Leadership, Legitimacy and Community: Representing a Heterogenous, Urban Informal Settlement in New Delhi, India

This article seeks to theorise power and change within informal settlements, manifesting across twin functions of leadership and representation. Adapting the Bourdieusian framework of class-formation, this research locates disproportionate concentration of symbolic resources that initially influence leadership roles but are soon subject to (re)evaluation following the emergence of an educated, dynamic and youthful class. Failure to coherently outline leadership functions de-stabilises the system and prompts multiple nodes of leadership/representation to emerge. Lessons from the paper are consistent with findings around informal settlements that privilege intra-settlement contradictions as key variable(s) in frustrating efforts by planning agencies to consistently apply uniform standards of negotiations. Equally, multiple points of representation prompt a (re)conceptualisation of the margins as rigidly opposed to the local state, instead highlighting tendencies of collaboration/contestation that underline the objective of the urban-poor to get by.