Pandemic governmentality and houselessness: interrogating management of COVID-19 through an analysis of dwelling

The COVID-19 pandemic and its response eroded the survival mechanisms that precarious populations have at their disposal in enduring urban dispossessions. Centring a politics of dwelling, this paper examines how pandemic governance fractured inhabitation practices to uphold hegemonic notions of home and housing. As the 'home' was seen as an important site to shield from the virus, those inhabiting the streets were perceived as contaminators, and coercive and carceral measures were introduced to confine these groups physically, economically, socially, and politically. As an analytical framing, we centre biopolitics and hygienisation to argue that pandemic governmentality reiterated the 'more-than neoliberal' trajectories of urban transformation and the disproportionate impacts on the vulnerable urban groups. With an empirical focus on Mumbai, this article examines the impact the COVID-19 governance, particularly the sudden lockdown, had on the unhoused in Indian cities. By highlighting how developmental ontologies of housing have shaped the politics of houselessness in urban India, we argue that pandemic governmentality has ruptured incremental practices of inhabitation and inventive modes of survival in the city through: the destruction of dwelling, the inadequate provision of shelter, and forced spatial confinement.