Vinay Gidwani

Community Economics: The Evolution of Seelampur, Delhi, as an E-Waste Cluster

Seelampur in north-east Delhi is one of the largest e-waste markets in India. Featured in numerous NGO reports and journalistic accounts, mainly to highlight the environmental perils of informal e-waste dismantling, the e-waste market’s spatial history and underlying social relations have never been systematically studied. Based on 10 months of ethnographic and survey research undertaken with Aakansha Jain, this talk extends the scholarship on the caste and community segmentation of petty commodity production and commerce in urban India; specifically, the role of “community economics” in consolidating Seelampur’s distinctive economic trajectory. Prof Gidwani employs this term as a way of conceptualizing the operations of kin networks in market formation and place-making that enabled and sustains Seelampur’s economic primacy within e-waste circuits, albeit decreasingly so. More speculatively, Prof Gidwani contends that waste hubs, as key nodes in the lymphatic systems of cities, contain the rudiments of a subaltern spatial history of the city that can upend elite imaginaries by showing how the de-valorized labor of workers and small-time entrepreneurs in places like Seelampur preserve the temporal illusions that underwrite metropolitan modernity.

*Vinay Gidwani *is a professor in the Department of Geography, Environment & Society and the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. His work navigates an uneven ideoscape consisting of Marxist geography, neoclassical economics, agrarian studies, and environmental science. He engages closely with disparate intellectual traditions, which often disagree on issues of epistemology and politics, which has been a source of creative tension. Although studying issues of work, poverty, livelihoods, and agroecological change within the Indian context, his scholarship is defined by research problematics rather than by regional affiliation. Gidwani draws liberally on Africanist, Latin American, and Southeast Asian scholarship for insights. Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Diana Guo, dg3372@columbia.edu; Vinita Govindarajan, vg2588@columbia.edu; Mauricio Enrique Rada Orellana, mer2245@columbia.edu

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is co-organized by the MSUP Program and second-year PhD students in Urban Planning: Vinita Govindarajan, Diana Guo, and Mauricio Rada Orellana.