Where Is Citizenship? : Thoughts from the Basti

For nearly three decades, on the banks of the river Yamuna in New Delhi lay one of its origins: a string of settlements by the riverbank, stretching at their height to nearly 30,000 households, that were colloquially called “Pushta” (riverbank). The first settlers came in the late 1970s, but the settlement grew exponentially when workers were brought into Delhi by contractors in droves to build stadia for the Asian Games in 1984. Marshy riverbank land was filled in, brick by brick. Homes were built, land marked and “sold,” communities organized, children born, lives begun. Over time, incrementally, slowly, services came: first electricity, then water, schools, and drainage. Residents negotiated the paper trail of lives in the city, obtaining identity cards and address documents, stored safely in the one metal container in the house as the most precious of assets. Houses solidified, one wall at a time, from tarpaulin and bamboo to brick, from kuccha to pucca, literally “raw” to “complete.” The built environment transformed, and a generation grew knowing no village or native place but the city.

By law and by the master plan, Pushta should not have existed at all. Different legal codes variously considered the settlement “informal” or “illegal” because it was built in violation of planning norms and through the occupation of public land that residents did not own in title.¹ Yet for three decades, the settlement grew. It became a basti, a Hindi/Urdu word that dervies from basna (to settle), which is the term used by residents most often to refer to their home, unlike the common English and legal translation to “slum.” Delhi is a city built in large part through its bastis. In the year 2000, when Pushta was at its highest occupation, no less than 27 percent of the city’s population lived in bastis or in settlements created from their eviction.² In this, the city is not alone. From the favelas in Rio to the colonias populares in Mexico City, from the musseques in Luanda to the ashwa’iyyat in Cairo, the shacks or ‘mjondolos in Durban to the sahakhums in Phnom Penh, cities of the global south have been built, in significant part, by their residents rather than planners, developers, or architects.

Teresa Caldeira writes of this process as a shared history of what she calls “auto-construction”: the production of the city by residents and communities building and constructing their own homes and neighborhoods. Auto-construction, she argues, is marked by “transversal engagements with official logics of legal property, formal labor, colonial dominance, state regulation, and market capitalism.”³ This does not mean, she reminds us, that it is a spatial or temporal “exception” to a city that is otherwise legible within the orders of land markets, master plans, governance codes, norms, and laws. In fact, it is auto-construction rather than planning that is the dominant mode of the production of urban space.

Seeing the basti as part of a mode of urbanization changes its signification. It no longer refers to just the materiality of its housing, a spatial form, or a planning category. It must be read instead as the territorialization of a set of political engagements within which urban residents negotiate—incrementally, over time, and continuously—their presence in as well as their right to the city. The basti is a particular form of auto-construction. It combines transversality with economic and social vulnerability, thereby implicating the other attendant promise of the developmental state: welfare.

The engagements that are embedded in auto-construction are complex. They work through the ballot box but also through resistance and protest. They call upon the law and planning but also seek to evade it. They work with the different institutions of government, often playing one against the other or leveraging one with the other. They reflect, in other words, the very transversal logics that defined the building of the basti itself. Every year that the basti survives and thrives, the engagements deepen. In Pushta, different and often contradictory orders and temporalities of claims, governmental forms, and rationalities seemed to coexist for years and even...