Assembling the Urban Frontier: Migrants and Everyday Place-Making in Kolkata

Abstract

This article examines how migrants from the Indian Sundarbans participate in the making of Kolkata's eastern metropolitan frontier through everyday practices of settlement, labor, social reproduction, and claims-making. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2023 among rural migrants living in an informal settlement on Kolkata's urban edge, it traces how wetlands have been transformed into a densely inhabited and economically productive urban landscape. I argue that migrants do not simply adapt to processes of urban expansion; through their engagements with wetland ecologies, informal housing and property arrangements, political brokers, employers, and state institutions, they actively participate in producing the urban frontier itself. I conceptualize this frontier as an urban frontier assemblage in which migrant labor, informal property relations, ecological transformations, infrastructures, political practices, and aspirations for belonging are contingently assembled through everyday processes of urbanization. Migrant women's domestic work in neighboring middle-class households functions as a form of urban infrastructure, connecting informal settlements to the everyday reproduction of middle-class urban life. At the same time, the settlement's residents produce their own infrastructures of habitation, livelihood, sociality, and political mediation. These processes generate possibilities for securing housing, livelihoods, and recognition, but also reproduce unequal relations of class, caste, gender, and political power. Moving beyond a binary opposition between urban domination and everyday resistance, the article shows how power, aspiration, exclusion, and belonging are simultaneously produced through frontier urbanization. It argues that urban frontiers are not peripheral spaces awaiting incorporation into the city but constitutive sites of urbanization, where ecological transformation, social reproduction, labor, infrastructure, and political relations come together to produce the city.