How cities exclude migrant workers

Urban Institute Associate Dr. Nebeela Ahmed has published a new article titled “Infrastructure as territorial stigma: labor migrant exclusions in the Indian city” in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

The city as an exclusionary place for migrants is widely established across global literatures. Global cities—and the infrastructures that animate them—share practices of surveillance and bordering, denial of public services and stratified labor markets that constrain migrants to precarious sectors. Stigma plays a crucial role in perpetuating such conditions for migrants, rendering them “others” and “outcasts” that taint cities. Loïc Wacquants concept of “territorial stigmatization” can be used to explain the spatial process of such exclusions.

This article empirically advances the concept by illustrating the relationship between infrastructures and territorial stigmatization that forms one part of a set of multilayered stigmas, and by arguing that territorial stigma is a relational, mobile and multiscale process.

Drawing from empirical research with internal migrants working in the construction sector in one of India’s fastest-growing cities, Nashik in the state of Maharashtra, this article illustrates how infrastructure plays a role in processes of territorial stigmatization in three main ways.

First, continued urbanization and infrastructural development perpetuate the need for stigmatized labor. Second, infrastructures (such as water, sanitation and public services) are crucial in configuring stigmatized spaces. And third, infrastructure enables migration across space and has the potential to reconfigure territorial stigmatization.