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The city of Mumbai is engaged in large‐scale urban restructuring efforts. Foundational to these is the demolition of many of the city's informal settlements and the relocation of residents to newly built housing complexes. Often discussed in terms of dispossession, this process is also one of formalization, with spatial, economic, cultural and sociopolitical implications. This article focuses on formalization's sociopolitical dimension, entailing the registration of residents and the establishment of formal governance provisions and new citizenship expectations. The provision of formal housing and recognized housing tenure has, designedly, been coupled with the establishment of official self‐governance mechanisms leading to new civic responsibilities and reshaping the experience of citizenship among former slum dwellers. We explore these governance arrangements, the interaction between formality and informal governance processes and how these arrangements impact residents' perspectives on citizenship. We also identify several challenges to effective self‐governance and the ways in which formal and informal processes shape residents' experiences of community life, citizenship and urban integration. While residents have benefited from some aspects of formalization (e.g. indoor plumbing and codified tenure rights), it has brought additional burdens, and the challenges of self‐governance have, for many relocatees, reproduced a kind of marginalized citizenship within formal structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large-scale reverse migration from cities to villages at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and again during the second wave in 2021 highlighted the persistence of poverty in India. Civil society responses pointed to the pressure that it was under in the absence of adequate outreach by the state for meeting food, livelihood, and other insecurities of urban and rural populations. Against this backdrop, the article outlines some of the challenges facing Social Work and Community Development in addressing poverty and marginalization. An examination of the relationship between Social Work with the state, and the contemporary complex neoliberal context for practice, highlights classroom-field tensions in community organization. In preparing graduates for what appears to be a messy field, an orderly curriculum, irrespective of how well thought out it may be, struggles to retain convergence between principles of CD and certain elements of contemporary practice. It emerges that education for CD needs to build systematically on critical community practice and align with an anti- oppressive framework, in order to contribute substantively to addressing poverty and marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of urban displacement is a vexed one. Today, it is made more complex by the multiplicity of agencies involved in project based displacement, leading to different explanations for what is clearly Involuntary displacement of large sections of the urban poor from the socioeconomic fringes to physical and spatial peripheries of the city. This article examines the experience of displacement caused by infrastructure development in Mumbai city. It highlights the fact that the sustenance of formal housing that a section of the displaced population received is endangered by the displacement of informal work and livelihoods of the affected people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]