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Paper short abstract

The study examines Delhi's Jamia Nagar, where Muslims transform state-produced informality and ghettoization—both refuge and site of exclusion—into platforms for rights-based claims through legal contestation, grassroots mobilization, and collective action toward alternative urban futures.

Paper long abstract

Jamia Nagar, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in Delhi, exemplifies a paradoxical phenomenon in Indian cities: informally urbanized ghettos that function simultaneously as refuge from communal violence and as sites of enforced spatial segregation and state neglect. This study explores how residents navigate structural constraints through grassroots mobilization and collective agency, while converting spatial confinement into sites of contestation and claims for alternative urban futures. Drawing on Loïc Wacquant’s framework of ghettoization and situating it within the scholarship on state-produced urban informality, I conceptualize Jamia Nagar as a Janus-faced socio-spatial regime that simultaneously enforces subordination and structures grassroots mobilization, solidarities, and political claims from within socio-spatial confinement.

The study combines planned interviews with residents, activists, legal advocates, and civil-society actors with analysis of government and NGO reports, eviction notices, court filings (including 2025 Batla House demolition litigation), and media archives. The study traces how state actors manufacture and sustain urban informality through socio-spatial segregation, inadequate services, demolition notices, and selective enforcement. Residents negotiate with state authorities through legal petitions, political mediation, and strategic non-compliance, transforming confinement into platforms for rights-based claims. Mosque committees, civil-society groups, NGOs, and protest networks that crystallized during and after the CAA/NRC protests (2019-20) transform everyday survival strategies into legal contestation, collective mobilization, mutual aid, and public claim-making. The study shows that marginalized residents of Jamia Nagar not only resist exclusion but also articulate alternative, rights-based visions of urban progress.