SPOTLIGHTING MIGRANT AGENCY: How Migratory Movements and Temporariness Drive Peripheral Urbanization in Mumbai's Agrarian‐urban Edge

Lalitha Kamath and Malay Kotal

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2023, vol. 47, issue 1, 71-89

Abstract: In this article we look beyond dispossession by exclusionary urbanization to highlight the complex articulation of migration histories, speculative accumulation, translocal livelihoods and political practices that make up a mini‐city in Mumbai's periphery. We think from Mumbai's periphery as a site from where theory can be made to argue that existing frameworks of peripheral urbanization are territorially fixed, and that there is a need to expand beyond a focus on land dynamics to a discussion on migration, translocal residence and livelihoods. We propose three extensions. First, we argue that peripheral urbanization must expand to include multiple temporalities and agencies that play out in line with orientations toward permanence but also temporariness. Second, we stretch the idea of autoconstruction beyond the material realm to focus on autoconstructed alliances as a central component of participating in the capitalist commodification of land but also exceeding it. Third, in a situation where residents inhabit both temporariness and permanence, they collectively produce place as simultaneously way station and place‐in‐the‐making. We conclude the article by reflecting on what a peripheral urbanization reconfigured for mobility and temporariness means for social justice and inclusion of the (migrant) working poor in the city.

Date: 2023
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