Making the Modern Slum

"An extensive and wide-ranging analysis of the dynamics of urban change—a work of insight and originality."—Jim Masselos, honorary reader in history, University of Sydney

"This is a refreshingly original and challenging account of the exclusionary logic of colonial urbanization. The British not only controlled the production of space in Bombay; they also shaped an Orwellian discourse that disguised slum-making as housing reform. Highly recommended."—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

"Sheetal Chhabria's bracing, meticulously researched monograph establishes, against received wisdom, that the slum is not peripheral to but constitutive of the city, the internal other against which the city proper is continually measured and refashioned. By carefully demonstrating how and where the forces of capitalism, the shifting policies of the state, and the resistances of various social strata come together and fall apart, Making the Modern Slum offers a masterful paradigm for new critical histories of the governance of poverty."—Rupa Viswanath, University of Göttingen