Homeless Solidarities: The In-Between Lives of the Occupants of Chandigarh’s Streets

Abstract

This paper examines the informal solidarities of Chandigarh as a way of rethinking Chandigarh’s ordered spatiality. This objective is achieved by exploring the solidarities of Chandigarh's homeless and working-class migrant populations through the spatial dialectic of motion and obstruction. Drawing on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay’s theorisation of the street as an apparatus of city-making, the paper reads literary representations of Chandigarh alongside urban theories of space, informality, and marginality. By bringing together literary representations, urban theory, and situated observations of Chandigarh’s streets, the paper demonstrates that the city’s informal occupants are not external to its spatial order but are constitutive of it.