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Paper short abstract

This paper compares a state-led housing project in Maldives and an informal settlement in Delhi to examine how land scarcity is differently managed and experienced. How is infrastructure lived through bodies? How is housing security sustained? How is development materialised (or not) in housing?

Paper long abstract

Drawing on simultaneous ethnographic fieldwork in Hulhumalé Phase II, an artificial island and state-led social housing project in the Maldives, and Sangam Vihar, Delhi’s largest informal settlement, this paper compares two infrastructural formations shaped by migration and uneven urban governance to examine how housing and settlement infrastructures articulate land scarcity.

The paper advances three interrelated arguments. First, it shows how infrastructural materiality becomes embodied through illness, bodily strain, and both lived and perceived forms of contagion. Across both sites, poor-quality construction, overcrowding, and environmental exposure generate stigmatising and patterned forms of disease, revealing how housing and settlement infrastructures generate health risks and their social inscriptions as part of everyday life. Second, material provision fails to compensate for the erosion or absence of immaterial infrastructural dimensions, including sociality, community, status, and safety, revealing the limits of development paradigms that privilege physical form over social life. Third, the paper shows that housing security is not determined by formal status alone. In Hulhumalé, state-led housing provision produces regulated but unstable forms of residence, while in Sangam Vihar, contractor intermediation, payments, and everyday negotiations with authorities sustain relatively stable yet politically vulnerable living arrangements.

Across both sites, residents organise everyday life around imaginaries of movement, returning to villages and local islands, or relocating elsewhere, even as the material endurance of these infrastructures sustains insecurity over time. Overall, this paper positions housing infrastructure as a technology of governance rather than engine of development: it stabilises populations in space while reproducing economic vulnerability and socio-political marginality.