The Role of Housing Finance Actors in Regenerating Delhi’s Unauthorised Colonies: An Examination of State–Citizen– Market Boundaries

Abstract

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.

Urban studies in India across the millennial turn: Histories and futures

“…Studies of affordable housing – the structure and dynamics of its markets and the role of states – remain a significant domain of urban scholarship in India (Mahadevia et al, 2018; Mukhija, 2004; Naik and Kunduri, 2020). Sengupta and Tipple (2007, this volume) examine the performance of public housing in Kolkata in a context of mass poverty and the liberalisation of economic and financial systems within a socialist political economy.…”

SPOTLIGHTING MIGRANT AGENCY: How Migratory Movements and Temporariness Drive Peripheral Urbanization in Mumbai's Agrarian‐urban Edge

“…These writings, while insightful for our understanding of the issue of land in urbanization and the agrarian‐urban edge as a frontier that reveals how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are secured and how new dispossessions and politics produce new urban subjects (Gururani and Dasgupta, 2018), seem territorially fixed through their focus on regional elites. Writings on the production of space in the peripheries of cities, by contrast, have focused on residents as agents of urbanization (Naik and Kunduri, 2020; van Noorloos et al ., 2020). Such studies usually focus on incrementalism in housing and urban development without sufficiently considering the dynamic nature of neighborhood building whose rhythms alter in accordance with the flows and relations of people, networks, knowledge and materials.…”