The intimate city: violence, gender and ordinary life in Delhi slums

In this paper I argue for an expansion of the horizons of urban geography through a notion of the intimate city. I focus on the slum as a space where the violence of an exclusionary city is woven into its intimate material and social conditions, but where this violence is also domesticated and rendered as part of the everyday. I illustrate through three stories of intimate lives of slum women that everyday life in the slum requires the production of (1) an urban subject who shows agency not by resisting but by living with intimate violence; (2) an urban subjectivity involved in acquiring knowledge of one’s bodily terrain in order to limit this violence; and (3) an urban citizenship that argues for a “right to intimacy” as a way to claim a right to the city. This paper calls for a recasting of the public/private divide in urban geography in order to understand how violence circulates through and contravenes the boundaries of public/private, city/slum, tradition/modernity.