In Search of Home explores a new yet less explored space of urban poverty – rehabilitation housing for the displaced poor, which increasingly dots the peripheries of Indian cities. This longitudinal ethnography examines these new liminal zones suspended between a slum and the legal city, producing 'citizenship in-limbo' and relegating the poor to perpetual dependence on the state albeit legal residence. It examines how the flexible governance of such housing produces illegalities, and how state institutions and actors stand to gain through systemic corruption that co-opts urban poor groups, pre-empting radical resistance. This book makes central the gendered nature of such politics, detailing the everyday political work of women, vital to the development of poor neighbourhoods and political struggles for housing. This analysis of rehabilitation housing policies and their implementation, chronicles the myriad strategies employed by the urban poor, from documenting to political performances, in their struggles for a home.
This article examines the women's quota at the local governance level in urban India, using several case studies of women municipal councillors, to question the evidently low numbers of poor and marginalised women amongst them. It examines issues of class, caste, and religion that have a direct impact on the access of poor women to quotas reserved for them at the local government level. The objective of this work is to draw attention to the specific ways in which women are constrained at the pre-election stage, resulting in an elite capture of the women's quota in India, indicating the need for further research and study on this issue.
This paper draws on field research conducted among a group of resettled slum (1) dwellers in the west of Bengaluru, and analyzes women's collective engagement to improve the provision of urban services in low-income neighbourhoods. The paper argues the need to deepen the focus on urban poor mobilizations below the level of the urban poor as a group − to look at the various groups, and the differences, divergences and contradictions within. Using gender as a differential, the paper focuses on women who dominate local neighbourhood level initiatives within low-income settlements, and analyzes their specific opportunities and constraints as actors within the larger domain of urban poor mobilizations. It proposes that these seemingly insignificant dayto-day negotiations diverge from more individual forms of "leadership", creating a political space at the lowest level of the neighbourhood where the projects of material improvement and emancipation take place simultaneously.
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.