Whose City?

Abstract

Displacement and forced evictions of the urban poor have been used in cities of the global south as a mechanism to attract investments and build ‘world-class’ cities. Favoring international and domestic capital and wealthier groups, these mechanisms not only leave people behind but also lead to increased environmental degradation, creating unjust urban environments from both human and environmental perspectives. Poor communities are often uprooted from places they have lived in for generations, disrupting livelihoods and erasing local and traditional ways of living. At the same time, ecosystems and natural areas are being encroached upon for “development”. Together, this leads to a crisis of social reproduction: a disruption in the essential conditions that enable dignified human existence and socio-ecological relations.

This thesis examines housing as a site of social reproduction in environmental justice struggles in the city of Mumbai, India. It specifically focuses on the forest region designated as the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) and its surroundings. The Adivasi community residing inside the forest and the slums settlements on its periphery have been facing eviction threats for the past thirty years for reasons of environmental protection. The SGNP forest thus remains a contested terrain as a new eviction drive has resurfaced, and the politics of environmentalism has again compromised housing for the urban poor. While housing and environmental planning are treated as separate issues in planning and governance, using a feminist social reproduction lens, this thesis argues that they are deeply intertwined in everyday lives of residents.

Through a governance analysis, the research first decodes the intersection of housing and environmental planning with the eviction regimes. Using interviews and counter mapping and drawing on the theories of social reproduction, it then defines a network of occupations, struggles and practices of social reproduction in the SGNP forest. The last part of the research focuses on a manifesto “what is the illegal was legal” as a proposal, which emphasizes the need for radical hacks and the need for rethinking the role of urbanists. By centering social reproduction, this thesis argues that the constructs of “legality” and “park boundaries” needs to be disrupted and housing needs to be viewed as an infrastructure that makes life possible.

Keywords: Housing, Justice, Forced Evictions, Environmental burgeoning, Social Reproduction, Feminism