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Paper short abstract

This paper asks how two urban peripheries sustain city life while remaining in a state of ongoing transformation. It argues that the periphery should be understood as an infrastructure: one that sustains the city while remaining shaped by construction and expansion.

Paper long abstract

This paper asks how urban peripheries sustain city life while remaining in a state of ongoing transformation. It brings into juxtaposition two different sites: Sangam Vihar in Delhi, a large unauthorised settlement shaped through incremental and informal urbanisation, and Hulhumalé Phase II in Malé, a planned reclaimed extension built through state-led housing and land reclamation.

Although the two places differ in form and origin, they play a similar role. Both are home to migrant and lower-income populations, both ease housing pressures in the urban core, and both help reproduce the city. The paper argues that the periphery should therefore be understood as an infrastructure in its own right: a spatial and social condition that makes the city function. It makes two central claims. First, peripheries sustain the city by housing the workers whose labour is essential to urban reproduction, even when that labour remains undervalued and invisible. Second, peripheries are defined by continual change: they are always being built, repaired, and expanded. In Delhi, this happens through incremental self-construction and eviction pressure; in Malé, through land reclamation and planned expansion. In both cases, incompletion is a constitutive condition of how these spaces sustain and enable urban growth.

Overall, the paper extends the literature on infrastructure to the spatial category of the periphery, while also showing how peripheries are entangled with broader processes of labour, capital, and governance.