MIT INDIA DISPLACEMENT PRACTICUM
As part of a practicum course in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), seven graduate students studied the impacts of jhuggi jhopri cluster (JJ cluster) evictions and relocations in Delhi in 2014. During a month-long engagement in Delhi and Chennai, the team researched and created tools and maps/visualizations to support the work of organizations preventing and responding to evictions and displacement in Delhi. The work has integrated diverse sets of data and focused on an interpretation of the causes and consequences of large-scale displacement and resettlement in Delhi, the impact on the morphology of the city itself, as well as the key institutional and other barriers for making Delhi a more just city.
Through the MIT Displacement Research and Action Network (DRAN), Professor Rajagopal and Mr. Miloon Kothari will continue to work with Delhi-based NGOs in order to implement the strategies developed during the practicum.
The videos below are time-series compilations of maps created by the students of the practicum depicting both forced evictions and resettlement camps in delhi over a two decade period.
Data was drawn from the now defunct Slum Wing of the Delhi Development Authority via researcher Veronique Dupont and from the under-development Eviction Database of the Housing and Land Rights Network.
This visualization documents the geography of forced evictions in Delhi over a 23 year period. The blue circle size indicates the number of jhuggis (shacks) relocated during each eviction. Since many displaced jhuggis (~50%) are not relocated during a given eviction, this video only portrays a portion of the human impact of these events.
This visualization documents the geography of resettlement camps in relation to JJ cluster evictions in Delhi over a 20 year period. Delhi development policy has aimed to relocate JJ clusters from the urban core to resettlement sites on the periphery. The relocated households have generally been given land and access to services but no housing or significant infrastructure.