Property & Citizenship

My ongoing book project Permanent Slums argues that urban governance has reached an impasse, where policy imaginations and governmental practices are framed and limited by the slum despite desires for slum-free cities. I draw on ten years of field and archival research on the exemplary case of Hyderabad (India), an emerging global city, where slum improvement has been a central focus for decades but 30% of the population still lives in slums. The book reveals the contradictory effects of a slum impasse by asking: how did slums shift from being a problem to be eradicated to becoming a technique of governance? What does this slum governance entail for the politics and political economy of the city at large? Finally, from the perspective of slum residents, what are the structural opportunities and obstacles posed by slum governance in pursuing economic mobility and a politics of citizenship? I demonstrate that prevailing modes of governing poverty through slums attempts to permanently inscribe poor groups into racialized regimes of property and caste-stratified markets, thus legally producing second-class citizens. 

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