Losing a Place in the City at the Urban Frontier? Peripheralisation as Disconnection in Indian Low-Income Housing Projects

Abstract

Along with other countries in South Asia, India has responded to a housing crisis with accelerated building of low-income housing, much of which is located at the urban periphery. This housing now makes an important contribution to cities’ physical expansion, lying alongside but often entirely disconnected elements, from IT parks to the informal but high-spec housing of Delhi ‘farmhouses’. This paper argues that unlike other peripheral land uses, which may benefit from the city edge as a space of exception or of opportunity, low-income housing built at the urban frontier represents a form of spatial marginalization and a loss of urban connection for those being relocated to live there. Drawing across two research projects, it illustrates this through the experience of residents of a large housing project at Chennai’s city edge before and during Covid. In doing so, it addresses this panel’s core theme of governance, arguing that governance arrangements at the urban periphery are producing new geographies of disconnection and marginalisation. More generally, it argues that the expansion and normalisation of this housing contributes to a reordering of social norms towards a more exclusive model of city life that amplifies and qualitatively changes existing problems of inequality and distributional injustice within India’s cities.