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<p>This paper explores how marginalized urban communities, who are excluded from formal and life-supporting infrastructures of the city, navigate challenges ensuing from their severance in contemporary city-making practices through their everyday living. Based on this objective, the paper asks, how do these communities assert and claim their belongingness to the city that often seeks to erase them and puts them at the tail-end of a transforming urban landscape? To seek answers, we unsettle ‘fixities’ in urban political ecology that dominate the understanding of urbanization in cities of Global South—ones that locate power exclusively to a single class (primarily the middle-class) or reduce it to a mere outcome of capital accumulation, thereby framing power solely as a tool of conflict. Instead, underpinned in a Situated Urban Political Ecology (SUPE) framework, we offer a ‘negotiated urbanism’ perspective that foregrounds place-based and micro-political idiosyncrasies, making visible how multiple forms of power emerge through diverse and coexisting urban identities. Drawing upon a grounded theory and ethnographic fieldwork, which includes in-depth interviews, focused group interviews, life histories, on-field conversations and observations in selected neighbourhoods of Delhi, we depict how urban marginalized groups are more than mere recipients of exclusion, exhibiting significant transformative agency. We argue to view them as active city-makers, rather than mere encroachers, who manoeuvre the uneven urban environment to claim their right to the city through diverse and mundane negotiating practices. This approach brings forth lived experiences and everyday struggles around land, electricity, and water in marginalized neighbourhoods, offering deeper insights and exposing the crooked reality of Delhi’s attempt at sustainable city-making. The findings highlight transformative agencies of these communities as they adapt and survive within the exclusionary urban development practices, reshaping their experiences in the process.</p>

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Negotiated urbanism: polychromatic encounters within the world-class restructuring of Delhi, India’s capital city

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年12月10日

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  • Gunjan Chowhan,
  • Amrita Sen,
  • Jenia Mukherjee

摘要

This paper explores how marginalized urban communities, who are excluded from formal and life-supporting infrastructures of the city, navigate challenges ensuing from their severance in contemporary city-making practices through their everyday living. Based on this objective, the paper asks, how do these communities assert and claim their belongingness to the city that often seeks to erase them and puts them at the tail-end of a transforming urban landscape? To seek answers, we unsettle ‘fixities’ in urban political ecology that dominate the understanding of urbanization in cities of Global South—ones that locate power exclusively to a single class (primarily the middle-class) or reduce it to a mere outcome of capital accumulation, thereby framing power solely as a tool of conflict. Instead, underpinned in a Situated Urban Political Ecology (SUPE) framework, we offer a ‘negotiated urbanism’ perspective that foregrounds place-based and micro-political idiosyncrasies, making visible how multiple forms of power emerge through diverse and coexisting urban identities. Drawing upon a grounded theory and ethnographic fieldwork, which includes in-depth interviews, focused group interviews, life histories, on-field conversations and observations in selected neighbourhoods of Delhi, we depict how urban marginalized groups are more than mere recipients of exclusion, exhibiting significant transformative agency. We argue to view them as active city-makers, rather than mere encroachers, who manoeuvre the uneven urban environment to claim their right to the city through diverse and mundane negotiating practices. This approach brings forth lived experiences and everyday struggles around land, electricity, and water in marginalized neighbourhoods, offering deeper insights and exposing the crooked reality of Delhi’s attempt at sustainable city-making. The findings highlight transformative agencies of these communities as they adapt and survive within the exclusionary urban development practices, reshaping their experiences in the process.