Infrastructure as a territorial stigma: How cities eliminate migrant workers

Dr. Nebeela Ahmed, an associate at Urban Institute, published a new article in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies entitled “Infrastructure: Exclusion of Labour Migration in Indian Cities.”

Cities as exclusive sites for immigration are widely established throughout the global literature. Global cities and the infrastructure that utilize them measure surveillance and boundary practices, denial of public services, and stratified labor market practices that restrict immigration to unstable sectors. Stigma plays an important role in perpetuating such conditions for immigration, making them “others” and “outcasts” cities. The concept of loïcwacquant in “territorial stigmatization” can be used to explain the spatial processes of such exclusion.

This article empirically advances the concept by explaining the relationship between infrastructure and territorial stigmatization that forms part of a series of multi-layered stigmatization, and by claiming that territorial stigmatization is a relational, mobile and multi-scale process.

Drawing from an empirical study with internal migrants working in the construction sector in Nasik, Maharashtra, one of India’s fastest growing cities. This article illustrates how infrastructure plays a role in the process of territorial denunciation in three main ways.

First, continuous urbanization and infrastructure development perpetuates the condemned labor needs. Second, infrastructure (water, sanitation, public services, etc.) is important in configuring stigmatized spaces. Third, infrastructure allows for movement across space and could reconstruct territorial stigmatization.