Capture and Consumer Citizenship: Towards Uneven Terrains of Dispossession and Inhabitation

Contemporary global urbanization propels the dispossession of those using public lands to enable investment-friendly, profit-generating global cityscapes. These impacts of urban development, however, are complicated by patronage relations and other symbiotic economic and political ties between state actors and urban residents in the Global South. Struggles for inhabitation in these contexts frequently lie at the liminalities between advance and retreat, autonomy and dependence, property logics and commoning practices.

Based on long-term ethnographic engagement with and participation in struggles for tenure security in Chennai, India, I illuminate some of these practices. The first is capture, pidippu in Tamil, an emic category that emerges from urban residents to refer to a stealthy and ongoing appropriation of urban land and life through routine practices of autoconstruction in increasingly commodifying urban landscapes (cf. Simone 2022). Capture itself is neither a singular event nor a consistently expansionist endeavour. It is an adaptive, dynamic practice emblematic of the ebbs and flows of urban informality as it includes the creation of local housing economies, commoning strategies to socialize reproduction and care, as well as strategic ceding of gains already made as a bargain for increased legitimacy and security. Capture is practiced alongside claims to consumer citizenship and participation in related rent-seeking economies of services essential for social reproduction in the city. Together, these strategies reveal uneven terrains in which dispossession and negotiations for citizenship can unfold, illuminating expected and unexpected opportunities for continued inhabitation in the city. Sometimes, these practices tap into the state-capital nexus, rupturing existing understandings of capture in actually existing neoliberalisms (Peck et al 2018).

Peck, J., Brenner, N. and Theodore, N., 2018. Actually existing neoliberalism. The Sage handbook of neoliberalism, 1, pp.3-15.

Simone, A., 2022. The surrounds: Urban life within and beyond capture. Duke University Press.