ABSTRACT
Land is the currency of power in Mumbai, and housing is the principal arena in which this power is expressed, experienced, contested, and transformed. Th e defi ning characteristic of its housing politics is that as Mumbai’s elites vie with other urban elites to provide a home for global capital, its poor fi nd it increasingly challenging to negotiate a home in the city. Th e urban poor fi nd themselves cast as outsiders who threaten the neo-liberal re-visioning of the city through their presence and their trespasses. Th e “annihilation of space by time” that enables the globalization project, the geographer Don Mitchell (2003) points out, has precipitated an “annihilation of space by law” as city aft er city institutes measures to criminalize the homeless in a bid to provide an attractive, secure home for global capital. Th ese measures, he argues, by denying the homeless the space to reproduce themselves, ultimately boil down to their physical annihilation: “We are creating a world,” he contends, “in which a whole class of people cannot be-simply because they have no place to be” (p. 171).
