Street-side citizenships: claim-making and the reordering of streets in Indian cities

The sense of urgency around sustainable mobility transitions in a climate crisis has resulted in renewed scholarly attention on automobility. The contextual peculiarities of Southern cities offer exciting opportunities for grounded conversations on automobility and its discontents. This chapter frames citizenship through the dimensions of entangled citizenship, citizenship as rights, status and claims, and mobilised citizenship. An infrastructured citizenship takes shape through the reconfiguration of streets, rationalising of smartness and expansion of highways and ancillary infrastructures. Since streets are a crucial component in the embedding of automobility, the authors view their edges as fit sites of resistance to the normalisation of an automotive citizenship. This resistance is built on the tensions inherent within automotive citizenship. By offering a conception of citizenship rooted in the realities of Southern streets, the authors wish to contribute to the growing scholarship on the bottom-up disruption of the automobility regime.