Urban Marginality Research Articles

Street-level service journeys: serendipity in outreach work with unstably housed people who use drugs

ABSTRACT People living in situations of homelessness and drug use experience significant barriers when seeking to access services in the Danish welfare state. Yet rarely are journeys to services examined in depth with attention to the factors that may either support or prevent their completion. Towards this aim, the article employs a ‘service journey’ approach by unfolding an ethnographic case study of a service journey pieced together at the street-level. This is achieved through the collective efforts of outreach workers and a man encountered at a drug consumption room in urgent need of medication. The article highlights the role of serendipity in the construction of such ‘street-level’ service journeys. It thus shows how possibilities for initiating or pushing a particular service journey forward occur through serendipitous outreach encounters. Further, it is shown how service journeys of unstably housed people who use drugs are both conditioned by and come up against other shifting everyday ‘itineraries’ of clients as they seek to piece together a living at the urban margins.

The Spatiality of Popular Politics on the Urban Margins: Insights from Argentina and Chile

AbstractPopular politics—a heterogeneous set of grassroots demands and subjectivities antagonistic to dominant power blocs—finds itself at a crossroads in Latin America. In Argentina and Chile, progressive governments have failed to curtail a resurgent populist‐right despite, as recently as 2019, appearing to be on the brink of a new centre‐left hegemony. This paper argues that paying attention to the spatiality of popular politics demonstrates a failure to articulate popular politics within a national movement, either neglecting them (under Boric in Chile) or incorporating them in a top‐down strategy that erased particularities (under Fernández in Argentina). It does so from the vantage point of two neighbourhoods at the urban margins in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Bringing together Ernesto Laclau's work on populism together with Henri Lefebvre's relational understanding of urban space, it analyses how popular demands and subjectivities have been articulated in relation to national progressive politics.

Poverty porn or poverty planning? Slum photography and the politics of spatial representation

This forum article critically examines the politics of visual representation in urban informality, interrogating the genealogies and contemporary manifestations of what we term the “slum gaze.” Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist visual studies, and critical urban geography, we trace how colonial visualities continue to shape aesthetic constructions of urban marginality through “poverty porn” and spectacles of abjection. We argue that dominant visual regimes not only reflect but actively produce urban informality as a pathologized state of being, rationalizing dispossessive planning interventions while obscuring subaltern spatial knowledges and practices. The article unpacks the contradictory role of visuality in urban planning and policymaking, where GIS mappings and documentary photography paradoxically render informal settlements simultaneously hyper-visible and illegible to state bureaucracies. Against reductive visual grammars inherited from colonial modernity, we advocate for participatory visual methodologies that amplify resident-driven representational practices. By centering community-based visual epistemologies, we gesture toward more emancipatory modes of seeing and narrating the heterogeneous spaces of urban informality. Ultimately, this intervention calls for a paradigmatic shift in how urban scholars and practitioners engage visually with marginalized communities. We contend that cultivating critical visual literacies attuned to the politics of representation is essential for imagining and enacting more just urban futures. This requires moving beyond simplistic denunciations of “poverty porn” toward a praxis of critical visuality that unsettles universalizing gazes while legitimizing plural ways of seeing, knowing, and inhabiting the city.

In the interstices of ubiquity: respatialising Bogotá through black relational territories

ABSTRACT Through a narrativization that connects heterogeneous and often undetected social lives in Bogotá, Colombia, this article charts the rhizomatic spatial crossings of continuously mobile urban trajectories, the often-unsettled forms of dwelling that they inhabit, and their capacity to make place despite the dismantling of community cohesion and the necropolitical forms of urbanity operated by racial capitalism and coloniality across Latin America – what the article refers to as relational territories, drawing on a rich scholarship on Black Geographies of the everyday and Latin American ‘territorios’. From there, the article explores how paths are being charted out of the racial-colonial maze of Latin America’s city-making, through multiple forms of ordinary resistance/re-existence that create life in the interstices of ongoing necro-politics . Ultimately, the article shows how this pluralistic repertoire mobilized from the urban margins not only points to the difficulties of emplacement for Afro-descendant dwellers in Latin American cities but also to the possibility of respatialising the urban from the decolonial relationality of Améfrica.

Unravelling the “Ethos of Change” in African Urban Margins: Institutions, Stigmas, Experiences

Abstract How are desirable futures conceived in the African urban margins? What trajectories do individuals use to get there? And who decides what constitutes a desirable future? This special issue proposes the “ethos of change” as an analytical concept to better understand how urban margins in Africa shape specific lives and, in particular, aspirations for change. “Ethos of change” is a broad set of embodied norms, (self) narratives, and routine practices driving the trajectory of personal change to escape an initial self and environment that are both internalised as unsatisfactory and dishonourable. Based on case studies from Kenya, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso, analyses in this special issue focus on how individuals construct their experiences of violence, (de)radicalisation, displacement, and the intervention of large-scale state programmes. This introductory article offers an institutional framework for comprehending the other articles that constitute the special issue and summarises their contents. Additionally, it assesses how the special issue’s contribution advances our understanding of how to reconsider Africa’s urban margins as spaces for the production of difference, where individuals appropriate the idea of change with its modalities amidst multiple facets of stigma and symbolic violence in African urban margins.

On conceptual hegemony and blanqueamiento vis-a-vis Latin urbanism in London

The commentary focuses on two arguments addressed in the article which resonates with my research about Latin America's urban margins and Latin urbanisms in London. It will first address gentrification's conceptual hegemony and its adoption in other regions of the world where neither its translation nor conceptual understanding suffice or allow for broader nuances of the processes embedded in urban change. It will then discuss the use of blanqueamiento as a concept vis-a-vis Latin urbanism in London to argue for the need of dialogical regional interconnections.

Fragmented marginalities: dispossessed peasantry and migrant labour communities in urban North India

ABSTRACT Analogous to the Euro-American context, Indian cities are usually conceptualised as socio-spatial forms where communities at the peripheries of ‘development’ constitute ‘urban margins’. However, such conceptualisations rarely interrogate the varied aspects of marginality within those spaces. Drawing from an ethnography with dispossessed peasantry (in ‘urban villages’) and migrant labour (in slums/jhuggis) in Noida, a north-Indian city, we unpack three aspects of marginality. First, the process of marginalisation; second, two communities negotiating their marginality differently; third, evolving social relations within each. We propose a relational framework: supra-sub levels of structural-spatial and economic-cultural marginalisation to better understand the fragmentations within urban margins.

Caring for uncommon bodies: Commoning yoseba through indifferent care and working together

ABSTRACT This study examines the emergence of care as a commoning practice within grassroots movements by focusing on Sōgidan, an activist group supporting rough sleepers in San’ya, Tokyo. San’ya is yoseba (day labor auction market), a historical urban margin turning into a service hub. Produced as cheap, disposable labor in the process of Japanese modernization, Japan’s day laborers were enclaved in yoseba and left without social protection after the economic bubble burst. However, they were not merely victims; they embodied a rebellious subjectivity, actively breaking away from the oppressive society. Despite welfare provisions after the 2000s, many day laborers refused aid and continued to sleep on the streets. Through extensive archival research, ethnographic observation, and in-depth interviews, this paper illuminates how Sōgidan has developed strategies of care to relate to the underclass, the historical others who refuse aid. Sōgidan embodies and carries forward the underclass movement, which uniquely echoed feminist ethics of care. It also initiates the creation of the radical commons, reconfiguring the distance between individuals and collectives, and sharing precariousness differently from capitalist norms. By linking Sōgidan’s practices to feminist ethics of care, this research contributes to opening up new perspectives of care and in(ter)dependence toward the commons.

‘You’re in or You’re out:’ Ethos of Change in the Lives of De-radicalized Youth in the Kenyan Urban Margins

Abstract Notoriously placed, ghettos and slums are perceived as locations for violence, drug abuse, violent gang operations, and other vices. In Kenya, the origin of violent radicalization and extremism has centered on urban margins, some of which are characterized as ghettos or slums due to the complex dynamics of communal interactions and spatial settings. This study draws on ethnographic data to analyze the lives of youth in two urban margins of Kenya whose lived realities were tied to their radicalization, deradicalization, engagement, and disengagement in violent extremism for the Al-Shabaab network. Using empirical data, the article probes the central research question: How do youth make meanings of violent radicalization, de-radicalization, engagement, and disengagement from their lived realities of these urban margins? A critical empirical assessment of this new ethos of change as a result of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE) and development actors’ work in these urban margins reveals a continuum of mixed reactions from ‘feeling good’ to ‘feeling worse’ as young people grapple with new identities, new stigmas, and new realities in reintegrating back into their communities.

From Bangladesh Colony to Shanthinagar: housing rights, sexuality, and consumption in Keralam

As the developmental state attempted to transform the urban slum in Kerala into a model housing colony, narratives of decency, self-restraint, and sexual discipline became crucial for securing housing rights in the transformed space. ‘Bad’ and ‘good’ consumption; ‘bad’ and ‘good’ poor and images of ‘normality’ and the ‘normal home’ as the abode of the ideal citizen and worker were some of the strategies deployed by the residents of the Bangladesh Colony to encounter the quotidian world of moral non-acceptance. This article examines how neoliberal articulation of rights through government projects often have contradictory effects on the lives of differently positioned women. The moral economy of consumption hinders the realization of the neoliberal ideal of the consumer-citizen. Practices considered as ‘excess’ in consumption by female sex workers were perceived as a threat to this slum community lying on the urban margins, resulting in their expulsion. The article integrates theories of urban assemblage and queer temporality to understand how women sex workers resisted such expulsions. These theories converge on the notion of excess/abundance. Abundance of relationships, of political alliances and strategies, of consumption practices—exceeding heteronormative ideals—was deployed by women sex workers to resist their erasure and confinement into any single identity.

High-life in a high-rise: Governing urban marginality during COVID-19 in Colombo, Sri Lanka

This research study discusses urban regeneration projects and the impact of COVID-19 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The study population constitutes urban watta communities relocated to government owned, high-rise housing projects. This study investigates the state response during COVID-19 and the governance of marginality. The research methodology includes participant observation, a household survey, in-depth interviews, and community based participatory methods carried out between September 2019 to January 2021. The study examines formation and perpetuation of discourses regarding urban working-classes who are perceived as 'urban underclasses'. Despite relocation in high-rise housing projects and attempts to create modern, and upgraded living, the residents in high-rise housing projects constantly experienced marginality. Marginality stemmed from socio-historical, structural factors such as dehumanising discourses, the impact of urban development projects, differential determinants that characterised communities and methods of state control. This study uses difference as an important perspective through which urban subaltern communities and everyday life can be studied. Whereas this study demonstrates that the state exerts excessive control in governing subaltern classes, they were not passive victims resigning themselves to a marginal status. They also exerted agency and engaged in resistance against the state within the post-relocation setting.

Socio-spatial insights into evictions governance and tenant movements during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and related economic effects have served to thrust rental housing insecurity into the public spotlight. Documenting the extent of pandemic displacement in the City of Ottawa and province of Ontario, Canada, this article provides insight on evictions governance, urban marginality, and social struggle. The socio-legal developments surrounding pandemic evictions offer a compelling case in which to analyze the governance of urban marginality in its various intricacies. During the pandemic, the Ontario government passed legislation to protect tenants from eviction, yet also passed legislation that criminalized tenants organizing against evictions. Tenants engaged in informal actions to stop evictions were met with the threat of formal legal sanctions; evictions moratoria—as a mechanism of care—were coupled with punitive forms of urban marginality governance, such as through evictions tribunals and the criminalization of dissent. Using a mixed-methods approach, we temporally and spatially map the scale and measure the impact of pre- and post-pandemic evictions—documenting that evictions tend to occur in areas with high core housing need and racialized neighbourhoods. We also examine the emergence of new social movements to fight displacement and assess the varied government and landlord responses—including evictions moratoria, tribunal eviction blocks, and the criminalization of tenant organizing.

Maintaining spatial and social order: the role of housing development in governing urban margins

This paper investigates processes of spatially ordered marginality of Roma in a former industrial town in Hungary. The analysis focuses on local poverty governance tactics and practices that aim to maintain social and spatial order through the regulation and selective displacement of Roma within the city. These practices of controlling Roma marginality are clear manifestations of the spatialization and racialization of poverty and I argue that spatial containment constitutes a new mode of poverty governance that aims to temper local tensions and cement local power. Moreover, these local policies reflect continuity from socialist era practices in terms of governing Roma marginality through disciplining and displacement. In the present context, EU-funded urban rehabilitation projects represent a vital local resource. While ostensibly targeting social integration, the local government in question has used these resources to promote the mobility of ‘deserving’ vulnerable groups and control ‘undeserving’ marginalized Roma through enclosure. Those who are seen as undeserving are racialized and subject to punitive containment while the ‘deserving’ enjoy material support and a sense of belonging to local society, provided they accept the conditions dictated by local government actors. In this way, the emphasis on individual responsibility masks the structural deficiencies of social housing and related social issues and perpetuates different forms of racism.

Substance and City: Exploring Drug Culture and Urban Marginalization in Jeet Thayil's "Narcopolis"

The present research article attempts to study the portrayal of drug addiction and its effects on individual identity, societal structures and marginal communities in Jeet Thayil's novel "Narcopolis". Through a close analysis of the characters' experiences with addiction of drugs and the consequences it has on their lives, the study focuses on the broader social implications of drug use in the urban landscape of Mumbai, particularly focusing on how marginal communities are impacted. The article also examines the novel's use of language and narrative techniques to convey the complexities of addiction and urban life, shedding light on the ways in which Thayil's work challenges traditional notions of identity and community in the face of addiction.

Traversing the Urban Soundscape: Black Sonic Geographies within The Minneapolis Sound

AbstractThis paper illuminates The Minneapolis Sound's emergence from the urban soundscapes of late 20th century Minneapolis. Turning to the 1960s and 1970s, I trace the genre's geohistorical emergence to a Black diasporic community who found within marginality the possibilities to spatialise an experimental world across the urban margins. Disclosing how this experimental world was upheld by improvisatory musical ensembles and their dynamic reaffirmations of a Black sense of place, the paper reveals how The Minneapolis Sound was insurgently pioneered as a Black sonic counter culture amidst unequivocal oppression. I then temporally propel the paper into the 1980s and 1990s and explore how the artist Prince and band The Time radically re‐imagined the city's anti‐Black spatial histories towards more just ends. This elucidates how, after emerging from the spatiality of the racialised metropolis, The Minneapolis Sound provided a speculative avenue of decolonial poetics through which alternative Black futures were made imaginable.

Aspirations for Higher Education among Mahadalit Students and Strategies for Overcoming Urban Marginalities in India

This paper seeks to understand the aspirations of first-generation learners for higher education and overcoming urban marginalisation in Indian higher education. It also aims to understand how students from the most disadvantaged social group, mahadalit, overcome their marginalities in accessing and obtaining higher education. Access and equity in higher education have been important goals for Indian policymakers and planners. The study, which is qualitative in nature and uses the ethnography method, provides a deep and nuanced understanding of the aspirations for higher education and Strategies for Overcoming Urban Marginalities among the mahadalit students in Bihar, India. Various educational and equalising programs focusing on disadvantaged groups have created aspirations among first-generation and marginalised learners like Mahadalit students. These mahadalit students are also from non-urban backgrounds and come to cities for higher education. In pursuing higher education, these students face social and economic marginality in their villages, schooling, and urban marginality. They use their social networks to find space at the transformative Dr B. R. Ambedkar hostel, which helps them sustain their higher education in the city. The Dr B. R. Ambedkar hostel becomes the site of educational and career aspirations for the mahadalit students in Bihar, India.

The eviction room: How Carolina Maria de Jesus can help us analyze migration, segregation, and the politics of citizenship in the city

In this paper, I propose the “eviction room” as an analytical frame for the linked struggles of citizens and noncitizens living at the urban margins. The metaphor of the eviction room was coined by Carolina Maria de Jesus, a late Black Brazilian writer and favela dweller. De Jesus sees the city as a house: the city center is its luxurious living room; the favela, its eviction room, a precarious space to which the racialized urban poor are pushed like disposable objects. Expanding on this metaphor, we can think of those segregated and stigmatized in a city’s eviction rooms as not only physically but also politically cast out. Regardless of their legal citizenship status, eviction room dwellers are constructed as the immanent others of the “good citizens” inhabiting the city’s living rooms. Segregated in space, their presence is transient in time given their “evictability.” While the frame of the eviction room can help us make sense of the urban marginalization of both citizens and noncitizens, it assumes neither their social homogeneity nor a united “politics of the evicted.” I expand on possible strategies within such politics, as well as on the spatial and temporal dimensions of the city as a house with an ever-shifting plan. The eviction room advances a research agenda centered on migration, residential segregation, and the politics of citizenship relevant to urban contexts across the global south and north.

Urban marginality: Everyday practice of building resilience to flood in the informal Settlement of Dar es Salaam

Urban marginality: Everyday practice of building resilience to flood in the informal Settlement of Dar es Salaam

Paternalistic state care and the dynamic of COVID-19 pandemic governance in Jakarta's rented social housing

The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited debates on care, exposing the vital role of social reproduction despite its ongoing devaluation. Recent studies underscore the urban marginal's multidimensional vulnerabilities during the pandemic, coupled with inadequate state support and excessive policing amid their disproportionate engagements in low-paying care work essential to the city.This study extends the literature by exploring the discourse of care amid the pandemic in Jakarta's rented social housing (rusunawa), Indonesia. As a state-owned settlement hosting displaced residents from informal settlements, rusunawa represents a new form of urban marginality. Based on an ethnography of three rusunawa between 2019 and 2021, I argue that paternalism defines the state's vision and operation of rusunawa. By portraying the residents as vulnerable yet ignorant, the state justifies the combination of disciplines and supports in ‘caring’ for them.The continued paternalistic care during the pandemic, with an intensification of disciplines and assistance, ameliorated the residents' antagonism against the state. Yet, access to state relief programs still hinged upon the residents' invocation of vulnerabilities and personal connection with rusunawa management. Lastly, I demonstrate the residents' intractable desire for a state that embodies a powerful yet nurturing parent, shaping their assessment of the quality of state care.

Covid-19 and managing urban marginality in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

The paper contends that the covid-19 pandemic has reconfigured how cities manage urban marginality within Zimbabwe. The pandemic enabled cities to push everyday mundane practices away from the centre of the city to the margins of the cities through securitisation and criminalising informal activities within the centre. The paper's methodological underpinnings are hinged on a six month ethnography within Bulawayo (Zimbabwe's second largest city). The paper maintains the view that managing urban marginality in the context of covid-19 must be framed within the binary of two opposing forces – governing institutions (the government and municipality) and the low-income residents. Using covid-19 as a pretext of “curbing the pandemic” governing institutions have pushed informal economic activities from the centre through employing law and force; on the other hand low-income residents have found eclectic means to counteract the measures imposed to constrain their agency. Finally, the paper suggests that covid-19 has reconfigured how cities manage urban marginality through pushing everyday informal practices to the periphery and how the low-income residents deploy their agency to counteract confinement hence managing urban marginality can be understood as a two-way process involving governing institutions and the low-income residents.