From Housing to Infrastructure of Racialisation: The Politics of Caste in Smart Housing Interventions in India

Abstract

This paper conceptualises housing as an infrastructure of racialisation in smart cities. With smart urbanism becoming central to urban governance, housing is emerging as a new geography of technological interventions in India. I argue that these interventions are central to the reproduction of unequal power relations and difference in everyday life. The paper specifically analyses how caste-based marginalities, as part of wider structures and processes of socio-spatial racialisation, are reproduced through the mundane intertwining of ideological, techno-material and embodied experiences of housing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi, I demonstrate how technological interventions in housing are imagined and used by dominant actors to maintain control over already marginalised lower-caste communities. In doing so, the paper highlights how housing assumes the qualities of infrastructure for racialisation, in turn, bringing attention to how politics of differences and inequalities are central in the conception and operationalisation of smart urbanism.