ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that what gets glossed over as slums are in effect working-class neighborhoods whose resident-workers organize themselves collectively not only to stake claims on urban consumption amenities such as housing, but also to gain control over the generation and allocation of land rents as a way of staking claims on the urban economy. It explores how an urban crisis was depoliticized as the slum question in the 1970s using the instances of slum patronage and clearance from Bengaluru. In the 1970s, reflecting global shifts in the internationalization of capital and industrial restructuring into global supply chains, the former Third World countries turned away from their earlier commitment to import-substitution industrialization and toward flexible specialization. When Bengaluru's trade-union leaders made their foray into informal land development, they reframed an urban crisis of growing precarious and flexible work as a housing crisis.
