Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability

9. Resettlement Ecologies: Environmental Subjectivity and Graduated Citizenship in Mumbai

Introduction Mumbai’s overcrowded trains, traffic-jammed roads, and sprawling underserviced slums undergird the paradigmatic Malthusian imaginary of the Indian city living beyond its means. Efforts to redevelop the city’s informal ‘slum’ settlements into world-class infrastructure and residential and commercial real estate promise a remedy for these urban ills. Such slum redevelopment projects have unfolded through social and material processes in which the ‘environment’—as spatial experience, discourse, and geographical imaginary—has figured centrally. Most notably, redevelopment has entailed what Amita Baviskar (2003) calls “bourgeois environmentalism,” a set of discourses and interventions aimed at remaking and ostensibly cleaning the city through the removal of the poor. This is an environmental politics in which the subjective desires and material interests of the upper and middle classes, business owners, and financiers are secured through state-facilitated slum demolitions, an instantiation of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003). Yet, as this chapter argues, redevelopment in Mumbai has not unfolded in a simple top-down fashion where elites and a bulldozing state serve as the only agents of spatial transformation. Rather in a city with a strong history of social mobilization, slum-residents and their representatives also play a critical role in facilitating, negotiating, and thwarting projects of urban environmental transformation in the service of capital accumulation. Slum clearance in Mumbai entails a complex ecology of state force, accommodation, and negotiation, as well as diverse and changing understandings of space and belonging. Slum-residents are making claims to 9 Resettlement Ecologies: Environmental Subjectivity and Graduated Citizenship in Mumbai Sapana Doshi 226 Sapana Doshi space as citizens and environmental subjects in highly differentiated ways with significant implications for whether and how the city is remade. Focusing on collective actions of slum-residents, this chapter examines how urban subjectivity is produced through the intersecting experiences and politics of redevelopment, displacement, and ecology. I take as a point of departure the works of Amita Baviskar (2003) and Colin McFarlane (2008), who argue that urban environmental citizenship is often rife with hierarchy: it either seeks to erase the ‘polluting’ poor from the space of the city or relegates them to sub-standard environmental conditions. My project develops this line of reasoning by investigating how evicted slumdwellers and their representative organizations have advanced new forms of environmental politics that negotiate or challenge displacements that occur as a result of redevelopment. This work takes seriously the call made by a number of political ecologists to engage more deeply with questions of subject formation and cultural politics, in addition to questions of urban political economy, infrastructure, and urban nature (Agrawal 2005; Braun 2002; Grove 2009; Peet and Watts 2004). In Mumbai, slum-dwellers emerge as environmental subjects through complex spatial processes in which relations of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender are articulated in diverse and politically salient ways. Highlighting the environmental subjectivities of the urban poor, this chapter also engages recent scholarship on new citizenship formations in Third World cities that has sought to challenge commonly held notions of modern democratic political participation (Appadurai 2002; Chatterjee 2004; Holston 2008). The chapter departs from these works, however, by emphasizing the relational and differentiated nature of subject formation— in the space of a single city—and the political implications of such processes for urban environmental change. The Mumbai case demonstrates that environmental subjectivity operates through the terrain of what Ong (2007) has called “graduated citizenship,” where class-based, gendered, and ethnoreligious identities fracture and remake experiences of citizenship and claims to legitimacy. Here environmental politics is shaped by a political ecology of redevelopment that privileges capital accumulation through slum clearance. Differentiated environmental subjectivities emerge through the uneven distribution of resettlement compensation as well as a contentious cultural politics of urban belonging. Resettlement compensation is thus a central arena for the formation and recalibration of urban environmental citizenship. Resettlement Ecologies 227 This analysis of differentiated slum citizenship is not merely an effort to expose the complexity of neoliberal politics in ‘actually existing’ cities like Mumbai. Rather, I argue, it is precisely the production of difference, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore, following Stuart Hall, has called the “fatal couplings of power and difference” (2002, 16), that provides the contradictory spatial experiences that incite displaced slum-inhabitants to engage in global city projects. Drawing on environmental discourses and situated experiences of unequal access to resources, slum-residents have made new claims to legitimacy and belonging. Paying attention to these multiple, relational subjectivities shows...