Philosophy
In the city, dwelling is never secure; it is constantly threatened by demolition, displacement, and exclusion. Yet people keep remaking home, again and again, in defiance of law, markets, and prejudice.
The Precarious Home
The right to dwell is never guaranteed in the contemporary city. Informal settlements face a perpetual threat of demolition, with residents holding no legal title to the land they have transformed into home over decades. Middle-class neighbourhoods gentrify, forcing out long-term residents whose memories constitute the place’s very identity. Communal geographies harden, neighbourhoods becoming coded as Hindu or Muslim, making crossing these boundaries increasingly fraught. The machine city constantly seeks sites for redevelopment, viewing the built environment as a resource to exploit rather than as a gathering of meanings to preserve. To dwell in Mumbai is to dwell precariously.
The threatened settlement reveals the dwelling’s political dimension most clearly. When bulldozers arrive to clear a settlement, they encounter not merely structures but dwellings, places where the fourfold had gathered over the years. Residents resist not because they misunderstand the legal situation but because they understand dwelling’s claims exceed the law’s categories. They have made a place here. Children have grown up in these lanes. Marriages have been celebrated in these homes. Deaths have been mourned here. The earth has been inhabited, the sky has been watched through these particular windows, mortality has been lived in this community, and meaning has accumulated in these gestures and rituals. The law recognises none of this. The law sees only unauthorised occupation of land designated for other purposes. Dwelling and property clash, and property wins.
Yet dwelling persists through resistance and through adaptation. The evicted community relocates and begins dwelling again, gathering in new locations, reconstituting networks. This resilience reveals something crucial about urban dwelling. It happens not once but repeatedly, not as a settled achievement but as an ongoing practice, not in security but despite precarity. The urban dweller must be prepared to dwell again, to create place anew when displacement occurs.
Heidegger’s framework must be radicalised to accommodate this reality. In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” he speaks of dwelling as remaining, as staying in place, as being spared and preserved. But what of dwelling that must be mobile, that must reconstitute itself after displacement, that creates home without security of tenure? Perhaps dwelling in the contemporary city means carrying place with you, means the capacity to create gathering wherever you are forced to land, means relationships with people and practices that can reconstitute themselves in new locations. The informal settler’s dwelling differs from the peasant’s dwelling precisely in this mobility, this resilient ability to make home without the security.
The communalised neighbourhood raises different questions. When riots or quotidian harassment make certain areas unsafe for minorities, when real estate agents refuse to show apartments to Muslim families in Hindu-dominated buildings, when neighbourhood associations police who can purchase property based on religion, dwelling becomes actively prevented. The machine city’s segregating mechanisms combine with communal prejudice to deny the right to dwell in chosen locations.
This situation violates dwelling at its core. To dwell means to be at home, but how can one be at home where one is not welcome, where one’s presence is constantly questioned, where festivals become occasions for tension rather than celebration? The communalised city produces a peculiar homelessness, where one technically resides but cannot genuinely dwell, where the gathering cannot happen because the fourfold fractures along lines of suspicion.