‘It’s a Matter of Land’: The Politics of Spatial Illegality and Cooperation in an Informal Settlement in Delhi

Abstract

This article offers a unique lens through which to theorise neoliberal governance from the perspective of the politics of space and everyday surveillance. Situated in the informal settlement of ‘Manohar Nivas’ in New Delhi, the article draws from over two years of ethnographic research and formal semi-structured interviews with children, their families, civil society and state representatives. Bringing theories of spatialised power into conversation with Faranak Miraftab’s framework on the mutually constitutive concepts of ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces of participation, it argues that Manohar Nivas is an ‘invented’ spatial domain of regulatory power wherein discretionary surveillance operates to enforce precarity and entrench poverty. These dynamics, however, are mitigated to some degree through spatial cooperation and possibilities for citizen participation in opposition to state domination and violence.