Naomi Prachi Hazarika

What happens if houses built by private capital as part of ‘slum redevelopment’ exacerbate urban inequality based on caste, gender and class built into the rapid urbanization process of the Global South? This doctoral project examines a policy of slum redevelopment called ‘In-Situ Slum Redevelopment and Rehabilitation on Public-Private Partnership model 2019’ implemented by Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in Delhi to study the historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible for private capital and the postcolonial state to push for projects that translate into the dispossession of historically marginalized communities in Indian cities. By looking at an urban infrastructural project as an ethnographic site, this study uses an embodied approach to argue how dispossessions around urban redevelopment and housing remain firmly rooted in everyday, lived and bodily dimensions even though processes of capital and finance are often characterized as structural in nature. Bringing together feminist scholarship and anti-caste scholarship that center the scale of the body, this study pushes the concept of urban ‘re’-development further into the sphere and scale of the body, desires and aspirations thereby grounding the flows of global capitalism in the everyday.