Dispossession by appropriation in a global south city: geography, cartography and statutory regime as mediating factors

Slum and land have a dialectical relationship. A land that is a slum embodies a filthy and dirty territory that hinders the aesthetic competitiveness of a global city. On the other hand, a slum as a land opens opportunities for multiple uses that promise resurrection of world-class ambition. However, in a situation of tight regulation, informal habitations are often could not be forcefully evicted for this dream to come true. In such an event more conciliatory, yet shrewd, practices are adopted to appropriate land from the informally residing community. A number of tools ply to get the work done, among which geography, cartography, and manipulation of statutory laws are more prominent. Taking Kolkata as a case, I wish to situate ongoing appropriation of central urban land as mediated by these three factors. In Kolkata, while forceful evictions take place on informally occupied land both at the fringe and the central part of the city with vague statutory laws, in the tightly regulated central part of the city, appropriation replaces expropriation, accompanied by a more regular invocation of slum in policy and governmental discourses. The study adds to the dispossession literature by underscoring the role of mediating factors in appropriating the central urban land that could not be coercively expropriated, yet needed for claiming a slot in the world-class city register.