Where is the city in "The Right to the City"? The colliding politics of place‐making in a resettlement colony in Delhi's periphery.

This paper reframes the motto of the right to the city by examining the colliding practices of place‐making among diverse residents such as displaced slum dwellers, rural migrants, and low‐income newcomers in a resettlement colony in Delhi's periphery. Moving beyond this conceptualisation of the "city" within the right to the city motto as an emancipatory and ideal one, I shed light on the "kind" of a city the diverse actors produce in Delhi's periphery. Refraining from suggesting a normative conceptualisation, I argue that the right to the city as practised on the ground is also a right to co‐create an ever‐emerging city with colliding trajectories of opportunities and constraints beyond an inclusive and emancipatory city, as generally perceived. This paper reframes the motto of the right to the city by examining the colliding practices of place‐making among diverse residents, such as displaced slum dwellers, rural migrants, and low‐income newcomers, in a resettlement colony in Delhi's periphery. Drawing from 13 months of ethnographic field research among the residents of a resettlement colony, Savdha, I identify and examine three broad practices and associated politics of place‐making among the residents and their implications for revisiting the motto of the right to the city: the politics of land commodification; the politics of patience, hope, and incremental homemaking; and the politics of mobility and temporality. Although scholars have sympathetically critiqued "whose" rights, "what" rights and "what kind" of rights "the right to the city" entails, scholars within the right to the city framework implicitly have spatially and conceptually fixed the "city" and practices of resistance in the gentrifying urban cores. Moreover, existing scholarship envisions the right to the city motto as an oppositional demand to reclaim and redistribute resources to co‐create an inclusive and emancipatory city. Moving beyond this conceptualisation of the "city" within the right to the city motto as an emancipatory and ideal one, I shed light on the "kind" of a city the diverse actors produce in Delhi's periphery. Refraining from suggesting a normative conceptualisation, I argue that the right to the city as practised on the ground is also a right to co‐create an ever‐emerging city with colliding trajectories of opportunities and constraints beyond an inclusive and emancipatory city, as generally perceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]