Slums: Of Labor and Democracy in Indian Cities - Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums and Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay Available to Purchase

Given the sheer scale of informal land and labor markets in non-Western contexts, the “slum” is often a privileged analytic for understanding the South Asian city, ranging from development studies that have spawned a veritable industry around sites and services, slum upgrading, titling, and other housing policies and programs, to postcolonial theorists who argue that the “informal city” constitutes a historical difference in the trajectory of capitalism at the edges of empire. Two recent books, by Sheetal Chhabria and Adam Michael Auerbach, take up the “slum” question but from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Chhabria's Making the Modern Slum reveals the making of the “slum” as a stigmatized category of rule in late colonial Bombay. Auerbach's Demanding Development shows the workings of local democratic politics in contemporary “slums” in Bhopal and Jaipur. What can be gained from reading these two books, by a historian and a political scientist, on “slums”...