In recent years cities around the world have undergone mass slum clearances for redevelopment. This study of Mumbai offers an alternative interpretation of urban capital accumulation by investigating the differentiated political subjectivities of displaced slum residents. I argue that Mumbai's redevelopment entails not uniform class-based dispossessions but a process of accumulation by differentiated displacement whereby uneven displacement politics are central to the social production of land markets. Two ethnographic cases reveal that groups negotiate redevelopment in contradictory ways, supporting or contesting projects in varying moments. Redevelopmental subjectivities are influenced at key conjunctures by market-oriented resettlement, ideologies of belonging, desires for improved housing, and participation in non-governmental groups. This articulated assemblage of power-laden practices reflects and reworks class, gender, and ethno-religious relations, profoundly shaping evictees' experience and political engagement. The paper concludes that focusing on differentiated subjectivities may usefully guide both analysis and social justice practice aimed at countering dispossession.

This commentary makes a case for a more rigorous treatment of the body as a material and political site within the sub‐field of urban political ecology. I propose an embodied urban political ecology grounded in a feminist, anti‐racist and postcolonial approach consisting of five orienting propositions. They include attention to metabolism, social reproduction, intersectionality and articulation, emotion and affect, and political subjectivity. Although applicable to political ecology broadly, I focus on the urban because of how often the body is mobilised in conceptualisations of cities and infrastructure despite the fact that material embodiment remains under‐studied and disparately theorised in the subfield. I suggest that theoretical and empirical attention to embodiment in these five key arenas can deepen understandings of the terrain of environmental politics and potential transformation within the subfield of urban political ecology.

In Indian cities, informal ‘slum’ settlements have long been targeted for removal as an environmental improvement strategy, despite their relatively low impact. Slum clearance has escalated with the combination of speculative development and environmental change, creating uneven precarity throughout Mumbai's neighborhoods. State agents play a direct role in slum evictions, but they do not act unilaterally. Diverse lower‐income and middle‐class residents seeking better living conditions have sometimes converged in their embrace of slum clearances and resettlements that advance elite development interests. In other moments, the dispossessing effects of market‐based and elite‐biased slum rehabilitation have fomented contestation. This article analyzes how differently situated groups emerge as ‘environmental subjects’ that embrace or contest improvement projects. It suggests three dimensions of subject formation: governing logics and discourses of urban environmental improvement, the territorial politics of informality, and differentiated embodied experiences of precarity and dispossession. Environmental subject formation is explored through two interventions that entail slum clearance—mangrove and green space conservation and an urban transport infrastructure project. Findings suggest that the connection between displacement and improvement cannot be explained through theories of environmental gentrification but require attention to the simultaneously inclusive and dispossessing regimes of postcolonial development.

Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption narratives become politicized and yoked to symbolic, material, and territorial regimes of power. We suggest that recent theories of urban informality provide a revealing lens into the ethico-politics and territorial struggles of contemporary capitalism across the North and South.

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