Disciplining the Planet of Slums: Habitat Improvement in Hyderabad before the Infrastructural Turn

Keywords: slums, informality, cities, citizenship, policy, global shift, governance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 3

Abstract

The period from 1970s-1990s was the heyday of processes of slum improvement through infrastructural and environmental upgradation, instead of violent processes of slum clearance and resettlement. In many cities across the world, projects of slum upgradation provided a political and economic impetus for the expansion of slums, often creating large gaps in access to adequate infrastructure. The planetary scope of this problem is discursively registered by the panic around slums generated in the late 1990s and early 2000s exemplified by the UN Report on "Challenge of the Slums" and Mike Davis' "Planet of Slums". Yet, even as these discourses were taking shape in the early 2000s, cities around the world on the recommendation of international agencies, had started significantly changing their policies around slum upgradation, effectively returning to a more violent resettlement model. In this paper, I narrate the complex forty-year history of an exemplary slum-upgradation program that was cost-effective, participatory, comprehensive, recognized worldwide as the effective and successful “Hyderabad Model”, and yet it had to be dismantled. Firstly, by situating the history of the Hyderabad Model’s dismantling in its larger global policy context, I show how local slum-making practices around the world became a planetary problem in the form of the infrastructural “challenge of slums”. Secondly, by analyzing how the Hyderabad Model was dismantled, I show how the political processes of slum-making were disciplined into specific legal, financial and territorial regimes. This crucial political economic shift at a planetary scale precedes the infrastructural turn in urban policy and studies.