Peripheral Urbanities: Migration, Space-Making, and Governance at the Edges of Delhi

This paper examines Jamia Nagar, a Muslim-majority enclave in Delhi, as a critical site of "peripheral urbanity"-a space that, despite its location within the national capital, functions as a socio-political periphery. This condition of peripherality is not one that naturally exists; rather, it is a produced one-continually forged through successive waves of internal migration and contested modes of governance. The area's character has been defined by histories of displacement, from Partition in 1947 to more recent communal violence, situating it as a refuge, a zone of arrival for Muslim migrants seeking community and security. It is, however, this very process of ethnic clustering, in concert with state neglect, that has rendered Jamia Nagar a stigmatized margin within the metropolis, wherein broader struggles over resources, planning, and political authority are powerfully concentrated. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth oral histories, this article pushes beyond top-down models of governance to reveal a fragmented and relational field of authority. Residents navigate a landscape of infrastructural precarity and ecological risk from the adjacent Yamuna River, along with a state presence that is selectively punitive in zoning restrictions and demolitions but largely absent in the provision of essential services. In this void, governance is co-produced through everyday interactions with a heterogeneous array of actors, including municipal officials, informal service providers, political intermediaries, and robust religious institutions. The paper methodically traces these everyday negotiations—over housing in "unauthorised" colonies, access to water, or claims to safety—that demonstrate how such iterative processes constitute the indispensable form of grassroots "space-making." These practices are ways in which migrants and long-term residents not only mitigate precarity but actively assert belonging and contest the terms of their urban citizenship. The analysis makes two important contributions. Firstly, the paper reframes core-periphery debates by showing how peripherality is actively reproduced in and through the urban core via planning regimes, discursive stigma, and differential state reach. Such urban margins, it claims, are not aberrations but rather concentrated expressions of broader socio-political cleavages. Secondly, the paper develops the methodological toolkit for the study of migration governance through advocating an interpretive, interactionist approach. It demonstrates how ethnography captures the subtle, relational dynamics through which macro-structures of exclusion and migrant agency are constituted and thereby grasps the nuanced ways in which sovereignty and legitimacy are negotiated in peripheralised settings.