Paper short abstract:

Excluded from Calcutta city planners’ spatial matrix and consigned to invisibility, waste pickers of the city reclaimed for themselves ‘the utopian space’ at a considerable distance from mainstream socio-spatial relations and state presence.

Paper long abstract:

Excluded from Calcutta city planners' spatial matrix and consigned to invisibility, waste pickers of the city reclaimed for themselves 'the utopian space' at a considerable distance from mainstream socio-spatial relations and state presence. The emphasis in this paper is to study how marginal community appropriated abandoned land in ways that proved productive of group cohesion by nurturing collective memories, cultivating the idea of a new life (formed by magical invention, effective negotiation, cynicism and illusion), fostered a desire for escape. I refer to this magical space of the marginal community as 'utopian space'.

Urban spaces are in strategic control of the powerful (state, mainstream). Strategies of powerful regulate geometric shapes of space through concrete fire proofing, fencing, lines of demarcation, legal boundaries in order to reduce unplanned contingencies. Marginalised community form utopian space on different principles since they cannot apply the Euclidian theories on stolen-illegal and grabbed derelict land. Short-term tactics are developed to protect the integrity of the magical space by continuously working in concrete, embedded, day-to-day ways to repair and maintain the bonds and boundaries. Marginals know they run the constant risk of being dispossessed of their magical space at any point of time. Spaces of their shelter, leisure, markets and transport pathways are defended by tactics, ruses, humour, governed by a constant sense of situational immediacy. Regardless of clever such subterranean tactics are they count for nought if overwhelmed by vulnerability of utopian space.