Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates women's homing work in the course of struggles over housing based on research in Kolkata, India and argues that poor women’s homemaking constitutes infrastructural labour, which we may read not as acts of resilience, but practices of managing decline.

Paper long abstract:

Infrastructures have gained prominence in critical urban theory and often draw on the experiences of cities and citizens in the Global South. This paper interrogates how poor women's homing work presents infrastructural labour in the course of struggles over housing. Based on research in Kolkata, India it argues that poor women’s homemaking creates urban life in the face of state disinvestment and a politics of dispossession and suggests that in order to address the current crisis of care we need to pay attention to the way such labour is distributed across time and space in the making of the city. The article looks at what makes the conditions of dwelling in places possible and highlights in particular the gendered (and caste/religion/ethnicity-) based regimes of labour that create homes under processes of neoliberal governance which are built on colonial histories and capitalist presents.  Finally, it argues for a reading of such homemaking practices not simply as acts of resilience and survival, but as practices of managing decline and permanent crisis.