Urban Imageries and Educational Aspirations: Perspectives from Delhi’s Margins

This paper explores the aspirations and negotiations of residents in a forty-year-old multigenerational slum for socio-spatial mobility, escape from stigmatised identifications and the centrality of urban education in this pursuit. In doing so, the paper situates itself at the crucial but often neglected intersection of urban sociology and sociology of education to examine the meanings and significance they attribute to urban education. With the neoliberal turn and its accompanying urban transformations, Delhi’s educational landscape has also undergone change. Using Edward Soja’s critical spatial perspective, the paper analyses articulations among the acutely stigmatised slum residents for a better future and attempts to overcome their marginalisation through the pursuit of urban education and its associated notions of sophistication and civility. Further, if much of the existing literature provides planners, elites and dominant middle classes’ desires and perspectives of urbanity and exclusivity, this paper highlights urban imageries from/at the margins.