Social Science Research Council

"Redeveloping Urban Governance?: Political Geographies of Eviction, Gender and Citizenship in Mumbai"

The city of Mumbai is witnessing radical changes in its social and political geography through state-led restructuring and redevelopment initiatives aimed at achieving world-class city status. In the process, millions of residents of informal housing or “slums” are facing displacement on an unprecedented scale. Under these adverse conditions, my research addresses one key question: How is urban redevelopment politically managed? I argue that redevelopmental state interventions find expression in highly uneven “governable spaces” of both conflict and cooperation. On the one hand, market-based, neoliberal development schemes have incorporated new techniques of cooperative governance through partnerships between local state agencies and private developers, communities, the World Bank and non-governmental organizations. On the other, state-led redevelopment has also entailed forced evictions, social protest and violent clashes in disputed neighborhoods.

Through a comparative ethnographic analysis of two cases of slum evictions in Mumbai, I will investigate how different spaces of redevelopment governance (conflict vs. cooperation) are shaped by 1) the social forces constituting redevelopmental state interventions; 2) differentiated discursive compensation and displacement practices; and 3) gendered and identity-based engagement in eviction politics among the displaced.

If recent scholarship has focused on how grassroots political participation in informal settlements is changing conventional understandings of democracy and producing a shift in power relations in cities, I would argue that such political engagement is simultaneously shaped by the differentiated positioning of slum dwellers in relation to each other and to powerful state and non-state institutions. My preliminary research shows that gender, identity and other differences among the poor significantly influence forms of political engagement and outcomes, yet this issue remains to be studied in the case of Mumbai’s politics of redevelopment. Through an in-depth ethnography of redevelopment-induced eviction politics, I will offer a useful new angle on the literature concerning the popular mobilization in the cities of developing countries by exploring the nexus between the political economy and cultural politics of urban development.