Experiments in peripheral urbanization: Building and unbuilding commons in urban India

Abstract

Peripheral urbanization is the predominant mode of producing space in the Global South, in which residents build their own homes and neighborhoods, becoming citizens and political agents in the process. In this article, I bring feminist ethnographic attention to community infrastructure such as childcare centers built collectively by women residents in MGR Nagar, an informal urban settlement in Chennai, India, as understudied examples of autoconstruction in peripheral urbanization. Marxist feminism enables a theorization of these infrastructures of social reproduction as urban commons that assert collective spatial autonomy and enable moral claims on urban space, while serving the everyday needs of its residents. The subsequent demolition of the childcare center caused symbolic and material loss to residents. However, the ceding of territorial autonomy and spatial privileges was a way for them to make new material and political gains in the city, suggesting that a feminist politics of space is possible in which legitimacy and responsibility are demanded from the state. The commons in turn can be seen as durable countertopographies enabling a politics of place in multiple locations.

To build and (let) destroy: Introduction

On a warm, humid evening in August 2016, over 70 residents of MGR Nagar, ¹ an informal settlement in Chennai, had gathered under a streetlight for a community meeting. An architect ally was describing a plan he had drawn up for a childcare center: a main room, kitchen, and front verandah in a 400-square-foot piece of land. “This is a building for our children, for them to eat and play and learn … a building for us. Shall we come together and make this happen?” Malliga, resident and local leader asked, to be met with great enthusiasm.

As construction began, residents contributed labor, expertise, and resources every day, to help build the facility in only a month’s time. A teacher and a helper from MGR Nagar cared for and taught preschool children in the facility for several hours a day, as the children acclimatized themselves to a school-like setting and their mothers went to work. After 22 months of functioning in this way, the childcare center built by residents was demolished by the local Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA; an elected representative) so a government-run center (anganwadi) could be built there. Despite the considerable investment they had made into the center they had built, the residents allowed the demolition, choosing after discussion, not to protest at all.

The story of the childcare center is a story of autoconstruction, the predominant building practice in the Global South through which residents incrementally build their homes and neighborhoods, thereby becoming active agents in the production of urban space (Bhan, 2017; Caldeira, 2017; Holston, 1991). In this article, I bring scholarly attention to autoconstruction led by and centering women in their attempt to aid social reproduction in the settlement and ease their access to employment. I detail how they built a commons that enabled a moral claim to city land for residents, while also serving as a site of social, economic, and cultural significance. Its subsequent demolition by an elected representative illuminates a careful calculation of political and practical costs and benefits by women urbanizers in which ceding of settlement space without protest was chosen as the way to secure legitimacy and the right to the city. The commons, in turn, revealed itself as a portable technology that can enact a politics of place while being materially durable.

I arrive at this understanding as a long-time member of Pennurimai Iyakkam (“women’s rights movement” in Tamil), a 40-year-old organization that has been mediating in the personal and collective lives of the female residents in MGR Nagar and other settlements since the 1980s. Originally a group that was responding to what they perceived as “women’s issues” – domestic violence, murders of women when they did not comply with demands of dowry (“dowry deaths”) – a growing working-class membership led the Iyakkam to recognize the inextricable connections between women’s issues and access to land and basic services in the city, evolving into a movement for female residents of poor settlements. Over the last few decades, the Iyakkam has recruited women into citywide mobilization against evictions of urban poor settlements, helped MGR Nagar residents fight evictions twice (and re-squat once), mobilized local women around childcare, and arbitrated in domestic disputes and provided legal advice to women. Given its close alignment and overlapping membership with a national-level construction workers’ union as well as a federation of unorganized workers across multiple sectors, the question of access and rights to livelihood is another key concern. This constitutes the third inextricable axis in the work of the Iyakkam, alongside the concerns of women and tenure security and basic services (see also Harriss, 2007). ² Across the union, federation and the Iyakkam, there are about 200 members among the residents of MGR Nagar.

I was introduced to residents in the settlement by Malliga, my colleague in the Iyakkam. Fieldwork in MGR Nagar entailed a kind of “deep hanging out” (Renato Rosaldo as quoted in Clifford, 1996: 5) with residents between August 2016 and September 2017 and summer visits in 2018 and 2019, along with semi-structured interviews with about 30 residents and several informal discussions with women who emerged as my key respondents. Through this process, I became familiar with the daily modes by which women sought to preserve and enhance their families' conditions of living. Women are active and enterprising urbanizers (Miraftab, 2001), especially in the face of inadequate social infrastructure. The female residents of MGR Nagar and the Iyakkam led the construction of a pre-school childcare center to address the nutritional and educational needs of children below the age of five, and thus enable mothers to join the workforce. When the time came to decide the future of the childcare center they had built, women remained agents of urbanization who could negotiate with state actors to give up their center to make new gains, instead of resisting or protesting dispossession after the fact. During my time in the settlement, I actively participated in the planning of, and contributed monetarily to raising and running the center. Therefore, my methods are best described as observant participation (Vargas, 2008): I was at once, a member of the Iyakkam allied with the residents in the endeavour, while observing the squat through its various stages and learning first-hand about autoconstruction and state–society relationships in an informal settlement.

Existing literature on autoconstructed “homegrown” neighborhoods tend to focus on dense economic and political ties in the neighborhood and the multi-functionality of spaces (Benjamin, 2008; Echanove and Srivastava, 2016; Ghertner, 2020). Paying feminist attention to squatting and autoconstruction through the lens of social reproduction enables a focus on collectively built infrastructures that serve the everyday needs of women in these settlements: these are modes of autoconstruction that remain understudied thus far. Consistent with literature on the role of material objects in obtaining rights (Das, 2011; Ranganathan, 2014), I show that these infrastructures can be theorized as urban commons that enable moral claims on urban space. While literature on peripheral urbanization forwards that informal urban spaces “are never quite done, always being altered, expanded, and elaborated upon” (Caldeira, 2017: 5, emphasis mine), I suggest that much like expanding, ceding urban territory, building as well as unbuilding are part of the repertoire of negotiational spatial strategies to stake claims on the city.

In recognition of the heterogeneity of urbanization processes and the uneven terrains of possibilities in each city and settlement (Caldeira, 2017), this article is an inductive attempt to expand our collective imagination of what peripheral urbanization could yield, especially its potential to facilitate a feminist production of space. It does not claim to identify any universal or generalizable features. Instead, I attempt to produce intimate, minor theory (Katz, 2017) within theory of peripheral urbanization, in which the everyday acts of creating and maintaining life are constitutive of urban spatialities and subjectivities that are always in the making.

This article will first locate peripheral urbanization in the context of the contemporary Indian city. Bringing together insights from postcolonial urban theory and Marxist feminism, it will identify the political potential in the materialities of building and unbuilding, by collectives of women transforming space for social reproduction. It will proceed to detail ethnographically how residents of MGR Nagar raised communal infrastructures of social reproduction and care (Alam and Houston, 2020), asserting collective spatial autonomy while also engaging the state. Autoconstructed facilities that socialize reproductive activities in MGR Nagar can be theorized as (urban) commons (Federici, 2019) that function as a collective instrument of negotiation with state actors: residents and activists invest in it, the potential to make moral claims on the state with which to receive protection from eviction. Finally, the article will forward a tentative theory of a feminist politics of space, in which peripheral urbanization is not always expansionist or defensive in nature. Residents of MGR Nagar suggest that sometimes the ceding or surrender of territorial autonomy and spatial privileges is a radical way to make new material and political gains in the city. Consistent with literature on the commons as an ethos of social practice (Linebaugh, 2008), the commons ultimately reveals itself as a portable, resilient material and cultural practice that enables a politics of place.

Politics of peripheral urbanization in the contemporary Indian city

Building and unbuilding for citizenship

Teresa Caldeira (2017) describes peripheral urbanization as the predominant mode of producing space in the Global South through a set of interrelated processes. Key among these are distinctive forms of agencies and temporalities in which residents autoconstruct their own neighborhoods. MGR Nagar is illustrative of this mode of producing the city, in which residents build their homes their neighborhoods incrementally, relying on resources they are able to harness at a given moment, often involving their own labor, and a combination of strategy, bricolage, imagination, and improvisation (Caldeira, 2017: 5). Residents chose a piece of land in the 1970s and cleared it with their bare hands to prepare it for settlement, first building provisional shanties of found materials and lightweight roofs, and subsequently with more permanent materials like brick, cement, and tiles. Over the next few decades, MGR Nagar swelled to multiple times its original size, and is now densely packed with over 500 resident families.

Residents now have regular water delivery, a public toilet complex nearby, and streetlights. These amenities are obtainable by virtue of the political nature of relationships between state actors and society, which has been theorized by multiple scholars of postcoloniality. A whole host of paralegal arrangements with bureaucratic actors and elected representatives deliver basic services and welfare amenities to residents (Chatterjee, 2004), enabling them to create entire neighborhoods on public land they do not own. Peripheral urbanization is enabled by what Caldeira calls “transversal logics” (2017: 7), marked by complicated shifting and unstable relationships between the government and residents, which cannot be explained by dualistic relationships of formality and informality. This has direct repercussions on the production of these urban spaces: peripheries are constantly improvised and “in the making” (Chatterjee, 2004: 5–7), in ways that are contingent on the status of these negotiated relations with state actors. The case of MGR Nagar demonstrates that this does not just involve the swelling and concretizing of the peripheries, but also the sometimes-necessary scaling back of neighborhood building, unbuilding. Urbanization writ large necessarily entails both building and unbuilding as part of consumption and reproduction, both of which are productive of the environment (Labban, 2019). Autoconstruction, a dynamic production of urban space by residents, can thus hardly be a linear, consistently expansionist endeavour, simply building instead of also unbuilding as part of its imagining and re-imagining.

The production and re-production of material environments through autoconstruction produce new, innovative democratic practices and forms of citizenship (Caldeira, 2017). Literature on informal settlements in South Asia has also highlighted the centrality of material objects such as ration cards and piped water connections in obtaining rights (Das, 2011; Ranganathan, 2014). In that vein, other material objects, specifically, communal infrastructure such as childcare centers, and their moral potential to provide legitimacy to MGR Nagar and its residents also emerge as key negotiational means through which continued residence in the city may be ensured. ³ While it is true that as a result, urban spaces are constantly elaborated upon, the history of MGR Nagar and other informal settlements suggests that frequent dismantling of shanties was expected, even necessary in the settlement’s early days to avoid attention from the authorities. This type of unbuilding by residents themselves (unlike more top-down forms of material destruction such as demolitions and evictions) is a way to negotiate stronger citizenship claims in the long term through the durability of the material form of the dwelling. The destruction of the childcare center in MGR Nagar, this time by the elected representative, only emphasizes the vagaries in citizenship rights even decades after the residents are properly settled, so to speak. The most recent threat to their continued residence in the city takes the form of an expressway that will connect the Chennai port to its industrial suburbs, possibly causing the eviction of the settlement. ⁴ In these circumstances, allowing the unbuilding of neighborhood infrastructure was a way for residents to continue to stake claims on the city.

Towards multiple and collective subjectivities

James Holston’s theorization of autoconstruction in São Paulo (1991, 2008) is rooted in Brazil’s historical conditions, specifically the valorization of homeownership and property rights in the face of the erosion of labor rights and unions. Here, autoconstruction has politicized urban residents into collective action demanding regularization and the rights to participate in consumer and property rights markets. This perhaps explains the overemphasis on the individual home in Holston’s account. Contemporary housing policy documents in India, Gautam Bhan (2017) points out, also reduce the idea of “housing” to a “house,” a discrete economic and legal dwelling unit, instead of the many possible readings offered by what is commonly referred to as a “slum”, a relational space co-constituted by the various dynamic circulations that occur in it, community infrastructure and social amenities. Urban land occupied by the poor is embroiled in myriad de-facto tenures anchored in complex local histories and political and economic relationships (Benjamin, 2008). The settlement is “lively” (Ghertner, 2020) with an interchangeability of land uses that is not dependent on individual property-based logics alone. Instead, the material bases of this liveliness of land indicate the multiplicity and the complexity of subjectivities possible, beyond simply a desire to participate in consumer and property markets.

Nikhil Anand (2017) sees urban poor residents in Mumbai as simultaneously occupying different political positions as they are serviced by various urban institutions and infrastructure. The everyday political practices of the poor may reveal heterogenous, often paradoxical forms of social agency (Roy, 2011) that may not be reducible to any one route to continued urban citizenship. MGR Nagar’s residents live in mostly discrete plots of various sizes and engage in a thriving local informal housing economy in which houses are bought, rented, leased out, mortgaged, and sold, with transactions carried out through agreements – even as they occupy land owned by the state. Residents demonstrate an interest in propertied citizenship in multiple ways; however, alongside, they also demonstrate communal socialities and subjectivities that are not individualized, as is common in non-privatized land systems in the Global South (Ghertner, 2020). They act collectively, for instance, to build shared social infrastructure, illustrating that autoconstruction is often a collective endeavour.

Collective subjectivities enable production of space and the construction of commons such as childcare centers which themselves cannot be commodified and enable a collective moral claim on the land. In MGR Nagar, the commons yielded first, political and spatial autonomy, and later, in exchange for that autonomy, increased legitimacy where they lived, improved access to state welfare and basic amenities, and tightened reciprocal ties between the residents and their elected representative. From a feminist perspective, this strategy is a decisive move against a binary conception of political possibility as consent or resistance: it is political practice that is not “obviously” or “naturally” subversive but ends up drawing resources and responsibility from the state instead (Fincher, 2013). Agency in this instance does not adhere to a liberal, “liberatory” understanding of subordination; it is instead “located within discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment,” (Mahmood, 2005: 15). The structural conditions for the residents of MGR Nagar are created by their need to collectively negotiate with various actors in political society to ensure particular outcomes. In Tamil Nadu, long-term party loyalties and membership among urban poor residents were assiduously cultivated by the leading political parties over many years, these ties holding strong in urban settlements even now, placing constraints on other forms of collective action and determining local outcomes (Coelho and Venkat, 2009). Any action by residents, therefore, entails careful working with and around political interests.

Women producing space

As already pointed out, what constitutes a “neighborhood” beyond an aggregation of individual houses in autoconstructed homegrown neighborhoods remains unclear in existing literature. The multiple, shifting uses of settlement space, especially those that are economic in nature, are frequently attended to (Benjamin, 2008; Echanove and Srivastava, 2016; Ghertner, 2020). But an underdiscussed but key consideration here is the spatial logics in urban poor settlements that entail the appropriation of neighborhood space for “private” functions, inevitably by women given the gendered labour demanded by social reproduction (Haritas, 2021). The lack of basic services essential for social reproduction in urban poor neighborhoods is seen by women residents as a problem concerning the collective, not the individual (Haritas, 2021), and as essentially “women’s issues”, as the history of the Iyakkam indicates. Therefore, any mobilization to advocate for increased access to services by women is also an attempt to make public those functions that are feminized and invisibilized in the “private” or domestic sphere. In doing so, women residents are key actors in enabling the emergence of neighborhoods that are more complex and diverse in form and function, and allow us to see them as more than just a collection of individual houses, their reproductive labour and political mobilization enabling material improvements and transformations in the neighborhood (see also Haritas, 2021).

Infrastructures for common or collective use are routinely constructed: in MGR Nagar, these include physical infrastructures that improve the quality of everyday life, such as ration shops – where residents access subsidized food and fuel – and childcare centers. The production of an urban settlement, therefore, involves spatial practices that sustainably create and maintain a neighborhood by addressing the many needs of its residents beyond just a roof over their heads. Subsistence activities undertaken by women in poor urban neighborhoods have been necessary to ensure the material conditions of life (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 2000), of which housing is only one component. Other autoconstructed infrastructures have received very little scholarly attention so far.

Marxist feminists have long since been interested in social reproduction because the labor of sustaining and reproducing life is one that is invisibilized and undervalued, as well as gendered and racialized. “In the feminist argument, renewing life is a form of work,” as Laslett and Brenner (1989: 383) argue, “a kind of production, as fundamental to the perpetuation of society as the production of things” (emphasis mine). If in the Lefebvrian view, every mode of production produces its own space, then so do processes of social reproduction. Women’s attempts to aid and socialize the labor of social reproduction radically transform space; however, many of these transformations remain invisible, much like the labor involved in reproducing life itself.

Silvia Federici (2019) observes that creating a “commons” is a critical way to socialize the reproduction of life, given that the idea of the commons from a feminist standpoint necessitates the production of women as a common subject (110). ⁵ Women-only housing and squats during the women's liberation movement in London of the 1960s and 70s were instances when women came together to take control of the material basis of their lives, and participate in cheap, collective living (Wall, 2017). Women learnt plumbing, electrical wiring and building to sustain themselves, and came together to do gardening, conduct sports and cultural events, and run women's centers, libraries and art centers. In post-war Italy, the Autonomia Movement was committed to squatting and class struggles mounted in the sphere of social reproduction (Vasudevan, 2017): self-managed women's collectives created radical urban infrastructures including day-care centers, health clinics, and shelters where feminist political subjectivities were sharpened. This was a wider interpretation of the struggles for housing, one which was attentive to cultural and political needs of urban squatters (Vasudevan, 2017), even responding to struggles elsewhere, including the Zapatista Movement (Mudu 2004). This stands in contrast to Holston’s interpretation of the Brazilian context, where it is mobilization around home ownership and propertied citizenship first that has the effect of expanding the field of the political to include issues around the home, family, daily life, and women. This suggests that the role of women’s work follows or is secondary to the actual building practices of autoconstruction, only relevant in the (re-) production of community.

While analyzing the spatialities and materialities of women’s everyday life and activism in South Asia, accounts tend to largely focus on inhabitation and maintenance practices. For instance, Richa Nagar (2000) trains her eye on spatial strategies in women's grassroots political activities to uncover social differences and how everyday gendered spaces can be transformed. Ayona Datta (2007) examines how the spatiality and architecture of everyday spaces in an urban poor settlement is experienced as, and used to contest social control. In her study of water access in New Delhi, Yaffa Truelove (2019) demonstrates how water infrastructure governance is produced by, and produces embodied gendered differences. While deeply sensitive to gendered dynamics and experiences, these accounts focus primarily on the negotiation and governance of already built spaces, not as much on the building practices and the primary production of space through autoconstruction by women in urban settlements. It seems necessary to take cognizance of the large degree of control that women can and do exercise on creating, rather than only negotiating their environments as urbanizers in the region.

In a recent account of gendered political work in urban poor settlements, Kaveri Haritas (2021) brings attention to women’s work for and with NGOs to improve education in their neighborhoods, including through the construction of additional classrooms in the local government school. In what is possibly India's most visible story on women building their own infrastructure, the alliance of the NGO Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, Mahila Milan and the National Slum Dwellers Federation has been conducting housing exhibitions and toilet festivals in Mumbai to mainstream the poor's ways of building (Appadurai, 2001). These strategies, however, do emphasize a model of gendered “negotiated development” that involves working with the state, NGOs and other developmental actors (Roy, 2009), thus depoliticizing squatting practices and sometimes aiding displacement from the central city, even privileging the needs of “housewives” over working women (Doshi, 2013) and naturalizing women’s voluntary work within developmental circles (Haritas, 2021).

In contrast, I attend to infrastructures of care in urban poor settlements built as part of squatting and autoconstruction practices situated outside of institutional, developmental networks. They center local community autonomy in creating a bulwark against centralizing, commodifying forces in the urban, in cognition of their political potential to resist dispossession. This autonomy in building practices and maintenance of services for collective consumption, however, is enabled at least partly by funding from the government for providing childcare. This is consistent with both Caldeira’s theorization of peripheral urbanization which emphasizes a transversal engagement with the state rather than non-engagement, and feminist scholarship in the Global South that demonstrates the porosity and mutual constitution between formal and informal spaces (Miraftab, 2006, for instance.)

Easing social reproduction, establishing autonomy

The ration shop is a key site at which urban poor residents receive welfare benefits from the state. Most residents of MGR Nagar have ration cards that entitle them to subsidized food and cooking fuel every month through the Public Distribution System. However, difficulties remained in accessing some of these welfare initiatives. As local leader Kamatchi recalled during a conversation outside her house one evening in January 2017, residents were earlier assigned to a ration shop about four kilometres away, which meant residents had to spend considerable money on autorickshaw rides to and from. They were also only one of many neighborhoods that received rations from the same facility, which meant that the shop was invariably overcrowded and understocked. By 2007, residents were determined to build their own ration shop. With the support of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam political party which has a loyal base in the settlement, residents constructed their own ration shop right by the main road with monetary contributions from every household and secured the support of the Tamil Nadu Civil Supplies Department. Now, the department serves residents in their own informal neighborhood, the invited presence of the state increasing its legitimacy. Women now walk up to the shop at the beginning of the month in their nighties, enquire about when supplies will come in, and procure rations as and when they are available. Kamatchi reasoned:

if we need something, we should do it for ourselves, no? While we waited for the government to look into the issues we were facing, we would've had to spend a lot of money. Instead, we actually saved money and built our own ration shop.

There are obvious advantages to residents exercising and asserting autonomy vis-à-vis the state as a “we”, a community. Upon observing informal settlements in Peru, John F.C. Turner advocated for housing and locally specific services to be “autonomous”, decentralized, built and managed by people themselves in his seminal 1976 treatise on self-help housing. The autonomy that Turner centers in his analysis is not absolute: it is dependent on accessing essential resources, such as land, from a “central authority” (Turner, 1976: 13–17), centering the need for the state to provide the aid with which residents could make decisions about their housing (Harris, 2003). Turner emphasizes a holistic, relational vision of housing, one that is as much about self-generated community development, mutual aid, and user control as about the material conditions of habitat (Golda-Pongratz, 2021).

Much like the ration shop, the childcare center was also built through transversal engagement with official logics and state actors. News reports and activist accounts have documented that Chennai does not have adequate state-run childcare centers, or anganwadis, to meet the needs of its vulnerable populations (Sampath, 2018, for instance). ⁶ From the early 1990s, the Iyakkam started to take cognizance of the need for childcare services while women went to work (in construction, domestic work, or as street vendors), the poor nutritional status of children, and the low literacy and high dropout rates in the settlement. Under the leadership of a then very-young Malliga, the balwadi functioned for about four years, moonlighting as a non-formal education center in the evenings to help school dropouts be able to take examinations and resume formal schooling, until funding ran out in 1998 and the center became defunct.

However, during this time, the Iyakkam managed to keep running two fully functional childcare facilities in other low-income settlements in the city. A nominal amount of funds was available every month through the Rajiv Gandhi National Creche Scheme offered by the Ministry of Women and Child Development to empower non-profit organizations and community groups to run their own childcare centers, and it was this opportunity, alongside donations from its supporters that enabled Pennurimai Iyakkam to run local childcare centers of their own. These funds only provided resources to run the facility: monthly groceries, a stove, a pressure cooker and vessels to cook in, and educational charts for the children. ⁷ The actual structure of the center still needed to be constructed in MGR Nagar. It was decided that the new center could just be built on the site of the older facility.

However, this was not a decision that all residents were on board with or participated in. One asked why the site was being used to construct a childcare facility instead of a toilet. What was the point of building a toilet when we do not have sewage connections, Malliga shot back. Rani, another resident who lived right across the street from the site, questioned the takeover of a space near which motorbikes and other small vehicles could be parked conveniently. Malliga in turn, asked her why she was resisting the construction of a facility that would benefit the whole neighborhood. Rani was disgruntled, but ultimately was among those who loaned chairs for the opening of the facility. Till the very end, residents in one part of the settlement chose not to donate to the construction of the facility nor send their children there, due to long-simmering tensions between them and the residents who were leading the construction of the center.

For the commencement of the childcare service in February 2017, neighborhood youth helped clean the future site of the center, leveled the floor with construction debris (“rubbish”) from elsewhere in the settlement, and erected old bamboo poles that would hold up a yellow tarpaulin under which children could sit. Milk was boiled on a kerosene stove and served to the children for the auspicious occasion of inaugurating the service, before they went to Malliga's for a brief, formal teaching session and games. The possibility of starting the service without a dedicated facility speaks both to the multi-functionality of houses, and the “make + shift” nature of housing (Simone, 2018), where residents embrace flexibility and uncertainty to adapt to resource constraints and survive.

Construction began on International Women's Day, 8 March 2017, with a mere Rs. 7200 (∼$108 then), sufficient only to buy construction materials for the next four days. Water was drawn using the motor in a house closest to the site. Over the next month, contributions from residents – a decided minimum of Rs. 100 per household (∼$1.5) – and donations from friends of the Iyakkam poured in. Some donated in cash, others in kind, buying roofing sheets, cement bags, bricks, and ceiling fans. Local construction expertise was solicited when certain critical day-to-day decisions needed to be made. For instance, in the last stages when sand became unaffordable, the workers, themselves residents of MGR Nagar, mined sand right next to the facility, as they had frequently done to raise their own houses. Instead of the tank-based kitchen drainage initially proposed by the architect, they opted for a simpler soak pit. Hose pipes, spades, water barrels, and step ladders were routinely crowdsourced every morning. When the structure was completed, the neighborhood youth painted it (peptic pink) for free; other residents lent chairs and tables for the opening day ceremony, which was marked by a free medical camp for children (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Flyer inviting residents to the opening of the childcare center and free medical camp for children on Saturday, 8 April 2017 at 2 pm (identifiable information redacted).

The rules of the functioning of the new childcare center were set by the people running it – MGR Nagar residents and members of the Iyakkam – who determined the working hours, everyday menu, school curriculum, salaries of the staff, and uses of the space. The facility also became a site of social and cultural importance where residents could host intimate family events and mark important occasions, such as Children’s Day, through song, dance, and other cultural activities. It was ultimately a site of autoconstructed commons that embodied collectivization of local knowledge, labor, material resources, and decisionmaking (Linebaugh, 2008). Inadvertently echoing the rallying call of squatters elsewhere (Wall, 2017), Kamatchi remarked, “this facility is on government land, but no one can own it. At the same time, it belongs to all of us.”

A feminist commons for urban citizenship

In the urban context, commoning has been theorized as the everyday, often desperate attempts to survive in a context marked by high pressure on land and resources (Huron, 2018: 62). At the opening of the childcare center, Kamala, the Chennai district secretary of the Iyakkam, commented on the significance of the childcare facility:

We have been pushing to rebuild this childcare center in MGR Nagar for so long now! Only this childcare center can save the settlement (from eviction). Now we can face any threat.

Kamala was making explicit connections between the construction of the childcare center, and the possibility of the settlement being spared evictions. It was implied that the actual structure of the childcare facility, its materiality, is a significant weapon of resistance against evictions. In another instance, while checking in on the construction of the center, Geetha, one of the founders of the Iyakkam, said

That man who painted the lovely animals, birds and the alphabet on the white walls of our other center in Triplicane? We should get him to paint the walls of here as well, it would be excellent. The demolishers will take one look at them and leave without demolishing.

According to Veena Das (2011), citizenship in urban informal settlements is a moral claim: urban residents and the state are bound together by the notions of preserving life through means that lie outside the letter of the law. She highlights the role of objects such as the ration card, issued even to informal urban residents, in preserving the life of these communities. Bringing these two ideas together helps us understand the function of the childcare center in urban poor settlements like MGR Nagar. The center is very much an instance of squatting, on land that is owned by a Tamil Nadu state department. Yet, it is also a material demonstration of the vibrant life of a community, of collective labor in its construction and upkeep, and the social function it performs for the neighborhood. The affective import of catering to children, as manifested in the center and its painted walls, is also significant. In erecting the center then, residents of MGR Nagar are making moral claims to continued life in their current location. The logic is that if the childcare center is made impressive enough through the hope and labor invested in it, maybe the whole settlement will be spared. As a commons, the childcare center is a present reality that contains within it an anticipation of a world beyond capitalism and social change through social reproduction (Federici, 2019: 4). It emphasizes the use of land for subsistence in an urban landscape where land is seen as productive only if used for profitmaking and capital accumulation. In doing so, it arguably has even more moral potential than individual dwellings of families to claim public land for the community.

The goal of such a facility is not just to provide a singular service. In another neighborhood, the local childcare center created a pipeline through which more young children began to receive formal education in the 1990s. In addition, since it was a community mainly engaged in a cottage industry of rolling beedi (indigenous cigarettes), the Iyakkam also helped female residents obtain a production contract to secure their livelihoods. Emphasizing the role of the commons in establishing the “economic rights of women” (penngalin porulaadhaara urimai), the Iyakkam sees the provision of childcare services as a way to enable women to access wage opportunities, financial independence, and dignity. The facilities run by the Iyakkam employ women from the neighborhoods they are located in as teachers and helpers. This not only sustains community interest in the facility, but also provides reliable salaried employment to women in the settlement who may otherwise have been home, in the private sphere, caring for their own children with little to no income of their own. (The first helper employed in the MGR Nagar center employed was a single mother poorer than most others.) The Iyakkam thus enables a practice of caring and income generating that reproduce (gendered) capitalist social relations while also altering them, what feminist geographers Katharyne Mitchell et al. (2003) call life’s work.

The childcare center takes on additional significance considering the broader context in which it is located. In the event of evictions, livelihood options for women, in particular, are vastly constrained in peripheral resettlement sites. In addition to great difficulties in finding jobs, women have reported job insecurity in contractual labor, poor working conditions, loss of social networks and flexibility in working hours, and absence of childcare facilities as issues (Coelho et al., 2012). The loss of jobs and income experienced in the process of being forcibly moved to the peripheries has proven tough to recover from in the short to middle term. Creating and preserving the livelihoods of women in the settlement in situ through the construction of the commons thus, is an alternative to, and an act of defiance against potential, perhaps imminent dispossession. This only highlights the relevance of Turner’s ideas today in the face of an anti-poor, pro-capital state whose main mode of intervention into informal urban settlements is one of eviction and peripheral resettlement, a top-down, opaque project that causes great losses to the urban poor in terms of livelihoods, social care, and community networks. ⁸ Autoconstructed settlements, in contrast, can potentially serve as a much more viable option for the urban poor, where they can function with relative autonomy and provide for their own needs, provided they come with tenure security and protection from eviction. This is precisely the demand made by many activist groups including the Iyakkam in Chennai today.

Negotiating relationships, ceding autonomy

While autoconstruction is a largely autonomous endeavour with residents frequently building, modifying, and expanding structures, residents have to continue to manage relationships with local politicians and elected representatives, given their powerful presence in the settlement. When the MLA once visited the neighborhood in December 2016, Malliga told him about the residents’ plans to build a childcare center. At the time, he expressed interest in starting a government-run childcare service and told her to wait until he is able to gather funds and approval. However, after waiting a few months, residents went ahead and built their own center. Although several residents including Malliga belonged to the same political party as the MLA, they also wanted to preserve spatial control and autonomy over the facility where possible. Malliga once declared emphatically,

It's a good thing that these party guys did not contribute to the center. Tomorrow, they cannot ask to use our facility as a storeroom or hold party meetings here. They have no connection to the childcare facility, and we don't need them.

Even so, as a goodwill gesture, the MLA was invited to distribute presents to the children at the Children's Day celebrations at the facility in November 2018; medical camps organized by his political party earlier that year were hosted at the facility. The MLA too continued his work in the neighborhood without seeming openly resentful or disapproving, laying drainage tanks to manage rainwater ahead of the 2017 monsoons, offering food and household supplies as relief to residents.

However, by late 2018, the MLA started talks with residents and local leaders about razing down the childcare facility. A government-run childcare facility elsewhere in his constituency had become defunct, and the MLA was keen to have its resources shifted to MGR Nagar. He wanted to fund and raise a more sophisticated building in the exact same location as the one in which residents had built theirs, with a childcare facility on the bottom floor and a community hall on the floor above. Multiple discussions were held, both among residents of the settlement and the members of the Iyakkam, and with the MLA. Discussions centered around the considerable labor and resources had gone in to building the structure and running the facility, which was providing employment to local women. However, the center had been often strapped for funds; it could really benefit from the regular funding from the government in providing quality services without interruption. After deliberations that lasted many weeks, residents allowed the destruction of the center by a bulldozer one quiet morning in February 2019.

Malathi, a young resident, said to me that day in a voice-note,

The demolition was hard to take. How much we persevered to build our center … What I feel bad about is that all this while, the center was in our control, it was our balwadi, our space! Now, someone else rules over the space, even locks it up! It's not like before now, is it?

The demolition resulted in the material loss of an asset and a financial loss for residents and the Iyakkam alike. More importantly, it was a symbolic defeat of the residents, and a threat to their autonomy and ability to sustain life in the settlement, perhaps even their precarity in the city. It was also notable that while the residents lost their building at least partly due to its perceived informality, the MLA could build on the same land without a “No Objection Certificate” issued by the concerned landowning state department, residents noted.

Yet, the loss of control over settlement territory was not the end of politics, only an intermediate stage. Malathi believes that it was because residents raised a facility first that the MLA was forced to act. It meant that now the state was present in the settlement in a more explicit way: a Corporation of Chennai signboard now hangs in the new building, providing the entire neighborhood more legitimacy. Residents believed that the center will be outfitted with a toilet with running water and sewage facilities, and that they could potentially tap into them for their own homes. By demolishing something that the people had built themselves, the MLA is now pressured to keep his promises to maintain local support and be assured of votes in the upcoming elections. Considering his investment in the new infrastructure, he might be more motivated to weigh in against the demolition and eviction of MGR Nagar, if the situation were to arise. To enable this, not protest, but the giving up of settlement space was considered an advantageous move for MGR Nagar. The residents had traded autonomy and territory for political capital, the possibility of better services, and consolidation of their occupation of city land. In Das' conception (2012: 5–6), the aspirations of the urban poor are “also an anticipation of contingencies,” based on practical calculations as well as faith in opportunities presented. Residents keep possibilities open, seize opportunities where they are available, and move on, taking what they can when they fail: “living” itself as “logistics” (Simone, 2018).

Conclusion: A feminist politics of space?

Squatting is most often characterized as a spatially expansive endeavour, with new ground being appropriated by urban residents in defiance of property logics. In most accounts so far, squatting initiatives are led by men and remain patriarchal in their political organization, pointing to the performance of masculinity in and through peripheral urbanization (see Lopez and Cattaneo, 2014; Roy, 2003). They are often also militant, especially in the face of police repression or threats (see Vasudevan, 2017). Holston (2008) conceptualizes autoconstruction by the urban poor in São Paulo's peripheries as “insurgent” and “irruptive” in how citizenship or the political is seized through the occupation of new space. In this article, I highlighted some of the ways in which settlements expand spatially, specifically through the autoconstruction of critical communal infrastructures of care that aid the social reproduction of residents. These are initiatives centering women, offering that the production of urban space can be a feminist endeavour aimed at easing the domestic burdens and ensuring the economic rights of working-class women, and led by women as agents of urbanization. These material infrastructures are commons which, while resisting commodification themselves, also enable a moral claim to the city in the event of evictions.

Life in an informal settlement is enabled through a complex web of negotiational relationships. In these terrains, ceding or surrendering urban land already occupied and spatial privileges already accrued can be a radical way to make new political and material gains. Such a strategy acknowledges the porosity and dynamism of boundaries and the unevenness of territorial control (Wastl-Walter and Staeheli, 2013), in contrast to property logics which afford individualized autonomy through boundaries defensible by law (Blomley, 2019). Again, in contrast to autoconstructed expansion for propertied citizenship, territorial retraction or unbuilding in MGR Nagar was allowed with the goals of social reproduction in mind, for increased stability and resilience of the settlement. The surrender of land in this instance was not to enclosing, commodifying forces, but to the state as patron to its urban poor clients, provider of welfare, and squatter itself (Bhan, 2019). It only bound urban residents and elected representatives in tighter, interdependent, even similar relationalities: residents were effectively gambling on the political potential of the state squatting alongside residents on their turf, on greater legitimacy through increased state presence rather than outright formalization. Could this complex type of occupancy of land perhaps protect it better from dispossession?

In articulating his anxieties about urban populism in the context of insurgent urban movements across Europe and the Americas in the 1970s, Manual Castells (1983: 209–212) identified the constraints placed by “dependency” on political systems. Yet, as in Pickerill and Chatterton's (2006) definition, “autonomy” itself is interstitial in nature, without an “out there” to build autonomy from, necessitating a constant toggling between autonomous and non-autonomous tendencies. Peripheral urbanization does not occur entirely outside of official logics or clientelism (Caldeira, 2017). The giving up of the childcare facility is only one instance in a long trajectory of negotiation between residents, political actors, the state, and social movements, through which citizenship is claimed (Das, 2011). As feminist scholarship critical of liberal ideas of citizenship have long since pointed out, citizenship rights are not linear or evolutionary (Staeheli, 1999, for instance). On a temporal axis, citizenship appears stronger at some moments and weaker at others, sometimes built through unbuilding and ceding of autonomy, rather than always expanding, building upon and seizing urban territory. Territory in the urban informal settlement is perhaps just as fluid, fungible and subject to change (Ghertner, 2020), always belying the rigidities of cadastral logics and representations.

What of the commons, then? The surrender of the center did not imply the loss of a commons. Once the center in MGR Nagar was demolished, the Iyakkam simply moved the service to a nearby settlement. It entailed renting an existing structure in the settlement (made possible by a recent tranche of donations to the Iyakkam) and shifting the minimum movable infrastructure from MGR Nagar to the new location – a stove, gas cylinder, vessels to cook and store food in, a blackboard, and a few educational charts. Some children from MGR Nagar are even able to attend, given the proximity of the new facility to the neighborhood.

Indeed, the Iyakkam had taken on a similar stance when the Chennai Corporation started providing childcare in a neighborhood where the Iyakkam was running a center earlier: it acknowledged that the government has the resources to provide more nutritious food and eggs to children and simply moved the center to a location where it was needed more. Thus, the commons in this case, is really a portable apparatus that can serve the needs of urban residents facing constraint anywhere in the city. The portability is a feature of both the minimal material infrastructure with which the service can be provided, and the ethos of commoning as a social practice that can be adopted wherever it is needed. Portability even signals an openness to being dismantled or unbuilt, to respond to varying contingencies and needs.

With their potential to enable a politics of place by strengthening, defending, and transforming the local, commoning technologies of urban residents and social movements are also an illustration of what Cindi Katz (2001) calls a countertopography that challenges capitalist spatialities across different locations. Katz helps recognize first that capitalist processes tend to rework “the material grounds of social life” (2001: 725); therefore, any response must be enacted in kind. For residents anticipating a potential loss of their homes and neighborhoods and consequent displacement, practices of social reproduction need to be adaptable, nimble, even as they are necessarily material and grounded in place (see also Simone, 2020). Just as topographies provide place-based knowledge so as to enable the exercise of global capitalist power across scale and location, countertopographies help build a practical but imaginative response along different locations on contour lines, each with their own material and historical specificities; a “rooted translocalism” (Katz, 2001, 724). Intervening in childcare provision across multiple urban poor settlements in Chennai allows social movements to mobilize negotiations between residents and the local state from multiple sites.

A conception of the urban commons as portable is also one imbued with hope: it allows us to imagine the commons as that which need not always be permanently or irreversibly lost or eroded. Instead, it can be a resilient, transplantable material and cultural practice that can mushroom as a response to the absence of state care, retreat, or dispossession, to enact a politics of place. The politics of unbuilding and ceding too, need not signify the absence of resistance, but a necessary strategy to foreclose the retreat of the state from fulfilling its obligations to citizens.