Event

Keywords: Housing, inhabitation, India, city making, extended urbanization, decolonial. Abstract:
The New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (Noida), a satellite city of Delhi, engulphed in the National Capital Region of India, has long been positioned as the future and solution to Delhi’s urban development, congestion, and housing problems. The brainchild of Sanjay Gandhi – son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who wanted to sanitize city spaces across the country, NOIDA was controversially and formally established in 1976 under the auspices of the National Emergency which suspended any possibility for resistance. Rather uniquely, Noida was established as a fairly independent parastatal agency, entrusted to perform the functions of a development authority, industrial development corporation, and municipal corporation all together, led by a CEO, Chairman, and 17 appointment members from the Uttar Pradesh Government. This means that even today, with an estimated population of 1.5 million people, the city still has no electoral representation. As a result of this political orientation, it is unsurprising that Noida has been subject to many competing developmental and housing experiments through its near 50 year history.
Even as Noida has been positioned as the urban and housing ‘future’ for Delhi, NCR, this future has not materialized as such. Because population growth in Noida has rapidly outpaced any prediction – 400% between 1978-1991, 120% between 1991-2001, and 277% between 2001 and the present day – the city has been made, unmade, and remade in different registers through its interventions into housing by different governmental regimes in different manners. In the last 20 years particularly, and in the face of mounting reports of state led coercion for land acquisition, decades long development delays, a housing stock purchased by middle class consumers that had gone largely unfinished, private developers increasingly facing bankruptcy and insolvency issues, and farmers and villagers litigating illegal land acquisition practices and compensation, the city was forced to submit to a federal government audit aimed explicitly at uncovering exactly what has happened with Noida’s land and its housing development. After a 5-year investigation, that tracked development practices and outcomes between 2005-2020, this unprecedented and landmark report revealed that despite the state aggressively acquiring 12,400 hectares of land from village and agricultural communities for primarily residential development, 63% of the housing units remains incomplete 15 years later.
Between mass state-led land acquisitions of village and farm land framed as ‘urgent’ to make way for development that began and never finished, and sold-out residential projects for middle class populations who purchased flats that they increasingly feel they will never be able to move into, in many ways NOIDA is now framed as ‘beyond inhabitation’. In response to heavily sustained public critique of the city as a place permanently condemned to a state of ‘waiting’ due to a combination of developers defaulting on payments to a tune of multiple billions of US dollars and ‘illegal’ encroachment, varied interventions from the CEO of Noida, the state of Uttar Pradesh, and the courts have launched violent eviction/demolition campaigns targeting ‘land mafias’ (both the wealthy and the poor) occupying and building on publicly-owned land. Perhaps the most surprising has been the recent demolition of near-complete 50 story residential towers for the upper-middle classes and the razing of over 100 farmhouses (the residences of the ultra rich). These drastic measures raise questions about whether these tactics are used to ‘unmake’ whatever is there in order start over fresh and simply try again.
In this paper, and drawing from preliminary fieldwork, and archival and legal analysis, I examine how Noida has been imagined, governed, and developed over its history, how different modes of governance and governmentality have influenced approaches to housing and urban development, and the contested politics of city making. Anchored by a decolonial approach to studying the urban, this paper is theoretically guided by insights from Subaltern Studies and that of extended urbanization. Particularly, I draw from Chakrabarty’s project of provincializing Europe and his use of History 1 and History 2s in order to link (ongoing) histories, impacts, and legacies of colonialism and capitalism with alternatives that are not necessarily subsumed into these processes. I do this through excavating the interruptions, competing temporalities, and tensions in how the city has been made/unmade through housing interventions in time and space. I complement this with that of extended urbanization, partly because Noida has both been consistently imagined as an urban extension of Delhi and has been almost completely eclipsed by academic attention focused on the metropolitan center, but also because this framework provides the opportunity to dislocate the obsession of urban scholarship to generate theory from the limited perspective of the metropolitan center, instead directing attention to spaces often ignored because of their decided non-city character. Taken together, the goal of this paper is to analyze the varied, overlapping, and contradictory interventions in housing in the making and unmaking of Noida in order to tease out multiple temporalities in the imagination of the housing present and future of the city. Holding together and paying attention to these multiplicities might shed light on how these processes might exist in relation to – but also outside – dominate ways of understanding the relationships between the politics of housing, urban development and inhabitation.

Keywords: Coastal, fishing, caste, pollution, ecology
Abstract:
Embarking on fieldwork in Ennore, a neighbourhood at the northern edge of Chennai, an oft-repeated concern I heard was, “but you can’t possibly go live there, it’s not a residential area”. Ennore was a predominantly fishing town where a colonial era canal and river meet the sea to form a rich estuarine ecosystem, now heavily polluted by industries, power plants and ports – all in the plural. The conditions of pollution here that might warrant analyses of ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2007) were now widespread knowledge thanks to repeated flooding in southern - apparently ‘residential’ – areas of Chennai precipitated by blockages in the city’s waterways, including the Ennore estuary, and the tireless work of environmental activists bringing this to wider attention.
Now, Chennai is no stranger to watery environs, as much of the city has been unabashedly built over marshlands, canals & former irrigation tanks. Yet, it is the north Chennai wetlands, inhabited by working classes and lowered castes; coastal sands that are home to fishing communities; canal and river banks historically settled by workers without access to land that are seen as ‘marginal’. They are marked as sites of improper inhabitation, from where residents need to be resettled, their lives and livelihoods improved, rehabilitated.
That is, it is not only logics of extractive pollution that construct Ennore as a frontier of ‘non-residence’ available for development and displacement, but also the ecology of caste in the city. As Max Liboiron (2021) reminds us, pollution is ‘colonialism’ that exceeds material contamination and spreads through the exercise of power and domination. Entrenched caste power thus requires that we rethink dwelling in an already, permanently polluted world as active agency (Liboiron et al. 2018).
This paper attempts to do so by tracing fishers’ everyday practice of ‘dwelling’ along the coast that collapse boundaries between the private home, the shore, and the polluted waters. The shore or the beach, unpropertied for now but already policed, is used for drying and mending nets, drying fish for sale and household consumption, and cutting and cleaning fish for cooking – extending the home towards the water. The waters of the canal, river and nearshore sea are all inhabited by the fishers’ labour and intricate knowledge of the non-human life they continue to host despite their pollution – what Anand & Mathur (2021) have called the inhabited sea. The aims of the paper are thus to rethink inhabitation of both the urban and its natural environment, especially in contrast to the extraction or pollution of the latter. In other words, it attempts to connect dwelling in the urban to the ecological relationship it comprises.
Drawing on the author’s experience of putting together a coastal community cookbook, the paper further focuses on the cooking and consumption of local catch – a practice that defies the stigma of both material and social ‘pollution’ attached to living near and fishing on these waters. These intimacies built through practice with the water, fish and coastal sands, the paper argues, transgress norms of urban dwelling encoded by caste and offer cosmopolitical ways of reimagining urban inhabitation.

Keywords: housing activism, resistance, archival research, exhibition, Brussels.Abstract: In Brussels, the swelling rental prices, loosely regulated private rental market, considerable deficit in social housing stock, heightened interest of international real estate investors and further criminalisation of squatting, mobilises an ever growing share of the urban population to struggle for their individual and collective right to housing in the city. The Belgian Housing Action Day, member of the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City, organised its fourth national housing protest on 26th of March 2023 in Brussels, stating its three demands loud and clearly: rent reduction now (1), an end to all evictions (2) and more social housing and alternatives to the private rental market (3). As part of the core activists committed to housing struggles in Brussels I have been closely involved in the organisation of the protest as well as the public assemblies and direct actions, occupations and anti-eviction campaigns organised year-round. Working together with fellow housing activists, squatters, social workers and workers from the non- governmental sector involved with housing issues in one way or another, I have come to realise our shared empirical understanding of the right to housing movement in Brussels is predominantly based on present-day concerns and demands, tactics and tools, without much resonance to past housing struggles. By curating and building a first exhibition on housing struggles in Brussels I have aspired to counter the observed discontinuity of the right to housing movement over time and the felt fragmentation of urban housing struggles in the city. Foregrounding past housing struggles and moulding these in an exhibition format has been a way to trace back trajectories of housing resistances and diffuse these over time, to understand their legacies today and to contribute to the sedimentation of the contemporary housing movement by providing solid common building blocks. It further also aimed at highlighting the cross-overs between housing struggles, anti-racism and regularisation struggles, culminating in an evening conversation organised around these intersections (https://www.facebook.com/events/188943803885088/?ref=newsfeed). The necessary preceding archival research, accomplished with the help of local associations and access to their archives, made for a compilation of common and collected memories, both visual and textual, of housing resistances in the city between the 1960s and today. The public exhibit of the archival material is viewed an anti-capitalist tool, opposing the erasure of the past. Aspiring to act as a space of collective memory for contemporary mobilisations, the exhibition was both a part of ethnographic field work as it was a part of the yearly housing protest. Held between the 25th of March and 2nd of April 2023 and open during the national protest on Sunday 26th of March, the exhibition was a welcome addition on the route of the march. Temporarily materialised in a former café called Au foyer (At home) in the historical neighbourhood of the Marolles, notorious for its rebellious community of inhabitants at the origin of multiple victorious housing resistances challenging and resisting mass evictions and the privatisation of social housing estates, the exhibition was freely accessible all throughout the day. Without engaging in much communication about the exhibition, the space, re-baptised as the “Foyer des Résistances” (Home of resistances), welcomed dozens of individuals with their respective stories and lived experiences. Local social housing renters from the adjacent housing blocks, houseless people, private renters, squatters, housing activists, social workers but also university professors, small property owners, civil servants and students found their way through the open door of the café and confided in me their concerns with current housing politics and their long-term worries about their own housing situation or that of their communities and families. The exhibited material further elicited memories of housing struggles and a reignited hope for different housing politics in Brussels. From morning to evening I conversed with over one hundred individuals on the housing situation in Brussels and absorbed what clearly presents as a common housing concern and will for change. Having closed the exhibition just over a week ago and being called to my desk to process the many field notes I have collected while holding the space, I consider the ICCG panel in October a fitting moment to properly conclude this chapter of field work and share a comprehensive and substantiated ethnographic account of these powerful few days by calling attention to the diversity of expert housing knowledge and living memories of urban struggles brought into the space, the clear struggle and movement fractures along the axes of race and class, and the overwhelmingly positive response to the exhibition topic, calling for housing struggles, past and present, to inhabit the city more visibly and permanently.

Over the past five decades, the Sudanese capital of Khartoum has been an arrival destination for displaced communities from around the country. The peri-urban landscape of Khartoum has, thus, been drastically (re)shaped by state-led planning strategies and humanitarian responses that concentrate in and around old villages, agricultural lands, and informal settlements (Steel, Abukashawa, Osman Hussein, 2019)2 through arguably racialized forms of dispossession. In response to, and despite this, inhabitants of these settlements and newly arriving communities in search of affordable housing, have continued to develop new strategies to access land, urban services, and livelihoods that resist oppressive state-led urban policies. These strategies have often been framed in discourses of informality and accused by the state of being detrimental to aspired processes of “urban development”. Despite the state’s continuous efforts to develop land policies that enable these communities to own land through titling and land registration, its approach has been heavily driven by market logics, disregarding the heterogenous and multi-functional peri-urban landscapes and settlements created by displaced communities (Steel, Abukashaw, Hussein, 2019). These dynamics showcase that, within this context, it is difficult for one to discuss notions of “access to housing” without discussing realities pertaining to land access, its governance, and its 1 Janoob Al Hizam translates to ‘South of the Belt’, the ‘Belt’ referring to the green belt (a forested landscape) which demarcated the extent of Khartoum’s expansion until the 1960s. From the 1970s onward, Janoob Al Hizam became the location where resettlement schemes were planned for displaced communities and the urban poor away from the city center. The forest landscape itself has since been transformed into a military complex, sewage displacement site, and residential neighborhoods. 2 Steel, G., Abukashawa, S., Osman Hussein, M. 2019. “Urban Transformations and Land Governance in Peri-Urban Khartoum: The case of Soba” In Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 111(1). Pp. 45-59. inhabitation. As highlighted by Franck et al. (2021)3, in times of urbanization within the Sudanese capital, questions of “belonging and otherness” have emerged from and remain central to “issues of access to land” for many of Khartoum’s inhabitants. To shed light on a more situated reading of these dynamics, this contribution offers a spatialized understanding of Janoob Al Hizam vis-a-vis Alshigelab, a 7-neighborhood settlement which sits along the riverbank of the White Nile. Once known as a series of spaced out agropastoral villages, the settlement had been subjected to village planning and incorporation schemes administered by the Sudanese Land Department in the late 1980s as urbanization began making its way into the landscape of Janoob Al Hizam. The aftermath of these schemes has given rise to Alshigelab, where customary land governance and practices of inhabitation continue to overlap with those that are state-led, and at the interstices of both, new inhabitants stemming from various regions in Sudan are developing strategies to claim their space. This paper mobilizes critical mapping as a methodology to trace trajectories of land access within Alshigelab, shedding light on the various interpretations of land that exist within this settlement. It draws from a series of collective critical mapping workshops4 conducted with local organization and community members between January and March 2023, documenting spatially manifested social contestations that have risen throughout these trajectories as well as the continuously shifting relationship between inhabitants and the land(scape). By doing so, the paper offers a critique to these schemes four decades later, foregrounding not only the contestations and racialized forms of dispossession, but the networks of solidarity that have been shaped in order to carve avenues for more nuanced land access strategies. As such, it contests the dominant view of the peri-urban landscape as a site “awaiting to become urban”, but as a territory where resistance and solidarity are re-shaping what constitutes the urban. Keywords: Critical mapping; access to land; resistance practices; racialized dispossession 3 Franck, A., Casciarri, B. 2021. “Greater Khartoum Through the Prism of In-Betweenness” In Alice Franck, Barbara Casciarri, Idris Salim El-Hassan (eds.) In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum: Spaces, Temporalities, and Identities from Separation to Revolution. pp 1-28. Berghahn Books. 4 The ‘Mapping to Action’ workshop is a participatory action research project with community members from Alshigelab that took place from January to March 2023. Co-organized by the author, Studio Urban, 26 Daraja, IDEAmap and Neighborhood Resistance Committee members, the project offered training to participants to mobilize collective critical mapping as a methodology to understand the complex lived realities of post-village incorporation settlements and the impacts of the Nile’s landscape on these dynamics. The critical mapping training offered by the author drew inspiration from Iconoclassistas’ Manual of Collective Mapping (2016), William Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1974), and Nishat Awan’s Mapping Otherwise (2017).

During the past thirty years, Central Eastern Europe (CEE) experienced a radical change in its economic and political system, the privatisation of public assets hit hardly the society's socioeconomic structure. One of the main tangible effects of this economic shift has been the transition of the property regimes in residential housing. Passing from a State-led economic system to a regime of free market has accentuated the housing precarity. The results of this transition have been visible throughout these past decades, the real estate market exploded rising housing and rental prices, increasing housing inequalities and accentuating poor living conditions. In this panorama, foreign investments in the real estate sphere, in particular those from Western Europe, played a crucial role in shaping the new economic relations, connections and dependencies. Repeating what Western Europe made in Southern Europe during the 70s (Hadjimichalis, 2017), after the fall of the Berlin Wall, CEE became the spatial outlet to absorb the surplus capital of the central European economy. The unequal relationship between central and peripheral Europe (eastern and southern) has been the core of European integration (Pósfai, Gál and Nagy, 2018).
These kinds of dependencies and unbalanced relations have been mirrored also in the academic knowledge production, often led by Western European frameworks, engaging what Ţichindeleanu (2023) has called “intimate colonization”. The recent book edited by Vilenica (2023) discusses such practices of decoloniality in Eastern Europe, stressing the role that Western Europe had in creating dependencies.
The article aims to investigate the construction of CEE as the “European periphery” through the lenses of housing political economy. In order to engage decolonial frameworks through the lenses of housing financialization, the call is double. On the one hand, housing financialization scholars begin to advocate for the openness of the studies in the so-called “capitalism peripheries” (Aalbers, Rolnik and Krijnen, 2020). They call the need to rethink housing political economic studies in a de-centred perspective to enlarge and complexity the discourse about housing financialization. On the other hand, “peripheral financialization” is a central theme also in CEE housing studies (Bohle, 2018; Pósfai, Gál and Nagy, 2018; Bródy and Pósfai, 2020; Mikuš, 2022). Such scholars focused their studies on the processes of peripherical financialization of housing that happened during the 90s in the region reporting the unequal economic relations based on systems such as debt dependency relations.
Starting from the concept of peripheral financialization, the article stresses the political-economic construction of a periphery (a south / an east), also questioning the possibilities to subvert such narratives and investigating alternative geographies in which the Central Eastern European region found its own centrality. The epistemological challenge is to change the perspective to focus on CEE, not as a periphery but as a centrality avoiding the European narratives that keep carrying out the centre-periphery dichotomy. Challenging this dichotomies and narratives open up the possibilities to explore alternatives mode of inhabitation from these perspectives.
Through the lenses of housing financialization, this article proposes a conceptualisation of the construction of CEE as (one of) the periphery of Europe, discussing the current implications and the possible alternatives.


References

Aalbers, M.B., Rolnik, R. and Krijnen, M. (2020) ‘The Financialization of Housing in Capitalism’s Peripheries’, Housing Policy Debate, 30(4), pp. 481–485. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2020.1783812.
Bohle, D. (2018) ‘Mortgaging Europe’s Periphery’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 53(2), pp. 196–217. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-018-9260-7.
Bródy, L.S. and Pósfai, Z. (2020) Household debt on the peripheries of Europe: new constellations since 2008. Budapest: Periféria Policy and Research Center (Periféria working papers, 3).
Hadjimichalis, C. (2017) Crisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe. Routledge.
Mikuš, M. (2022) ‘Whither Peripheral Financialisation? Housing Finance in Croatia since the Global Financial Crisis’, Critical Housing Analysis, 9(1), pp. 57–67. Available at: https://doi.org/10.13060/23362839.2022.9.1.541.
Pósfai, Z., Gál, Z. and Nagy, E. (2018) ‘Financialization and inequalities: The uneven development of the housing market on the eastern periphery of Europe’, in Inequality and uneven development in the post-crisis world. London ; New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Ţichindeleanu O. (2023) Intimate colonization. In Vilenica, A. (2023) Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation. Novi Sad: New Media Center_kuda.org
Vilenica, A. (2023) Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation. Novi Sad: New Media Center_kuda.org.

At the heart of this paper is the reconstruction of one chapter in a more expansive and shared genealogy of housing justice and radical care work. The paper re-traces the history of housing struggles in West Berlin focusing, in particular, on the relationship between care work, inhabitation and the making of an alternative urban imagination. It builds on recent scholarship in critical urban studies which has drawn increasing attention to the role that care work has come to play in the development of emancipatory urban futures. While much of this work focuses on a range of contemporary struggles, the paper seeks to re-centre and historicise our understanding of care as a source of political action and organising. The politics of care occupied an important place within the history of the New Left in West Germany though the significance and meaning of care has been routinely overlooked offering little more than impressionistic colour to well-established accounts of the period’s radical political developments.

It is against this backdrop that the paper proposes a new reading of the communal spaces and autonomous youth projects that first flourished in West Berlin in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that, in many respects, served as key laboratories of political experimentation. Drawing on extensive archival research, the paper connects the everyday spatial practices of housing activists (including squatters) in the city to matters of care that politicized health and were intimately intertwined with a wider struggle over the meaning of political action, community organization and collective city living that extended well beyond West Berlin. These were orientations that aimed to make visible the actual physical sites – the radical urban infrastructure - in which alternative (and undeniably intersectional) forms of care and solidarity were actually assembled and developed from clinics to communes, squats to youth centres. At stake here, is the recognition of a largely neglected archive of care that encompasses struggles over housing, migrant rights, social welfare and urban redevelopment while opening up a critical space to imagine and conceive of inhabitation as practiced through everyday geographies of care, dwelling and refuge.

The paper thus aims to make visible this archive and the work of the housing activists that it encompasses. At the same time, it also offers a new conceptual model that explores the complex place of care and health activism in struggles over autonomy and self-determination in West Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s. These were struggles that challenged oppressive systems of institutionalisation (asylums, psychiatric clinics, youth homes) while creating new spaces of treatment and therapy that, in many cases, became sites of radical inhabitation and dwelling. These were, moreover, struggles that resonated with wider anti-imperial and feminist movements in West Germany. It is in this context that the paper, ultimately, develops an approach that zooms in on the everyday practices adopted by activists and the mundane tactics required to mobilise people and sustain a movement while carving out new forms of housing justice. It is also an approach that highlights the complex multi-scalar geographies of connection and solidarity that connected activists in West Berlin with their counterparts across Europe and beyond.

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Keywords: Radical care work, inhabitation, autonomy, housing justice, West-Berlin