The Production of Everyday Carcerality in State‐Led Redevelopment of Informal Settlement in Delhi, India

Abstract This paper focuses on the everyday experiences of carcerality of a community, known as Kathputli Colony, that has been waiting to be rehoused by the state for over a decade in Delhi, India. We draw on Kathputli Colony's everyday experiences to argue that state‐led housing policies and practices produce carceral socio‐spatialities, rather than just transformations in the city. Everyday carcerality arrests marginalised communities within states of spatial, embodied, and temporal constraints at individual and collective levels. In turn, this paper understands state‐led housing practices of in‐situ redevelop to rehouse as part of the carceral continuum, advanced in this paper through the concept of “everyday carcerality”. We argue that the conceptual framing of everyday carcerality provokes questions on intimate yet often invisible interconnections among housing, homing, and carcerality in geographies that are not prison, yet are connected to the logics and logistics of the punitive state and its deepening entanglements with capitalist extraction of land and housing value.