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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork on urban floods in Bengaluru, this paper argues that informality within the municipal government shapes access to relief for slum residents; and that they strategically navigate this informality to claim services, protection, and relocation amid environmental crisis.

Paper long abstract

This paper uses urban floods in the Indian city of Bengaluru as a lens to examine the co-constitutive relations between urban informality, environmental crisis, and claims to urban services for residents of informal settlements. With urban floods becoming more frequent and destructive across Global South cities, they affect the provision and maintenance of multiple urban services including drainage, infrastructure, housing, and welfare. Floods, worsened by climate change, thus reconfigure ‘urban informality’ when poor populations encounter the state for relief; sometimes intensifying its effects of precarity and other times bringing forth its political possibilities.

The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between July - September 2025, including in-depth interviews with ~forty residents across three flood-affected informal settlements in East Bengaluru. It puts forth two arguments. First, it extends Ananya Roy’s (2005) concept to argue that ‘urban informality’ is indeed embedded within Bengaluru’s municipal governance architecture, structuring how slum residents access flood relief. Historically shaped by technocratic restructuring and democratic insulation, this state informality manifests in overlapping jurisdictions over service provision; legalistic evasions; and agency-to-agency blame shifting, with costs most borne by marginalised populations. Secondly, this paper argues that these flood-affected communities are not just victims of state informality but tactically navigate and even exploit such bureaucratic ambiguity, often with the help of civil society networks, to secure relief or relocation.

Thus, this paper ultimately sees urban flooding as an analytic through which informality within the state and grassroots agency intersect, opening constrained but meaningful possibilities for contesting exclusionary urban governance.