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This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipalhousing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediateddeterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context ofliberalization-era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary thatposits the unplanned, illegal and informal ‘slum’ as the self-evident conceptualcounterpoint to a planned, formal, ‘world-class’ city. The story of Shivajinagar-Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political andhighly unstable nature of this binary — and thus insists upon an account of the shiftingpolitical and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar-Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood’s emergence as an illegal slum has beenmediated by the liberalization-era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood’swater pipes — dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of theneighborhood as a discursive effect.
