ABSTRACT
The concern of my research has been based on two sets of processes: the increasing urban affiliation of the working class leading to enormous migration and the continuing process of gentrification of the city leading to constant demolition of slums and squatter settlements to make a place for the ‘exclusives’. With the presence of two such processes, I found it interesting to understand how the urban poor are making sense of their place where the increasing aestheticization of the neoliberal city is continually pushing them out to the distant peripheries, denying their due share in the city-space and its benefits. With the sole objective to take out the real-life stories of existence and adaptation as well as hope and despair, the present work tries to inquire about life in a city where I anticipate this attempt to provide a useful lens for evaluating the ongoing development process and the nature of inclusiveness of the poor into the city-space. A total number of 417 interviews have been conducted across 277 households. The study is based on both quantitative and qualitative interviews across various working-class colonies in peri-urban Delhi, where I expect the narratives to throw light upon the way the people are trying to establish a stake in a territory and accomplish an actual sense of the ‘right to the city’. I believe the way space is imagined by this majority can be a useful tool to explore how poverty is being (re)conceptualized at the global economic and political platform, how identity is being shaped by the place, and vice-versa.
