Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper shows how urban land informality, once negotiated through mobilisation and patronage, now generates heightened insecurity. It argues that structural and institutional changes have reconfigured how informality is tolerated, reproduced, and governed.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how changing configurations of urban informality reshape the possibilities for grassroots agency through a comparative study of informal settlements in Lucknow, India. It analyses two moments: a successful land-rights mobilisation in the Haider canal settlement in the late 2000s, and the recent demolition of Akbar Nagar. Informal settlements in Lucknow survived through a combination of grassroots mobilisation, civil society support, and political patronage, which together rendered informality and ‘illegality’ negotiable and eviction politically costly. In the Haider Canal case, a land-rights movement supported by a local grassroots organisation generated collective solidarity (ekta), enabling residents to negotiate access to land and sustain a degree of political protection.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper argues that while political brokerage persists, the structural conditions that once allowed them to translate into security have eroded. The demolition of Akbar Nagar marks a critical shift in the governance of informality: patronage no longer reliably offers protection, civil society interventions have become fragmented and increasingly legalistic, and avenues for collective mobilisation have narrowed. As a result, political visibility seems to no longer guarantee security from eviction.

Focusing on Haider Canal in the present, the paper shows how fear and uncertainty now permeate everyday life even in settlements that have not been demolished. New actors claim to defend it, yet such claims are experienced as fragile and contingent. The paper shows how contemporary urban inequality is produced through unstable forms of political mediation, in which protection becomes contingent, uneven, and increasingly unreliable.