As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban\u00a0slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges\u00a0on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint\u00a0migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought-off by wily politicians, or\u00a0polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics<\/em> shows how slum residents in India routinely defy\u00a0such portrayals, actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit\u00a0imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country\u2019s expanding cities.<\/p>\n Drawing on years of fieldwork in India\u2019s slums, including ethnography, interviews, surveys, and experiments,\u00a0Auerbach and Thachil reveal how migrants harness forces of political competition\u2014as residents,\u00a0voters, community leaders, and party workers \u2013 to sow unexpected seeds of accountability within city\u00a0politics. This multifaceted agency provokes new questions about how political networks form during urbanization.<\/p>\n In answering these questions, Migrants and Machine Politics<\/em> overturns longstanding assumptions\u00a0about how political machines exploit the urban poor to stifle competition, foster ethnic favoritism,\u00a0and entrench vote-buying.<\/p>\n Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann<\/a>,\u00a0Assistant Professor of Spatial Development and Urban Policy (SPUR)<\/a>,\u00a0ETH Z\u00fcrich,\u00a0Institute for Spatial and Landscape.<\/p>\n Contact: Sofie Heintz<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nDiscussants<\/h3>\n
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Organisation<\/h3>\n
![\"QR](\"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/QR-Code-Book-Talk-David-Kaufmann-Adam-Auerbach.jpg\")
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