City of shadows: slums and informal work in Bangalore

Abstract

Alongside debates over rising inequalities, the stubborn persistence of urban poverty, globally, has emerged as a major academic and policy concern, typically framed by the paradigms of basic services and welfare. In the backdrop of Bangalore’s evolution into India’s Silicon Valley, City of Shadows presents research spanning old, inner-city slums, new migrant settlements in urban peripheries, slum development projects, and garment export and construction workers. This research highlights that, inter-generationally, the urban poor remain tied to traditional, low-income occupations, or get incorporated into new urban growth channels, such as export industries and low-end services, under highly unfavourable terms and conditions. Debates on the developmental state, democracy and the urban poor’s political agency are used to problematise the complex relationship of informal work to contemporary theories of class. Using the concepts of the old poor and the new poor to explore channels of urban inclusion and exclusion, City of Shadows demonstrates that the poor’s vulnerabilities vary profoundly under different regimes of informal economies actively constructed by both the state and the market.