Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Care infrastructures like the recovery shelters for homeless people in Delhi are characterized by a temporariness in the state's modernist vision. The temporariness represents the state’s governance of a ‘permanent’ spatial-temporal problem of homelessness reinforcing their invisibility.

Paper long abstract

Although care infrastructures such as the recovery shelters of the Delhi Municipal Board were instituted to provide rehabilitative support to ailing homeless people, historically shelters have occupied a contested space in the Indian state’s modernist vision of Delhi.

Preliminary findings show that this shelter has been left unrepaired for multiple months owing to an impending demolition at a geographic site associated historically with displacement and urban capitalist accumulation. I suggest that a temporariness has become permanently assigned to this shelter. Its temporariness comes from the temporary status that was assigned to the shelter structure by virtue of its physical built form of a portable cabin that was not designed to be a permanent form of occupancy. In the continuum of care, the public health system itself is fragmented and typified by infrastructural shortages. Bureaucratic violence further assigns a temporary status to the citizenship status of homeless population, impairing access to spatial and health infrastructures in the city. Moreover, the homeless population continues to be implicitly conceptualised as an ephemeral population in recent policies and is thus excluded from the modernist ‘productive’ vision of the city. I argue that this instantiates the temporariness that characterizes the state’s biopolitical vision of the homeless people in its decades-long post-colonial management of spaces occupied by the urban poor.

The temporariness represents a divestment of the homeless population’s substantive citizenship of the right to the city and healthcare, reinforcing the state’s mode of governing what has become a ‘permanent’ spatial-temporal problem of homelessness.