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Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Kolkata this paper interrogates how poor women's infrastructural labour in struggles over housing creates urban life in the face of state disinvestment and a politics of dispossession.

Paper long abstract:

This paper brings together different aspects of housing as social, economic and infrastructural need with informal struggles over access to shelter, home-making practices and the way they enable care work amongst poor women in Kolkata. Situated at the intersection of state provision, party politics and private provision of services, struggles over the connected home, rights in dwellings, and the making of liveable city lives for families, the paper asks what kinds of infrastructural labour is invested in making homes and how this labour is distributed across time and space in the city.

Following on from feminist critiques of scholarship on infrastructures the paper argues that poor women's labour to create homes is not only made invisible in common discussions about housing, but that their contribution to social and material infrastructures of the city enables urban life and highlights the exclusions implicit in the making and reordering of urban space under current neoliberal planning and economic regimes.

Homemaking is here not understood as a private practice but as the maintenance of social infrastructures that are intimately related to what Berlant has referred to as infrastructure as 'life-making', albeit under conditions of acute scarcity. The paper suggests that rather than bridging the gap between the metropolis in the global South either as model of resilience or dystopian disfunction, a focus on gendered infrastructural labour suggests that whilst everyday survival is based on socialities of resilience, anthropologists are increasingly faced with the need to theorise urban decline.