2 - Weird Assemblages of Infrastructure: Navigating Infrastructure, Materiality and Agency in Delhi's Urban Peripheries

In Delhi’s Savda Ghevra resettlement colony, infrastructure may well be considered a weird assemblage of people, space, materials, networks, and logic. Infrastructure stories in Savda consistently evoke the odd materialism of these assemblages—what Lancione (2019) calls “weird exoskeletons”. Homes and infrastructure in Savda Ghevra are made of “weird stuff”: nails and plastic buckets as storage, high-density thermocol sheets, dalda containers for water storage, bed as a cooking space, waste rubber sheets as seating, wooden columns made out of wood collected from the forest, bricks brought from an old bulldozed house, etc. Maintaining the “weirdness” (Lancione, 2019, p. 247) and “dirty literalism” (Lea & Pholeros, 2010, p. 191) of these assemblages prevents a sanitized and romanticized reading of these spaces and lives in urban peripheries such as Savda. The weirdness of these objects allowed residents to fall “through the cracks” (Lancione, 2019, pp. 247-248) of neoliberal Delhi and be used for making homes in the margins. This weird “gathering” (Lemke, 2021) of people, things, space, and environment in Savda is unexpected and challenges the notion of mundane material objects in subaltern spaces. Everyday objects and materials in these homes surpass their intended use through social interactions, transformations, coupling, and proximities, which were overlooked in the planner's imagination. Using visual EthnoGraphic stories, this paper introduces the notion of weird assemblages representing not only odd collections of strange entities but also peculiar logic and methods to realize them in Delhi’s Savda Ghevra resettlement colony.