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This article takes the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant migrant exodus from cities as an inflexion point and engages with the new policies initiated to address the needs of migrants to cities. As against the significant and persistent invisibility and neglect of the issue of circular internal migration in the country, recent years have witnessed some shifts in the narrative and a few new policies triggered by the pandemic. The article reviews these initiatives to find that the hegemonic hold of the previous narratives and policies informed by the same is largely intact. The new policies do not account for migrant realities and needs. The article therefore calls for more migrant-aware policies based on its study of migrants in Mumbai and proposes principles by which these policies can be reimagined.

Semi-formal settlements like Delhi’s unauthorised colonies (UACs), which await regularisation by the state, are characterised by aspirations for housing improvements and enhanced property values. Frustrated by the rigid regulatory frameworks that operate in the binaries of legal/illegal, formal/informal, planned/unplanned and having limited influence over processes of regularisation, UAC residents use ‘transversal logics’ (Caldeira, 2017) to negotiate planning regimes, credit markets and local politics to improve housing, which become their ‘action space’ to meet aspirations for social mobility. This article investigates the role of finance and networks of credit in autoconstruction, with a focus on the work of market actors in navigating market–citizen and market–state boundaries, foregrounded against the relatively well-studied politics of state–citizen relations. It finds that landowners and housing finance institutions, as well as actors within them, navigate regulatory boundaries through innovative partnerships and creative workarounds, and by strategically deploying collective and individual identities. Even as cities like Delhi endeavour to become planned world-class utopias, a multitude of actors continue to reshape the city’s peripheral landscapes through the assertion, dissolution and spanning of multiple boundaries—regulatory, individual–collective, state–citizen, citizen–market and state–market.

This article narrates how a fisherfolk community comprising original inhabitants of Mumbai has been spatially squeezed and choked by surrounding urban developments, compelling them to turn away from their customary livelihoods and ways of living. The community resists this through a political project of indigenous reclaiming. The project is material in nature—focused on reclaiming alienated lands—but also imaginative—reasserting a newly imagined, albeit contested, identity as a fishing community founded on repurposing its fishing commons and reconfiguring the dominant notion of property as private. Using the lens of boundaries allows us to understand the closures and opportunities presented by these complex urban transformations. Overall, the fishers’ reclamation is directed at redefining, contesting, blurring and ‘commoning’ the established ordering boundary of private property that erases their customary claims—their remembered boundary spans not just the village settlement but also the land–sea commons—and is seen as unjust.

Civil society has played a key role in responding to the COVID-19 crisis in Indian cities. This article uses the conceptualisation of boundaries and borders to reflect on the role of local state and civil society actors in Gurugram’s pandemic response. It examines the state’s bordering practices, state-society relations as well as processes of negotiation that enabled disease management as well as relief efforts-especially for migrant workers-during the crisis.

Collaborative research endeavours, such as the ‘Boundary Spanning and Intermediation for Urban Regeneration’ project, can help unpack boundary spanning from the viewpoint of communities in informal settlements who engage with the state through certain actors operating as their citizen–state interface. This article builds on the story of a community toilet in Mohammad Nagar settlement in Bholakpur, a neighbourhood in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, where solid consumer waste is processed, recycled and regenerated with value. Tracing the struggles to build a functional community toilet from 2012 to 2017 amidst a gentrifying real estate landscape, this article asks: what does the process of working through a fragmented community to claim a community toilet from the state say to the idea of boundary spanning? By describing the boundary-spanning activities of three different actors invested in working through a divided settlement to co-produce an effective claim, it seeks to enquire about the different knowledge types these actors hone. How are these knowledge types generated? How do different actors deploy them in the neighbourhood? Through its analysis of the post-2017 scenario, when the toilet stood built but unmaintained and unused, the article argues for studying boundary spanning over time and spatial change, especially in places like Mohammad Nagar, where securing basic and usable civic infrastructure relies on multiple iterations of boundary-spanning activities.

This article analyses the politics of environmentalism revealed in struggles over the land–water boundary of an urbanising tank in Chennai. In contesting this boundary, property-less settlers on its banks called into question the tank’s ‘nature’ and functions in its urban milieu, and demanded a redrawing of boundaries to reflect the socio-natural transformations that had turned parts of it into land. Simultaneously, propertied residents, in concert with state eco-restoration schemes and court rulings, fought to restore the tank to its ‘original’ dimensions. In foregrounding the liminalities of the urbanising tank, this article suggests the limits of the contemporary property-determined eco-restoration discourse, premised on a return to pristine pasts and original boundaries. It proposes that the stand-off between water body restoration and the defence of working-class housing rights necessitates recognising the tank as an artefact assembled over time by socio-technical and natural processes.

Emotions relationally and performatively constitute the very boundaries that distinguish the subject from the other(s). The urban human in India is affectively constituted by many intense emotional experiences of everyday life. Adopting a participation view of planning and drawing from Sarah Ahmed (2014, The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press), we examine ‘what emotions do’ in the planning and participatory atmospheres (Buser, 2014, Planning Theory, vol. 13, pp. 227–243) in Bangalore. Tracing emotional content embedded in participations and non-participations, we demonstrate how distrust, anger and fear co-produced the process and outcomes of the 2031 Master Plan of Bangalore. We join the few emerging scholars that call attention to the emotional geographies of planning, particularly to be able to transform the continuing colonial urban management practice in the postcolonial world to that of planning. Planning, we argue, has to involve participation, in which emotions, we demonstrate, are the connective tissue (Newman, 2012, Critical Policy Studies, vol. 6, pp. 465–479).

Anand Pandian, A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. Duke University Press, 2019, 168pp., ₹2,115, ISBN: 978-1-4780-0375-5 (paperback). ISBN:978-1-4780-0311-3 (cloth).

This article examines a particular village—Kunkeri—in Konkan, Maharashtra, characterized by persistent mass outmigration for over five decades, by combining a field study in 2017 with detailed ethnographic and statistical baseline data collected by the Census of India in 1961 and 1987. It documents the increase in outmigration rates, catch-up in outmigration intensities by the lowest castes to those of the upper castes, diversification of household migration strategies and outmigrants’ occupations, the lessening of single-male migration strategies, the presence of a diasporic association and the growing significance of commuting and migration for education. Yet, despite mass outmigration and a general rise in the standard of living across castes, we observe strong continuity in the distribution of castes and land ownership structures within Kunkeri. These findings point to both the transformative and status-quo preserving features of persistent mass migration from rural India.JEL: O15, J61, N35

This article compares various forms of housing informalities, especially slums and gunthewaris that are present in Maharashtra. The comparative stance enables an insight into the dynamics that generate informalities and the disjuncts in the policies that have chosen to deal with them as specific forms that merit a distinct response. Such a policy response that does not address the basic causes that generate these informalities attenuates a policy environment that continually creates a state of exception. In fact, it seems to be leading to a scenario where planning and production of affordable housing is becoming increasingly difficult.