Paper short abstract:

An analysis of urban renewal framed subalterns’ political agency, entangled into intersectional power structures; Making the city work via everyday experiences, political mobilisation and networking. A grounded theory method engaging women and children reveals power nuances.

Paper long abstract:

Chennai and Pondicherry in living memory of poorer coastal groups experienced several major climate-induced crises: 2004 Tsunami, recurrent floods and cyclones. Seasonal monsoons and large infrastructure work like the overhead metro rail on Buckingham Canal have added to differential impacts on poor groups. My ethnographic research since 2019 and being a Dalit political activist, reveals that politics of agency and networks operate intersectionally between gendered hierarchies overlaid with those of caste. The politics of land and representation shape power relationships around different constellations of actors and institutions revealed in meetings with officials from the Slum Clearance Board, Community Development, the MLA a regional politician, all armed with a ‘planned outline’ seeking the public’s consent on reconstruction, while poorer groups formed ‘residents welfare committee’ to negotiate these. Such materialities of climate change are further shaped by how some residents mobilized individual political networks, and those instances when various groups found it important to come together to organise collectively. Exploring these power structures, shaped by caste and gender, the question of how subalterns’ agency is created and subverted links to ideas, points to ideas from Bayat’s quiet encroachment of the ordinary, struggles of uncivil society, Cohelo’s Urban Political ecology, Auerbach’s work on local leaders and association, and finally Kothari and Mitchell among other critiquing ‘participation’. My emerging question helps define the contours of ‘subalternity’, by looking at politics of land, and how groups operate as constellations of interests with fractures and coalitions to mobilize and empower themselves through political and bureaucratic networking.