Slum Evictions through the Lens of Labour: Capture, Value Generation, and Belonging in the Indian City

Abstract Following the lead of labour movements, this article frames slums as labour geographies whose evictions constitute the devaluation of labour in spatial terms. This devaluation occurs in two modes: in the first, through the rendering of workers as “encroachers” or “the urban poor” in policy documents and public discourse, thereby unmooring workers from their geographies of reproduction. In the second, evictions entail the material erasure of the unwaged labour of autoconstruction and other activities that produce and sustain these geographies. Through ethnographic research in Chennai, India, and archival work, “capture” emerges as an embodied practice and emic concept that makes visible value generated through the reproduction of labour power, and the labour sunk into urban lands where access to the realm of the formal is foreclosed. Visibilising this labour of caste‐marginalised working classes is a key way by which discourse on who belongs in the city can be transformed.