Discourses of Citizenship Beyond Practices of Property and 'World-Class' Aspirations in Globalising Delhi

This paper presents practice(s) of citizenship beyond the conceptualizations and hegemony of property; rooted in state aspirations of attaining ‘world-class’ status for the Indian city of New Delhi. Emerging out of observations at Kathputli Colony (KC), (lit. Artists’ Neighbourhood), in the city — a neighborhood earmarked for the pilot project under the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) scheme; the research identifies differences in power within informal settlements as a starting point for examining demand-making as discursive practice. Power differentials, within such settlements, are argued as being outcomes of fixed identity; privileging the history of certain groups over others and overlooking contemporary realities of heterogeneity. Alternative voices emerging from the settlement, in response, articulate their own visions based on imaginations, solidarities, and associations aimed at overcoming a singular interpretation of belonging; instead, seeking congruence between social realities and expressions of community aspirations. As a corollary, field-work evidence, collating voices from the settlement, renders binaries such as ‘illegal/legal’, formal/informal’ or standard/deviant’, a limited conceptual category to understand the interconnectedness of history-politics-identity in approaching the margins. Begetting attention to fluid, contextual, and contingent processes that define the politics within and of the margins additionally, somewhat challenges a unified way of seeing ‘marginality’, as solely an outcome of zero-sum politics between the state and its geographical peripheries. Eventually, socio-political heterogeneities point to the fertility of carrying out further research to uncover the discourses, processes, and practices, that continue to make politics of marginalization a relevant topic of study in urban geography.