RECONCEPTUALIZING VALUE & SPACE: LEARNING FROM THE SLUMDWELLERS OF DELHI

Abstract

The world is urbanizing at a rapid rate and since 2009, more people live in cities than in rural areas. As the predominant mode of habitation, cities are understood as the spatialization of capitalist social relations in which the inhabitants who create the city are marginalized in favor of those who have the power and the means to realize the exchange value of the city. The fundamental contradiction between use and exchange value is inscribed on the urban, and space becomes a by-product of capitalist production. Space, however, produces the social and is socially produced. Social relations in the urban are not mediated and manifest by just capitalism and therefore this understanding of cities ignores the ways in which space is produced by those that interact with space as a more than a commodity. It fails to understand the urban as produced simultaneously through the agency, hope, and contestation that takes place in the everyday lives of marginalized inhabitants. Using grounded theory analysis, I present evidence from 124 ethnographic interviews and 8 months of fieldwork in Kathputli Colony, Delhi to show that slumdwellers produce urban space through their everyday acts of living. Centering the stories and anecdotes that residents shared with me, I show that residents create and find value in their spaces which lies outside the capitalist relation of use and exchange. Based in the domestication of land, appropriation of space, incremental practices of building and socio-material engineering, residents create and instill value in space. Using Henri Lefebvre’s (1994) dialectic of l’habiter and habitat as the difference between inhabiting and mere building, I conceptualize imbued value to articulate the kinds of value that residents create and instill in space through their continuous acts of inhabiting their settlement as ghar (home). The significance of this concept of imbued value lies in how it shifts attention back to the slum as settlement and demands that we reorient our understandings of the city by viewing it from the perspectives of slum-dwellers. From this vantage point, we see in urban spaces the more-than-capitalist spatial value that residents imbue on it.