In the process, it examines pre-war and wartime Islamist opposition in the city, the local invocations of a ‘jihad’ with the outbreak of Turko-British hostilities in November 1914 and the transformation of quotidian surveillance into mounting suppression of the current.

Touring the Demolished Slum? Slum Tourism in the Face of Delhi's Gentrification

What are the limits of the knowledge it is ethically viable to articulate about “slums,” in a political environment where slum demolitions are a weekly occurrence? By cross-reading Partha Chatterjee's theoretical discussion of the conditions of subaltern (self)representation with studies of global slum tourism, the article attempts to answer this question by analyzing the case of the NGO, Salaam Baalak Trust. This NGO conducted slum tours for tourists from the global North in the interstitial spaces around New Delhi Railway Station until 2010, when the slum they used as an example of their work was suddenly demolished. To the NGO staff, this posed two mutually exclusive ethical demands: a) to represent slums so that the plight of their (sometimes displaced) inhabitants might be publicized and discussed and b) to hide slums from view so the state would have no incentive to remove them as a part of their struggle to gentrify the city. The article argues that the implications of this case speaks into the theoretical framework of slum tourism studies, as it illustrates how knowledge produced within this field comes to act in the world in sometimes unforeseen ways.

Urban mega-projects for a ‘world-class’ riverfront – The interplay of informality, flexibility and exceptionality along the Yamuna in Delhi, India

While the rejuvenation of India's rivers is a major future challenge for sustainable urban development, large-scale riverfront development projects across India indicate that the riverbed is often seen almost exclusively as real estate. In Delhi, a series of urban mega-projects has been realized on the river's floodplain, which almost simultaneously had been cleared of large slum settlements. By focusing on the environmental dimensions, discourses and legal conflicts, the case study contrasts the slum demolitions and the development of two intertwined mega-projects (the Akshardham Temple complex and the Commonwealth Games Village). Grounded on Ananya Roy’s (re)interpretation of informality as “a mode of urbanization”, the paper argues that urban mega-projects in India should be interpreted as intentionally created zones of exceptions embedded in a calculated urban informality.

The ‘new’ woman:Changing Zimbabwean female identities in Valerie Tagwira's novel The Uncertainty of Hope

Valerie Tagwira's award-winning novel The Uncertainty of Hope (2006. Harare: Weaver) is usually read as a complex archive from which – as an alternative to the government narrative of the 2005 urban slum clearances in Zimbabwe – we can access invaluable ‘independent’ perspectives about the social, economic and political ramifications of the actual mass slum clearances. However, this article contends that besides its overarching concern with the human consequences of Operation Restore Order (as the urban slum demolitions were officially called), The Uncertainty of Hope centres on the experiences of women caught up in a volatile economic and political situation, making it a critical text for comprehending Zimbabwe's social and economic crisis of the past decade, both from the perspective of a female author and also from the point of view of gendered experience. In this light, the article attempts a reading of Tagwira's novel that explores shifts in female identity formation and how such transformations impact on women's socio-economic problems and vulnerabilities in the context of Zimbabwe's post-2000 economic crisis.

Which Place for the Homeless in Delhi? Scrutiny of a Mobilisation Campaign in the 2010 Commonwealth Games Context

The socio-spatial restructuring of Delhi was accompanied by large-scale slum demolitions that increased homelessness. This paper focuses on the people made homeless, and their struggle to assert their place in the city. First, it expounds the context of homelessness in Delhi and analyses the mechanisms behind its aggravation. Then, it examines a decisive moment in this struggle: a mobilisation campaign for the homeless’ right to shelter, triggered by a tragic eviction during the preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. This research shows that the campaign’s success is due to the combination of long-term structural work at the grassroots level and the timely reaction of various connected actors in different spheres (civil society, media, justice) and institutional levels, and how the campaign for the homeless faces several challenges in sustaining its outcomes.

The Making of a Gecekondulu Identity

While many studies have undertaken analyses of the socioeconomic and political problems resulting from rural–urban migration in developing nations, few have examined the symbolic challenges presented by this shift. Examining news reports on the most sensational instance of slum demolitions in Turkey that took place in 1977, this study argues that urban squatting and slum dwelling created vital problems of cultural representation. In spite of huge ideological differences among various newspapers, there was a surprising level of consistency in the portrayal of the squatters as a dubious group, devoid of ideological commitment, and a serious threat to society. Such a portrayal of the urban poor as nonideological actors has been dominant worldwide, which overlooks the powerful symbolic challenge that the very existence of this group poses to idealized projects of social change, and hence the potential that their despised (non)identity offers for the development of a more democratic political vision.

The Magicians’ Ghetto: Moving Slums and Everyday Life in a Postcolonial City

This essay elaborates a magical realist reading of urban dispossession and the displacement of slum dwellers in contemporary New Delhi. More generally it argues that realist descriptions of the magical and magical descriptions of the real can help us sense and engage the multiple, fractured temporalities of the postcolonial city. The essay foregrounds an impending slum demolition in postcolonial Delhi’s (in)famous magicians’ ghetto in the heart of the city, excavating a concept of ‘moving slums’ from Salman Rushdie’s classic magical realist text Midnight’s Children. The interpretive concept of ‘moving slums’ describes the precarious temporality of slum demolition and re-settlement in postcolonial Delhi, juxtaposing dominant urbanist ideologies with everyday experiences and narratives of urban change. In societies deeply marked by the historical violence of uneven development, moving slums index the haunted morphology of the postcolonial city.

Eviction as Opportunity: Beyond State Power and Community Resistance

Studies of insecurity and uncertainty in local communities emphasize coercive state power and unified community resistance. However, this government versus community dichotomy obscures the important local political divisions that exist in communities, important government-community linkages, and incentives that community leaders have to maintain a certain level of informality. Based on an ethnographic account of a slum demolition in Old Fadama, Ghana’s biggest slum, this on-the-ground analysis argues that forced evictions in slums can be opportunities for leaders to “cash-in” and strengthen power, political parties and politicians to mobilize support, and international NGOs to support a cause while the most vulnerable residents are left entirely unrepresented. By examining a slum demolition that leads to the continuation of the status quo, this study demonstrates how eviction threats of slum communities shape political incentives of community leaders and the strategies that residents use to contribute to the persistence of insecure and uncertain living conditions.

Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum‐Free Delhi

Abstract: This paper examines the narratives through which associations of private property owners in Delhi depict slums as zones of incivility and “nuisance.” In tracing how this “nuisance talk” travels into and gains legitimacy in popular and state visions of urban space, the paper shows the role of discourse in justifying and enacting exclusionary urban imaginaries. As a lay term, nuisance is widely used to identify forms of aesthetic impropriety. But, as a primary element of environmental law, nuisance operates discursively as a catchall category allowing diverse private grievances to be expressed in terms of environmental welfare and the public interest. The widening depiction of slums as nuisances hence reworks the public/private divide, inserting once local codes of civility into the core of public life. By examining how nuisance talk circulates between property owners' associations, the media, and the government, the paper shows how slum demolitions have become widely read as a form of environmental improvement.

Gentrifying the State, Gentrifying Participation: Elite Governance Programs in Delhi

Recent scholarship has highlighted the central role of India’s ‘new middle class’ in gentrifying and ‘cleaning up’ its cities. According to this literature, this class experienced a political awakening in the 1990s and began mobilizing to reclaim urban space from the poor. Using the example of Delhi’s Bhagidari scheme, a governance experiment launched in 2000, I argue that urban middle-class power did not emerge from internal changes within this class itself (as is commonly argued), but was rather produced by the machinations of the local state. In particular, I show how Bhagidari has realigned the channels by which citizens can access the state on the basis of property ownership. In so doing, it has undermined the electoral process dominated by the poor, and privileged property owners’ demands for a ‘world-class’ urban future. By examining the ‘new state spaces’ it constructs, I show how Bhagidari has effectively gentrified the channels of political participation, respatializing the state by breaking the informal ties binding the unpropertied poor to the local state and thereby removing the obstacles to large-scale slum demolitions. In making this argument, the article introduces a unique approach to mapping state space that aims to reveal the relationship between state form and political participation.