ABSTRACT
India, since the 1990s, has experienced economic and political transformations, including a review of the meanings of “development” and “the local.” The combined pressures of capitalist globalisation, democratisation, decentralisation and neoliberal economic reforms have challenged the traditional role of the “state,” the meaning of citizenship and the limits of the local. Consumerist ideologies of the middle class and its lifestyle, and attitudes that have shaped urban development projects and notions of world-class cities that prioritise middle-class ways of living. Consequently, slums appear as congested, polluted and become “nuisances” and face demolitions, large-scale rebuilding, displacement and relocation. The chapter is based on the case study of Bawana resettlement colony in the periphery of Delhi and how the urban poor within the new regimes of world-class city negotiate and try to struggle for their own right “in” and “to” the city and thereby to possibilities of development. It is this engagement of the poor in “inventing” spaces of participation to voice their own contentions that the chapter in particular focuses on.
