Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how communities negotiate day-to-day socio-spatial exclusion, relegation and differential access to urban infrastructure. It discusses the wider implications of these processes and the ongoing quest for safe civic spaces in the contemporary urban.

Paper long abstract

Amidst precipitating socio-political contestation, acute inequalities, glaring gaps in availability of key civic services, rising intolerance, volatility and violence, it becomes critical to pay heed to the myriad negotiations that shape everyday modes of inhabitation and existence for different classes and communities within expanding urbanscapes. Rooted in contemporary urban India, this paper addresses how socio-spatial exclusion of Muslim residents is constructed and sedimented, confining them usually to poorly serviced city spaces with inadequate infrastructure.

Through sustained fieldwork, the paper rests the spotlight on Bhopal, a burgeoning city in central India with a sizeable Muslim concentration. It discusses how they navigate everyday exclusion in a spatially fragmented and religiously divided urbanscape. It looks at the gradual and intentional production of the northern part of the city as a crammed and decaying zone, bogged down by a desperate lack of infrastructural facilities, and of its southern part as a better-planned zone, supposedly more amenable to ‘modern’ urban development. These contrastive spatial characterisations are further reinforced by an underlying, sinister layer of differing community affiliations, with north Bhopal identified as a Muslim block and south Bhopal as a Hindu area. Muslim residents of north Bhopal find it exceedingly hard to relocate to other, better-serviced, parts of the city and their narratives voice the biases involved in house-hunting.

This paper examines how communities negotiate day-to-day socio-spatial exclusion, relegation and differential access to urban infrastructure. It discusses the wider implications of these processes and the ongoing quest for safe civic spaces in the contemporary urban.