PhD Dissertation Defense: Vivek Mishra
Date/Time: Mon, July 28th, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Location: Renaissance Park 201C and Zoom
https://northeastern.zoom.us/j/98365697059
Meeting ID: 983 6569 7059
Title: “Cultural Production of Property and the Contested State: Elite Informality, Class, and Citizenship in Delhi”
Abstract:
What conceptual tools emerge when we shift the focus of urban informality away from slums and toward the informal settlements of elites? In 2019, the government of India identified, recorded, and published a list of 69 unauthorized colonies inhabited by affluent residents of Delhi, occupying a land area comparable to that of all the city’s Jhuggi Jhopdi (slum) clusters combined. While a parliamentary decision granted ownership and mortgage rights to the residents of low- and middle-income unauthorized colonies, it excluded these affluent colonies based on plot size, land value, and location.
This dissertation explores how affluence coexists with urban informality and how wealthy residents secure services and claim property rights without formal land tenure. How do they gain access to substantive citizenship entitlements while being in legal limbo? And how do they contest the infrastructural power of the state? Through ethnographic methods, including participant observation, unstructured interviews, and analysis of newspaper archives, policy and planning documents, government committee reports, court cases, and social media discussions, this dissertation traces the historical emergence, everyday practices, and the politics of claims-making in elite informal settlements. It develops a set of interlinked theoretical contributions that challenge the slum-centric, resistance-oriented, and survival-focused frameworks commonly found in urban studies and planning literature.
First, it examines how Delhi’s centralized planning regime and the political economy of land acquisition created regulatory gray zones, facilitating the rise of these colonies. It maps their spatial concentration and built form, comparing them to the location and built form of formal elite colonies. It argues that while the development of these affluent unauthorized colonies mirrors that of other low and middle-income unauthorized colonies, what sets them apart is their spatial location and housing style. It shows that most of these elite informal settlements are concentrated in South and South-West Delhi, a region associated with socio-economic prestige, which allows them to mimic adjacent formal elite colonies in both location and built form.
Second, focusing on Sainik Farms, the oldest and largest affluent unauthorized colony in Delhi, it investigates how the residents of Sainik Farms access citizenship entitlements without formal property rights. I argue that residents of Sainik Farms gain access to citizenship entitlements through their institutional, aesthetic, spatial, and ideological practices. These practices, which constitute what I refer to as the ‘Cultural Production of Property,’ enable them to mimic formal elite settlements that gain citizenship entitlements based on property rights while distancing themselves from people regarded as squatters and the undeserving poor. Here, culture is construed as a function of taste, norms, values, beliefs, symbolism, and worldviews.
Finally, it examines how elites negotiate with and contest the state’s infrastructural power to assert complete ownership rights to their property. I show that the residents of these settlements, unlike those in subaltern informal settlements, primarily contest the state by using their informally built infrastructures as a tool of power and negotiation. They also reinforce their claims to formal property rights by emphasizing the potential economic benefits of authorization, presenting their settlements as possible revenue streams for the state. Additionally, they challenge the state power by questioning its right to classify people and neighborhoods as “affluent” and by portraying themselves as dutiful, taxpaying, and anti-corruption citizens. Drawing on theories of urban informality, property rights, citizenship, the infrastructural power of the state, and politics of claims-making, this dissertation highlights how informality is shaped not only by marginality but is also rooted in elite culture, their aesthetic sense, sensibilities, and improvisational spatial and governance practices.
Committee Members:
Professor Gavin Shatkin, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University (Chair)
Professor Liza Weinstein, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University
Professor Asher Ghertner, Department of Geography, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
