https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4275-6802
![Sample our Built Environment journals, sign in here to start your access, Latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5926/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Built-Environment.jpg"})
Abstract
The growing emphasis on affordable housing and the sharp increase in its supply in Indian cities over the past two decades is characterised by two features that diminish the inclusive and integrative role of affordable urban housing. The first is the move toward constructing new housing stock rather than upgrading existing stock. Second, most of this new housing, increasingly in the form of multi-storied tenement buildings, is located on urban peripheries in isolated or poorly connected sites. In focusing on the peripheralisation of formal low-income housing, this paper adds a new dimension to studies of peripheral urbanisation in India, which have hitherto focused on high-end speculative developments or informal settlements of the poor. Drawing on mixed-method field studies of four formal low-income settlements in Ahmedabad and Chennai, this paper argues that residents of these settlements experience a multifaceted dynamic of disconnection, not only from the city but also from other peripheral developments, rendering them outsiders in the periphery. Three dynamics of disconnection are studied: first, the allocation of fully built housing units disconnects residents from processes of housing production. Second, spatial dislocation constrains their mobility, both physical and socioeconomic. Third, these two dynamics, combined with substandard infrastructure and housing conditions, alienate residents from the new settlements, and curtail their engagement in processes of place-making or the production of neighbourhoods.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr Paula Meth, a co-investigator on this project, for her support, and Abhilaasha N., Selva Ziona B., Meena Chockalingam and Shaurya Patel for their assistance with the research for this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 JNNURM comprised two initiatives: large-scale infrastructure development, and low-income housing through its Basic Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP) component (2005–11). The BSUP covered 65 mission cities while the Integrated Housing and Slum Development Programme (IHSDP) covered the rest. RAY (2011–15) aimed to scale up BSUP’s reach, and was in turn replaced by PMAY when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. ‘Awas Yojana’ translates as housing programme.
2 This trend is not unique to India. Numerous studies over the past decade across Asia, Latin America and South Africa have noted that social housing is increasingly being pushed to urban peripheries, into single-class settlements that are poorly connected and serviced, producing ‘islands of poverty’ (Borsdorf et al., Citation2016; see also King et al., Citation2017; Libertun de Duren, Citation2018; UN-HABITAT, Citation2011; Venter et al., Citation2007).
3 The usage here differs somewhat from Wacqant’s ‘urban outcasts’ (2008), which signifies residents of ‘stigmatised neighbourhoods at the bottom of the hierarchical system of places that compose the metropolis’. The formal housing projects we describe here share some features of his ‘zones of relegation’, including their spatial marginalisation, the concatenation of discriminatory systems such as caste, ethnicity, and class to create social marginalisation and stigma, and different degrees of institutional neglect. However, these settlements, precisely owing to their formality, represent for their residents, an advance over the tenurial or ecological precarity of the slums that most had moved from.
4 Evidence suggests that dispossessed small-scale farmers and agricultural laborers in city-edge villages either migrate out or take up work, e.g. in security, maintenance or housekeeping, in industrial parks or housing developments nearby (Gupta, Citation2015; Raman, Citation2016; Vijayabaskar & Varadarajan, Citation2018).
5 Our study included a third city, Johannesburg. We report on South Africa-India comparisons elsewhere (Williams et al., Citation2018).
6 In a comparative study of eight slum clearance initiatives in Chennai 20–30 years after their implementation, Coelho (Citation2016) also found a sites and services scheme displaying the most successful outcomes.
7 Prices started at INR 700,000 (a little over US$10,000).
8 Street and compound lighting was installed in these sites in the months following our interviews.
9 Respondents’ accounts of the high incidence of alcoholism, drug abuse, child molestation, violent fights, and even murder are corroborated by press reports, see Aditi (Citation2019) and Narayanan (Citation2019).
10 Although the ghetto is defined in western contexts as constituted by race, ethnic or religious categories, we argue that it is produced here by a class-defined housing category.