Genealogies of Dispossession: Local Histories of India’s World Class City Evictions
Why have informal settlement evictions become more pervasive and destructive across India’s cities and urbanizing regions since the early 2000s? While analyses have identified a range of explanations, including new competitive pressures associated with “world class city”-making and neoliberalization, the routine demolition of low-income neighborhoods and dispossession of precariously housed urbanites have long been core features of planning and politics in Indian cities. Fuller explanations for contemporary housing insecurity require that we look not just at emergent competitive pressures, but also at established patterns, submerged discourses, and longstanding practices of urban governance. Tracing the cumulative and locally specific character of India’s eviction politics across India’s largest cities over more than a century, this talk demonstrates that evictions underway today have been shaped as much by path dependencies and entrenched governing logics as by new and emergent politics. Drawing on the histories and contemporary politics of informal settlement evictions in urban India, the analysis presents a framework for engaging historical explanations more fully in studies of contemporary urban politics.
Speaker:
Liza Weinstein
Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston
Liza Weinstein is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston. Her research focuses on the politics of urban development and contested housing rights in Mumbai, urban India, and in comparative perspective. She is the author of The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), and is currently completing a book on the shifting politics of housing insecurity and anti-eviction activism across urban India. She is also leading a National Science Foundation-funded study on the intersection of legal exclusion, embodiment, and territorial stigma in non-notified communities in Mumbai, and is currently an editor at the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR).
