India’s Poor and Better-Off Urban Citizens: Cycles of Proximity and Segregation

After IndiaIndia’s independence in 1947 sought its leaders to provide the country’s urban slum dwellers with acceptable, accessible and affordable housingAffordable housing. A major question was where this acceptable, i.e. decent housing should be built. Slum dwellers had to live in accessible locations, close to their inner-city worksites, while landLand in inner cities appeared too expensive to provide for affordable housingAffordable housing. It took some 15 years before the failures of this policy were accepted. Increasing negative opinions regarding the urban poor helped from the 1960s onwards to make slum dwellers themselves responsible for their housing needs: the state withdrew largely from its welfare-oriented housing policiesHousing policies. Self-help housing projects in urban peripheries were developed, while in some existing slumsSlum marginal in situ improvements took place. The resulting increased spatial segregationSegregation of the urban poor from their work locations resulted however in large-scale subaltern return movements by erstwhile slum dwellers from the urban fringes to the places where they used to live, belonged and had found a livelihood. A new impetus to remove the urban poor from inner-city locations emerged after the introduction of IndiaIndia’s liberalized economic policies in the 1990s that fostered (foreign) investments in prestigious real estate. New luxury residential and commercial complexes replaced slumsSlum and slum dwellers were once again pushed out of the city. The question remains whether they will again be able to return to the places where they came from, or whether they have to find new types of survival in the peripheries of IndiaIndia’s cities.