Rent gap, fluid infrastructure and population excess in a gentrifying neighbourhood

Abstract

Through a careful documentation of an ongoing struggle for sanitation infrastructure in a neighbourhood facing intense gentrifying pressure—namely, Mohammed Nagar slum in Hyderabad—this paper shows how incomplete and fluid infrastructures can become sites through which an excess population can be purged outright in order to rebuild neighbourhood character. Mohammed Nagar slum is located in the Bholakpur ward of Hyderabad. Bholakpur has been a major site for informal waste segregation, recycling and processing in the city and region for the past three decades at least. As different constituents of the fragmented community consolidate their claims through opportunities thrown up by crumbling infrastructures, some resist metabolic processes that attempt to reproduce direly needed infrastructures. Others, facing acute deprivation, have to choose between staying put and moving out. Gentrification processes arising from new rent gaps emerging in cities due to high-end infrastructures, such as metro rail and shopping complexes, can be brutal and can trigger mechanisms by which bodies are revalued as legitimate claimants or otherwise. Populations that were once all associated with waste reinvent themselves, including some who can make it, and purging others who decidedly cannot make it into the new neighbourhood.

Key words:

• metabolism
• infrastructures
• sanitation
• civil society
• gentrification

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Munawar Chand and Asif ud Din of Basthi Vikas Manch in sharing the documents related to this case.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

The research for this article was partially supported by a Ford Foundation Housing Rights research grant managed by the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad.

Additional information

Anant Maringanti is director of Hyderabad Urban Lab.

Indivar Jonnalagadda is a researcher at Hyderabad Urban Lab. Email: [email protected]