Semi-formal settlements like Delhi’s unauthorised colonies (UACs), which await regularisation by the state, are characterised by aspirations for housing improvements and enhanced property values. Frustrated by the rigid regulatory frameworks that operate in the binaries of legal/illegal, formal/informal, planned/unplanned and having limited influence over processes of regularisation, UAC residents use ‘transversal logics’ (Caldeira, 2017) to negotiate planning regimes, credit markets and local politics to improve housing, which become their ‘action space’ to meet aspirations for social mobility. This article investigates the role of finance and networks of credit in autoconstruction, with a focus on the work of market actors in navigating market–citizen and market–state boundaries, foregrounded against the relatively well-studied politics of state–citizen relations. It finds that landowners and housing finance institutions, as well as actors within them, navigate regulatory boundaries through innovative partnerships and creative workarounds, and by strategically deploying collective and individual identities. Even as cities like Delhi endeavour to become planned world-class utopias, a multitude of actors continue to reshape the city’s peripheral landscapes through the assertion, dissolution and spanning of multiple boundaries—regulatory, individual–collective, state–citizen, citizen–market and state–market.
Recent scholarship has reflected on these historical concerns by engaging with questions of modernity and change (Parry 2003; De Neve 2003; Strümpell 2008). Parry (2003:247) observes how articulations of the village as "backward," "conservative" and "a waiting room" by Bhojpuri migrants to the steel town of Bhilai feed into the post-independence, Nehruvian vision of industrial modernity. In a similar vein, Strümpell (2008) speaks of a "spatial limitation of caste" (p. 378) among workers of a public-sector power project in Orissa. He argues that while caste takes prominence in relation to workers' rural ties, it is consciously subverted and "negated" on the shop-floor, epitomizing the ideal of
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.