Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how “unplanned” urbanism silences marginal voices in Delhi’s JJ Colony Bawana and Kashmir’s informal settlements. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals how planning discourses justify evictions, service cuts, and policing via legality and hazard rhetoric.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how discourses of “unplanned” urbanisation enable the silencing of marginal voices in two ostensibly distinct sites: JJ Colony Bawana on Delhi’s periphery and informal settlements in urban Kashmir. In both cases, large-scale resettlement and redevelopment are framed as necessary correctives to chaos, encroachment, and environmental risk, even as they deepen precarity for already marginalised communities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bawana and Srinagar, interviews, walk along conversations, and visual documentation, combined with analysis of planning documents, court orders, and media narratives, the paper traces how legality, hazard, and beautification are mobilised to justify the withdrawal of services, policing of everyday life, and threats of eviction. It argues that the “unplanned city” is not an analytical description but a governing idiom that disqualifies slum residents, migrant workers, and informal vendors from the category of legitimate urban citizens (Mohan 2025; Saqib 2025). Yet residents of Bawana and Kashmiri informal settlements actively contest this marginalisation through petitions, rights based language, tactical engagements with local politicians, and alliances with civil society groups, crafting fragile but significant spaces of claim making (Mohan 2025; Baviskar 2011). By reading Bawana and Kashmir together, the paper illuminates how displacement, securitisation, and developmentalist rhetoric intersect to produce differentiated regimes of vulnerability and voice in contemporary Indian urbanism, while foregrounding subaltern practices of urban citizenship from the margins.