Introduction

Located within a world of moving capital, forms of informal housing emerge in the Global South as a means of appropriating urban space (YUVA, 2019). These housing arrangements have particular inherent and relational temporalities, that is, these practices hold a spatial, material and experiential relationship with time – often, to consolidate, through incremental growth, change in material and perceived security. However, these housing temporalities may be non-linear, revealing a life of precarious circumstances – floods, fire, evictions and changing individual and political circumstances (Bhan, 2017). This chapter argues that this temporality matters: it is a space of transformation, that is, of socio-economic and political mobility, and should be of key interest to discourses on housing. Literature across disciplines on mobility, poverty and capabilities, and choice and agency suggest that the temporality of these housing practices is not just symptomatic of a quantitative movement of people or finance across space, but also implies a qualitative shift in well-being (Sen, 1999; 2000; Dani and Moser, 2008; Narayan and Kapoor, 2008; Cresswell, 2010; Griffiths et al, 2013). However, state narratives that hold a limited reading of the temporality of informal housing practices further set into motion conditions for precarity.

This chapter locates itself within the city of Delhi, India, to illustrate state narratives of housing temporalities through two cases. In Delhi, cycles of evictions have broken large ‘slum’ clusters, or bastis, ‘unsettling the city’ (Bhan, 2017) into further spatial configurations of ‘moving slums’ with particular ‘precarious temporalities’ (Kalyan, 2014): waiting during resettlement, resultant cycles of homelessness from forced eviction and peripheral resettlement.