More than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas, many of them in low- and low-middle-income countries with limited ability to support urban growth. Urban areas are inherently fragile. Many cities are desperately overcrowded, with poor building construction, limited access, poor or absent waste disposal, limited or no access to clean water, irregular supplies of food, unreliable power supplies, inadequate emergency services, and problems with crime and violence. Healthcare is often poor or absent, with an increased risk of communicable disease outbreaks. Supply chains can easily be interrupted. Urban poverty and slums are proliferating with informal dwellings in areas vulnerable to natural disasters. The nature of urban areas can increase the impact of disasters, as was shown by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This chapter examines the relationships between volunteerism and religion, between youth activism and Islamic charity. During the reign of King ʿAbdallah, informal groups that advocated volunteering flourished among youth in Saudi Arabia. The rise of youth activism in Saudi Arabia is tied to the rise of social media.

At the heart of this chapter is the Young Initiative Group (YIG), an informal organization that grew out of the efforts of youth who distributed meals during Ramadan 2009. The chapter explores how the YIG negotiated alternative forms of belonging and community through charity work. The YIG embedded its volunteering practices within the religious obligation of alms and compassion for the needy. The group’s community approach was rooted in an Islamic ethics of care. This appeared to be both a reflection of the personal religiosity of some of its founders and strategic positioning vis-à-vis the authorities, given the initiative’s lack of legal status. The YIG’s rhetorical emphasis on family-like relations among volunteers, together with a critique of consumption patterns and references to Islamic norms of benevolence, created an apolitical profile of a group that promoted social reform.

An examination of the precarity and poverty of dispossessed lives in India, see through narrative non-fiction by Katherine Boo and Sonia Faleiro and with reference to Hollywood and Bollywood cinema.

Chapter 4 provides background on the ten aspiring global cities and their theoretical and empirical comparability. Despite important variations, the cities examined share these core features: (1) They are key national and regional nodes of business and politics. (2) They experienced major and controversial redevelopment, which has caused different forms of displacement. (3) They have intensified the use of branding and cultural policies as engine of economic growth, often thereby promoting the “creative class.” The chapter presents data showing their shared prominence and discusses the high degree of institutional variation between the cities.There is significant variation in how markets and governments combine to pursue international competitiveness policies and the associated urban redevelopment. In developmental states, an essential feature is the elimination of informal settlements, with the consequent massive and brutal displacement of the poor, as examined in Seoul, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. In more advanced economies, a key dynamic is the erosion of public-sector housing, as illustrated for Hamburg. Redevelopment policies weresupported by city branding and legitimized by connections to cultural industries as new engines for economic growth, as examined in Tel Aviv, Seoul, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles.

Chapter 4 examines the book’s main protagonists – India’s slum leaders. I first draw on my ethnographic fieldwork and survey data to explore the strategies that residents use to claim public services. I find that India’s slum residents primarily orient their collective action toward the state, in the presence of informal slum leaders, to improve local conditions. The chapter then establishes the pervasiveness of slum leaders and their central place in local distributive politics. Next, it describes how slum leaders climb into their positions of informal authority, the material incentives that motivate them to make this gritty political ascent, and the diverse problem solving activities they perform for residents. I then argue that slum leaders must demonstrate efficacy to build a following – the base upon which they collect rents, attract patronage, and seek party promotion. The chapter subsequently describes the subset of slum leaders who have become party workers, absorbed into party organizations, and given positions within their hierarchies.

Chapter 1 motivates the central puzzle of the book: Despite a shared context of informality, patronage politics, and discretionary state institutions, India’s slum settlements are not uniformly marginalized in the distributive politics of the city. Instead, they exhibit dramatic variation in their capacity to organize and push the state to extend basic public services. The chapter begins with two vignettes that illustrate divergences in settlement organization and development. It then draws on official data and my own survey findings to establish wide variation in access to public services across India’s slums. Next, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s theoretical framework and foreshadows its contributions to several literatures in the field of comparative politics. Next, it positions the study at the intersection of several literatures and establishes why extant theories are insufficient in explaining inter-settlement variation in public service delivery. Next, the chapter defines the specific type of slum under study – squatter settlements – and introduces Jaipur and Bhopal. It then turns to the research design and data and concludes by mapping the remaining chapters.

Chapter 8 concludes. It revisits the substantive and theoretical motivations of the book and provides a brief summary of its main findings. The chapter then expands on the contributions of the book to our understanding of democracy and development in India and other rapidly urbanizing countries in the Global South, and subsequently discusses the book’s implications for the design and implementation of community-driven development programs.

Chapter 7 examines the formation of party worker networks, and the reasons why they vary so remarkably in their density and partisan distribution across settlements. The chapter presents quantitative evidence that key drivers of variation in party worker density are ethnic diversity and settlement population. Higher levels of social diversity increase the fractionalization of informal leadership within a settlement. Over time, parties attempt to bring slum leaders into their fold, increasing party network density in the process. The second is the population of the settlement. A slum’s population – the size of its “vote bank” – determines electoral incentives for parties to extend scarce patronage resources and positions to maximize votes.The chapter then takes an additional step backward, probing why settlements vary in their populations and levels of ethnic diversity in the first place. I find that idiosyncratic features of the urban geography and constraints over where poor migrants settle influence settlement size and ethnic diversity, providing analytical leverage in explaining their impact on party organization and, in turn, public services.

Chapter 2 situates the book in the context of a rapidly urbanizing India. It describes India’s demographic shift to cities and towns since Independence in 1947 and the concurrent proliferation of slum settlements. The chapter further outlines the formal institutions of governance in India’s post-decentralization cities and the sources of public finance that are used to provide services to slums. It then goes on to delineate the mediated, nonprogrammatic environment in which slum residents seek access to public services. The chapter ends with a description of the organizational structures of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC) in Bhopal and Jaipur and how they have percolated neighborhoods.

Chapter 5 presents ethnographic narratives from eight case study settlements – four from Jaipur and four from Bhopal. The narratives trace the emergence of informal authority, party linkages, and public service delivery in each settlement, from the initial period of squatting to the present. In addition to demonstrating the mechanisms underpinning the book’s theoretical framework, the narratives address issues of historical sequencing and causality.

Chapter 6 quantitatively tests the theoretical framework with survey data from 111 squatter settlements. I find that party worker density is positive and statistically significant in its association with paved road coverage, streetlight coverage, municipal trash removal, and the provision of government medical camps. These findings hold when controlling for a wide range of potential confounders and are robust to several model specifications and post-estimation tests. Read alongside my qualitative findings, these statistical relationships provide further evidence that denser concentrations of party workers are associated with higher levels of public service provision.

Chapter 3 presents the book’s theoretical framework. It explains why settlements with dense concentrations of party workers are better positioned to demand public services than those with thin or absent networks. The discussion is set around three mechanisms undergirding this relationship: political connectivity, mobilization capacity, and the informal accountability generated by competition among party workers for a following. The chapter further considers the implications of having party workers affiliated to competing parties, which I argue has several countervailing influences on public service delivery. Next, the chapter takes a step backward in the sequencing of events and asks why settlements vary in the density and partisan balance of their party workers. I argue that two variables – settlement population and ethnic diversity – shape bottom-up incentives for residents to engage in party work and top-down incentives for parties to extend their organizational networks.