Terrains of negotiation: local politics, bureaucracy, and urban residents in contemporary Chennai

This dissertation examines how the informal poor make claims to city land and basic services in a landscape marked by increasingly violent and frequent slum evictions. I posit that outcomes for the urban poor emerge from their adept navigation of ‘terrains of negotiation’ with politicians, local bureaucrats, and activists to preserve their citizenship in the city. Terrains of negotiation emerge as part of the contested arena of patronage relations widely discussed in the literatures on postcolonial state-society relations and urban informality. Based on over thirteen months of ethnographic field work conducted in an informal settlement, archival research, and multiple years of housing rights activism, I forward that residents deploy particular, temporally variable, strategic positions on shifting terrains of negotiation. I examine moments at which (i) as pliable clients of local political patrons, residents cede slum territory and spatial privileges to avoid threats to their occupancy; (ii) as biopolitical subjects of the welfare state, they stake claim to land, legitimacy, and citizenship, both current and future, through a metis, or learned practice of capturing identity documents; (iii) as active encroachers of city space who build their own community infrastructure, residents attempt to strengthen their moral claims to the land by demonstrating its current use value by creating and sustaining an urban commons; and (iv) as consumers of municipal services who are willing to pay and bribe for access, they are able to secure access to certain state agencies and a form of substantive urban citizenship. The terrains of negotiation I examine emerge at the intersection of both the splintering of housing patronage in the state bureaucracy and the absence of formal regulations for eviction and resettlement, and a more fluid landscape of political parties and community organizations in shaping patterns of collective action. Terrains of negotiation are uncertain, unpredictable webs of political alliance that form in particular spatial settings and that, I argue, allow the urban poor to exert considerable, although inconsistent, claims upon the state in the face of deep economic and political vulnerability.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference