Examining land and built forms in informal settlements challenges dominant understandings and imagines more just futures.
Author
Ishita Chatterjee, Associate Professor, Jindal School of Art and Architecture, O.P. Jindal Global University, India
Summary
This chapter aims to start a conversation about the material-performative by focusing on the land-built form relationship. I analyse the different processes that take place on, in, and to land during the growth of informal settlements through a cross-case analysis by comparing two peripheral informal settlements in Delhi and Mumbai that developed on precarious topographic conditions. Often these settlements are characterised by living conditions that are considered unliveable by the rest of the city. Yet these spaces are why the urban poor are able to survive in the highly unequal and unjust city. Theorising informal settlements through their precarities, entanglements, and contestations is a way to engage ethically with them and disrupt the hegemonic understanding of land and housing – a path towards alternative, just futures, and imaginations.
Published in: The Politics of Urban Land in South Asia: Current Challenges and New Directions
To read the full chapter, please click here.
