Unsettled City: Neoliberal redevelopment, state crisis, slum resettlement & biopolitical struggle in Mumbai

Abstract: This dissertation concerns capitalist urban redevelopment and the government of urban housing poverty. It examines the ways urban redevelopment regimes shape resettlements and governance of urban populations in Mumbai. The specific enquiries focus on salient accumulative and dispossessive dimensions of urban redevelopment and linked resettlement construction, the reformation of informal politics of the poor, and possibilities of reordering renewal and resettlement governance processes. These enquiries are addressed through an ethnographic exploration of two mega-projects: transport expansion and pipeline securitization, two resettlement townships, and their multi-scalar and multi-site sociopolitical dynamisms. The theoretical framework of “redevelopment as governmentality” guides analysis connecting macro-institutional practices and their human consequences.This is a compilation dissertation with a Kappa (comprehensive discussion) and four sole-authored journal articles. The dissertation makes four major contributions: First, urban redevelopment regimes employ an extractive-inclusive political economy in resettlement housing developments, which promotes urban growth. This is beyond facilitative or welfarist rehousing linked with displacement-based dispossession. The underlying political-economic logics, and institutional and policy frameworks also shape the life-allowing and limiting materiality of resettlement. Second, state and NGO-mediated resettlements employ unconditional urban displacements through strategies that speak of institutional violence, coercion, and abandonment, but are coated with the hope of inclusion and aspirational formal urban living. Uneven sociopolitical outcomes include contested formalization, widespread institutional vulnerabilities, and arbitrary post-dispossession rule. Third, state powers in redevelopment are complicit in creating death-allowing settlement forms and environmental concerns, and subjecting populations to them. Inhabiting such violent materialities exposes the embedded deadly powers, through life-compromising living. Inhabitation also leads to a new outlook of resistance and negotiation that redefines the politics of human lives at the urban margins. Fourth, the state bureaucracy maintains life-constraining post-resettlement scenarios and biopolitical struggles through arbitrary, informalized, humanistic interventions, and using a new vocabulary of urban habitability. This life-compromising subjection, however, also impacts urban renewal and allows some alternative rehousing. Overall, the dissertation shows certain contradictory outcomes of urban renewal and population governance in the making of the urban imaginary and modernity.