Gautam Bhan

“This is no longer the city I once knew”. Evictions, the urban poor and the right to the city in millennial Delhi

Millennial Delhi is changing rapidly. Between 1990 and 2003, 51,461 houses were demolished in Delhi under “slum clearance” schemes. Between 2004 and 2007 alone, however, at least 45,000 homes were demolished, and since the beginning of 2007, eviction notices have been served on at least three other large settlements. Fewer than 25 per cent of the households evicted in this latter time period have received any alternative resettlement sites. These evictions represent a shift not just in degree but also in kind. They were not ordered by the citys planning agency, its municipal bodies or by the city government. Instead, each was the result of a judicial ruling. What has this emergence of the judiciary into urban planning and government meant for the urban poor? This paper analyzes the dictums of verdicts on evictions in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India from 1985 to 2006. Using these judgments, it explores the “misrecognition” of the poor that became dramatically apparent in the early 1990s and that underlies and justifies evictions. This shift is then located in the larger political, economic and aesthetic transformations that are re-configuring the politics of public interest in Indian cities.

The real lives of urban fantasies

This paper is a response to and a commentary on Vanessa Watson’s paper on “African urban fantasies” in this issue of the Journal, which analyzes new urban master plans developed by international architectural firms and property development companies for many cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Taking Watson’s argument as an opportunity to think about current urban fantasies in Indian cities, this response offers three reflections. The first looks at the scale of renewal in the plans for African cities and argues that they represent a different order to similar imaginations of special enclaves, zones or gated communities that have become common in cities in the global South. The second reads these plans as a yearning not just for particular built environments and the economic lives they represent but also for a controlled and orderly city free of the messiness of democratic politics, guided by the visions of authoritarian city states such as Dubai and Shanghai. The third theme discusses the critical and exclusionary consequences of these plans in cities across the global South, whether or not they are implemented. Implementing them would realize the disconnect between these plans and the actual citizens of the cities they seek to reshape. Yet even if they just remain on paper, these plans play an important political role in shaping aspirations and urban futures, as well as the possibilities of a more inclusive urban citizenship in the present.

The impoverishment of poverty: reflections on urban citizenship and inequality in contemporary Delhi:

This paper explores the mechanisms through which democratic urban polities produce, maintain and reproduce inequality. It does so by looking at case law from 1990–2007 in New Delhi, where a seemingly relentless series of evictions of poor illegal settlements (colloquially known as bastis) were ordered by the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India in Public Interest Litigations (PILs). While the power of the claims of the “middle class” and the emergence of a new urban political economy are well documented in the analysis of evictions, the specificity of how subaltern urban residents have been displaced from a development imagination remains relatively understudied. Put simply: how have the claims, presence and resistance of a significant proportion of urban residents been managed and even evaded within urban politics? This paper argues that case law on evictions makes visible not only the claims to the city of an insurgent urban elite but also the simultaneous “impoverishment of poverty”, which together create a new calculus for the contestations of urban citizenship in contemporary Delhi. This impoverishment is marked by a reduction in the efficacy of poverty and vulnerability as the basis of claims made by subaltern citizens to the elements of citizenship, i.e. the determination and distribution of rights and needs, access to resources and entitlements as well as a place within narratives of belonging and personhood. Making visible the multiple and particular processes of impoverishment is a critical part of a praxis that seeks to formulate effective resistance and imagine different urban futures.

From the basti to the ‘house’: Socio-spatial readings of housing policy in India:

In June 2015, the Government of India approved a national housing program called the Prime Minster’s Awas Yojana (PMAY; Prime Minister’s Housing Plan), the latest in a series of ‘urban missions’ that have seen the urban emerge as an object for policy intervention in a country long rurally imagined. The emergence of these missions has necessitated the construction of a new urban grammar. Concepts, categories and classifications have sought to define, delineate and measure different aspects of the urban landscape so that different modes of practice and intervention may emerge. This article reads this grammar. It does so not to assess policy through its design, efficacy or feasibility, but to argue that policies, at least in part, attempt to create their own objects. A policy is thus both a product and an agent of contemporary politics, simultaneously instrumental and generative, acting as a means to an end but also an end unto itself. It is, in many ways, as much a site of the construction of meaning as it is the allocation of resources. This article looks at housing policy in the Indian city from a particular site: auto-constructed neighborhoods in the Indian city – referred to here as the basti in contra-distinction to the ‘slum’. In doing so, it offers a socio-spatial reading of these settlements along three lines: transversality, transparency and opacity. It then reads the proposed new national housing policy against these spatialities and argues that the policy fundamentally misrecognizes ‘housing’ in the Indian city.

Tackling Urban Poverty

The biggest cities are growing faster than smaller towns. India’s mega-cities have the highest percentage of slum-dwellers in the country. This indicates that as big cities grow even larger, their slums will swell. While slums have become an important place to reach the urban poor, even though the urban poor do not all live in slums. The urban poor population in India is estimated to be nearly 8 crores currently, while the slum population is only 4 crores. Our knowledge about the urban poor outside of slums is superficial. If there are as many urban poor living outside of slums as there are living in slums, the focus of poverty alleviation should differ considerably from those aiming mainly to upgrade slums and provide job training.