Breathing in Delhi's Peripheries

• In Event: Air Pollution Governance: Sites, Styles, Histories

Abstract

Delhi’s environmental history cannot be understood outside the continuing peripheralisation of ecological risk. The city’s hinterlands have not only been the identified sites for industries but also of waste and practices--from slaughterhouses to landfills--deemed ‘out of place’ in a modern, globalising city (Sharan, 2014). Our paper views these sites through an atmospheric lens, examining the relational production of space, vulnerability, and breathing in these zones of exaggerated risk. It further asks where the peripheries figure in the circuits of knowledge production via measurement and visualisation, and in the governance of air. Specifically, we consider the neighbourhood of Okhla to think through these matters by locating the changing nature of risk and mapping the everyday practices of residents. Here, a large and exhausted landfill, a modernist industrial area undergoing post-industrial change, a depot where thousands of trucks drop off containers from the larger region in transit via the railways every night, and a new waste-to-energy plant that deposits soot over buildings every night share space with dense housing, multiple health facilities, and remnant forests. Our interest in air and breathing in the peripheries adds richness to the scholarship on the intersections of environmental forms and urban experiences in neoliberal India.

Authors

• Rohit Negi, School of Human Ecology, Ambedkar University Delhi

• Prerna Srigyan, Ambedkar University Delhi