Maynooth University Department of Geography invites you to attend an online seminar presented by Dr Debangana Bose.
Autogenic Displacement: Beyond Mega Displacement in the ‘Global South’ Cities
This talk provides fresh insights into a question relevant to urban studies worldwide: how does supposedly emancipatory practices of place-making and claiming a right to the city lead to exclusion and displacement from within a community? Research on urban displacement in the ‘Global South’ cities has largely focused on mega displacement processes where external agents such as the state, private developers, the judiciary or the middle classes evict and displace informally-settled low-income residents from inner parts of large cities where they migrate and squat on public and private land in search of better jobs. The literature lacks attention to displacement processes that occur after such mega displacement or mass eviction and within resettlement sites. Moving beyond narratives of mega displacement in urban ‘cores’ in the so-called ‘Global South’ cities, I unpack what I call ‘autogenic displacement’; autogenic displacement refers to a range of displacement pressures whereby exclusionary practices of placemaking and commodification of land though an illicit property market among some displaced slum dwellers prompt a loss of a sense of place among fellow slum dwellers within the same community as opposed to mega displacement driven by external agents such as the state and the middle-classes. Using selective data drawn from thirteen months of intensive ethnographic research in Delhi’s peripheral slum resettlement sites, I argue that the exclusionary practices of placemaking among some slum dwellers initiate further rounds of displacement among fellow displaced slum dwellers with or without spatial dis/relocation. In doing so, I dissect the displaced slum dwellers’ lived experiences of displacement in a peripheral resettlement site in Delhi’s western periphery and their practices of placemaking based on their intersecting identities relative to caste, gender, age, religion, occupation, previous place of residence, and pre-existing social networks with state agents at various levels.
