Four places tell these stories. While all reveal the same violent cycle, the diversity of their social profiles, histories and geographies shapes very different rollouts and responses.

Kamathipura

Red light districts are treated like pariahs. Kamathipura, in the heart of the Island city, is no exception. But this is a story of the marginalised and migrant labouring communities of Kamathipura as they contest its stigmatisation to reclaim and transform their neighbourhood.

JVLR

Urban infrastructure can inflict spatial violence on poor communities. Jogeshwari Vikhroli Link Road (JVLR) brought distant locations across Mumbai region closer after 2011. But it sliced through an informal settlement and ‘maimed’ a valued place that was an auto-constructed infrastructure of consolidating precarious lives.

Nala Sopara

This story traces the violent geographies of displacement, organised abandonment and disposability that peripheralise certain ecologies and groups of people while (re)making Mumbai. Focussing on one periphery, Nala Sopara, this story also highlights counter-narratives of repair and remaking that unsettle simple dualities of core-periphery.

M-East ward

We often assume cities to be homogeneous places. However, some of its places and communities are subjected to countless environmental hazards. This is a story of an area which has been peripheralised through the concentration of such hazardous uses over the last seventy years and the struggles of its residents to live a decent and secure life in the wake of the same.