Sorting Territory: Informal Settlements Recognition and the Production of Political Subjectivities

Informal settlements recognition is an important mechanism through which the state expands its authority and power over place. This legally charged intervention is underscored in this paper as fundamental to the state's territorialising project. It allows the state to designate spatial categories, invest these spaces with new forms of authority and demarcate boundaries of entitlement. Drawing on examples from Dharavi and Mukuru informal settlements in India and Kenya, the paper invites attention to the legal and administrative regimes under which the state makes territory in informal settlements the object of its rule. It unpacks tools such as slum notification and special planning area (SPA) declarations, highlighting their centrality to the state's territorialisation project. The paper illustrates how, by ‘sorting territory’ under these recognition regimes, the state engages in the normative production of difference through the designation of spatial categories, while expanding its authority over space. Arguments in this essay are designed to invite geographers' attention to statist territorial logics and the differentiated political subjectivities which they generate within informal settlements.