Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how the slum dwellers in Delhi experience inequality in relationship to the changes the city has undergone in the recent past.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at how slum dwellers in Delhi experience inequality in relationship to the changes the city has undergone in the recent past. The city of Delhi has transformed during the post-reform period in India, and is becoming increasingly segregated along the class lines. While convivial areas for middle and high class are expanding, many slums and urban poor areas are being pushed out to the outskirts of Delhi. These changes generate new notions of inequality and the ways it is experienced by the poor. Most of the literature discusses the segregation and the 'gating' of communities and convivial city areas. In this paper, a shopping mall emerges as a signifier of class and is constantly juxtaposed to the lived environment of the poor - a slum. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a slum in Delhi, the paper analyses the accounts of a young males who transgress the boundaries of the 'classed' territories. Rather than experiencing segregation and exclusion, some find the mall as a place that enables to be part of the 'world class' city.