Infrastructure as territorial stigma: labour migrant exclusions in the Indian city

The city as an exclusionary place for migrants is widely established across global literatures. Global cities – and the infrastructures that animate them - share practices of surveillance and bordering; denial of public services and stratified labour markets that constrain migrants to precarious sectors. Stigma plays a crucial role in perpetuating such conditions for migrants – rendering them ‘others’ and ‘outcasts’ that taint cities. The concept of ‘territorial stigmatisation’ can be used to explain the spatial process of such exclusions. This paper empirically advances the concept by illustrating the relationship between infrastructures and territorial stigmatisation that forms one part of a set of multi-layered stigmas; and arguing that territorial stigma is a relational, mobile and multi-scale process. Drawing from empirical research with internal migrants working the construction sector of one of India’s fastest growing cities, Nashik in the state of Maharashtra, this paper illustrates how infrastructure plays a role in processes of territorial stigmatisation in three main ways. First, that continued urbanisation, and infrastructural development perpetuates the need for stigmatised labour. Second that infrastructures (such as water, sanitation and public services) are crucial in configuring stigmatised spaces. And third that infrastructure enables migration across space and has the potential to reconfigure territorial stigmatisation.