ABSTRACT
Space is significant to urban politics in India. The Slum Rehabilitation Policy (SRP) of the Government of Maharashtra (GoM) in India aims to rehabilitate slum-dwellers by moulding the existing spatial structure of the self-built settlements. This chapter demonstrates that the SRP effectively proposes a modernist spatial structure of individuated apartments and high-rise buildings, effectively confining and ordering the socio-spatiality of the self-built human settlements. Yet, ethnographic explorations of two slum rehabilitation projects in Pune, India, demonstrate that in/formal socio-spatial practices possess an adaptive agency, which builds community's resilience to the modernist enterprise of the Indian state. Here, the term in/formality is used as a heuristic device to locate those practices that the state policies neglect but institutions and professionals support in practice. In effect, these in/formal socio-spatial practices unsettle the fixed boundaries of modern spatiality; make space expandable, flexible, and adaptable; and help the community build resilience to colonial modernity.
