Becoming a Slum: From Municipal Colony to Illegal Settlement in Liberalization‐Era Mumbai

Abstract

This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipal housing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context of liberalization‐era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary that posits the unplanned, illegal and informal ‘slum’ as the self‐evident conceptual counterpoint to a planned, formal, ‘world‐class’ city. The story of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political and highly unstable nature of this binary — and thus insists upon an account of the shifting political and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood's emergence as an illegal slum has been mediated by the liberalization‐era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood's water pipes — dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of the neighborhood as a discursive effect.

Contesting theIndian City: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local

“…Björkman (, this issue) focuses on the relationship between economic and political change, state discourses and the politics of poverty in Indian cities. Focusing on the area of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi in Mumbai, she examines the reassertion of tropes of the legal/illegal and formal/informal in the politics surrounding aspirations for the globalization of Mumbai.…”

Waterscape: a perspective for understanding the contested geography of water

“…31 The prominence of middleclass esthetics and values, as well as planning logics connected to reimagining cities as 'world class,' are intertwined with new understandings of the waterscape. [32][33][34] …”

The Quest for Water, Rights and Freedoms: Informal Urban Settlements in India

“…Viewing water services through the lens of the waterscape ‘helps take the hatchet to apolitical narratives’ (Acharya, : 374) on water such as the ones often guiding development efforts at the moment. Unless this shift takes place, hard‐won infrastructural improvements will continue to be removed as quickly as they are built (see Bapat and Agarwal, ; Anand, ; Björkman, ).…”