The Hidden Abodes of the Urban: infrastructural labour and urban transformation in the Delhi National Capital Region

Urban geographers have emphasized the dwindling significance of productive work, gradual physical displacement and expulsion of labour, and rise of speculative finance-dominated urbanism in contemporary Indian megacities (Goldman 2015; Sanyal and Bhattacharya 2009). In such conditions, the threat of "wageless life" (Denning 2010), as evidenced by the growth of insecure low-paid jobs, work "beyond the wage" (Montieth et al. 2021), and unemployment, looms increasingly larger over the futures of ordinary people. From the perspective of global labour history, rather than being a new norm of labour relations, the turn towards informalization signifies the real norm of insecurity and precariousness that has dominated labour relations in the Global South (Breman and van der Linden, 2014). Using a multi-sited, mixed methods approach combining oral history interviews with migrant informal(ised) construction and maintenance workers and their families, archival research at colonial and post-colonial archives in India and the UK, and key informant interviews with housing and labour organizers conducted over 10 months of fieldwork, this project traces how the informalization, deregulation, and expropriation of the unpaid labour of migrant workers, working-class women, and agrarian households has been a fundamental precondition to and continued basis for urban economic development in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR). By centering less sectorally legible forms of infrastructural labour (Gidwani 2015) performed by migrant workers, unwaged forms of provisional labour (Elson 2000) performed by working women, and more-than-urban questions of gender, land, and caste, this project contributes to ongoing debates in labour geography, urban geography, and critical development studies. Focusing on the transformations and continuities in the everyday socio-political and working lives of informal workers and their families in Delhi's building construction industry through the long twentieth century, this project helps disentangle informal labour both from its ahistorical association with 'southern underdevelopment' and conflation with neoliberal regimes of flexible accumulation. In so doing, it reveals how labour informality was actively constructed through the privatised regulation of key aspects of the labour process (including recruitment and control) and of labour's social reproduction (including the family, housing, food and other essentials of urban life) and inscribed into processes of urban development and transformation. While the extant literature on labour geography in Delhi has focused on working life in outward looking and globally connected industries such as garment and auto-manufacturing, or newer patterns of gig-and platform-based work, my research enriches our understanding of so-called "surplus populations" who flit in and out of domestic and "immodern" industries and wage relations, and grounds how their labour continues to provide invisible subsidies to urban development. As "crises of reproduction" (Fraser 2016) induced by austerity surge in the Global North, the findings of this project also support extending the concept of informality to understand different historical and contemporary regimes of "precarity." Finally by tracing informal workers strategies of adaptation and visions of social change, this research forefronts a labour-centred view of just cities and labour-led urban development. As such it raises important questions for how to enact political transformation, as well as policy-centred and advocacy-based interventions into the future of urban work. The fellowship will provide me with the opportunity to disseminate these findings to academics, labour advocacy groups, and policymakers, generate greater public engagement, build my professional networks, and develop my grant-writing skills to prepare for a successful academic career.