Delhi

Adequate housing is not just houses, but ensuring safe, liveable and inclusive neighbourhoods for all. Art and culture are an integral part of this process. ‘Fursat ki Fizayen’, a socially engaged art project encouraging women’s participation in public space, offers insights into how young women from peri-urban areas exercise their ‘right to the city’ with a focus on spaces and stories of leisure. Based in Madanpur Khadar – an under-resourced, poorly serviced resettlement colony in Delhi with a predominantly working class population – the project is an example of how socially engaged art creates openings that commercial practice does not, and has the potential to reconfigure residential communities towards inclusion.

The poor in India’s cities have endured evictions and demolitions of their homes and settlements for decades now. While long legal and political battles have sometimes resulted in a modicum of justice through rehabilitation of affected households, demolitions themselves are irreversible acts that forever destroy a settlement and transform the area. initiatives like the Missing Basti Project (MBP) seek to document these erasures by utilising the power of the Internet to create an archive of material memory.

Drawing on over a decade of research on the Kathputli Colony in Delhi, this two-part series focuses on the complex processes involved in the in-situ rehabilitation of squatter settlements. While the first part focused on the differentiated nature of the resettlement processes, this second piece focuses on the transit camp, examining the multidimensional impact on the residents who are endlessly awaiting their final rehabilitation.

Drawing on over a decade of research on the Kathputli Colony in Delhi, this two-part series focuses on the complex processes involved in the in-situ rehabilitation of squatter settlements. This first part explains the differentiated nature of the resettlement processes. This involves exclusions caused by stringent eligibility requirements, opaque enumeration processes and delays in project implementation. Additionally, an unclear legal status has kept households in a continuing state of uncertainty.

An initiative to archive past and ongoing evictions in Delhi to question as well as mobilize action for the prevention of further evictions.

A recent regularisation scheme promises to improve the tenure security of about 5 million Delhi residents. But how inclusive is the scheme and does it keep pace with the realities on the ground? Sukrit Nagpal, Smriti Singh and Sonal Sharma from SEWA Bharat take a critical look.

While central and state governments have launched several housing policies over the years to promote ownership-based housing for the ‘urban poor’, the housing requirements of migrant workers remain neglected. The sudden announcement of a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 led to an exodus of migrants from cities due to their inability to pay rents for rooms after losing their jobs. It is thus crucial to understand what housing means to migrants in cities, and how cities can be made more livable for migrant workers. This piece attempts to answer some of these questions through interviews of several migrant workers in the national capital region to understand their experiences and perspectives.

The private residential real estate market in urban India is diverse, and housing typologies vary within and across geographies. This is the second in a series of data pieces highlighting some of the characteristics of private real estate market in India across selected geographies between 2009-2019, based on data provided by Liases Foras, India’s only non-broking real-estate research company.

Discrimination in rental housing shapes our cities, demarcating what spaces are ‘open’ or ‘closed’ to some citizens. Interviewees told researchers of the Housing Discrimination Project that it makes Muslims feel safe only in some areas, unwelcome elsewhere.

The paper uses a boundaries lens to investigate the role of finance and networks of credit in autoconstruction, with a focus on the work of market actors in navigating market–citizen and market–state boundaries, foregrounded against the relatively well-studied politics of state–citizen relations, in Delhi’s unathorised colonies