On any ordinary morning, the footpaths of Kamla Nagar are a dense and practiced world. A tea stall gathers university students, rickshaw pullers, and elderly walkers into a routinized rhythm of exchange. A cobbler’s station, a fruit cart, a chaat vendor’s setup sits in careful spatial choreography with the pedestrians who move around them. This is not the picturesque informality of tourism photographs. It is infrastructure: reliable, rhythmic, and embedded in the lives of those who depend on it and those who sustain it through daily labour (Larkin, 2013).
In the weeks before the G20 Summit arrived in Delhi in 2023, this world was interrupted. Jute threads appeared overnight along street-sides, strung between poles to demarcate footpath edges and keep vendors off. This was an ad-hoc technology of exclusion, standing in for the fencing and formal barricading that followed. Municipal trucks arrived before dawn. Carts were confiscated. Vendors received eviction notices, or more often no notice at all. The footpath was cleared, not cleaned, of the very practices that make it infrastructural to the everyday life.
The state’s own rationale for such clearance is beautification and order. But the footpaths of Delhi are not cleaner or hygienic by a sweep in any material sense. The drains beside them still run, the potholes remain unfilled, the rubble is undisturbed.
What changes is not the material city but its legibility. The sweep temporarily produces a corridor that is clean, empty, and photographable for a visiting dignitary’s eyes. Ghertner (2015) calls this aesthetic governmentality: rule through the visual, in which the appearance of order substitutes for its substance, and appearance itself becomes the object of governance. The sweep produces a curated version of the city, assembled for those who will see it from the window of a convoy.
Ad-hoc jute-thread demarcation keeping vendors off the street-side, G20 Summit, 2023
What makes this sweeping worth dwelling on, beyond its obvious material harm, is its selectivity. Not all informalities in Delhi are equally exposed to erasure. During the same eviction drives, cars remain parked across the footpath’s width, occupying exactly the space vendors are evicted from. The restaurant that has quietly enclosed half the pavement for private seating arrangements is untouched. The building whose ground-floor frontage has crept its frontage onto public land is not demolished. These, too, are informalities — departures from what the master plan permits. But they belong to a different register of the city. These informalities carry enough socio-political standing, capital, or ownership to be read as ordinary, or even invisible, rather than as disorder. What gets swept, cyclically and predictably, are the informalities of survival. The distinction being enforced is not, in the end, about legality. It is about whose presence is permitted to register as belonging to the city at all.
Parked cars remain on the street while vendors are evacuated
“Sanitization” undersells what is happening here. The routine framing treats the problem as epistemic: municipal drives merely conceal informality, producing a distorted image for outside observers, correctable by better information. But this is not simply a failure of representation. It is an ontological act. It does not just hide the tea stall from the dignitary’s convoy. For the duration of the visit, it withdraws the tea stall’s very status as a legitimate object of the urban — as something that counts — that has a claim to exist in the frame of what “Delhi” is. The footpath is not shown selectively. It is briefly and violently unmade and remade as something it is structurally not: an empty corridor, a formal urban surface stripped of the informal life that animates its rhythms and the everyday of Delhi.
Barricaded, depopulated Kamla Nagar street — police barricading and parked vehicles occupying the footpath and street-sides
This distortion runs deeper than information. It reproduces, materially and coercively, a premise this body of scholarship has long sought to unsettle. That formal urban process is the baseline against which informality is judged as a deviation, rather than informal practice being generative of urban life in its own right (Roy, 2009; Simone, 2004; McFarlane, 2012). Each sweep re-asserts, on the ground and in the sightline of those who plan the city, that the tea stall’s claim to urban space is contingent and revocable, while the parked car’s is not. Planners, politicians, and visiting dignitaries are not simply misinformed by what they see. They are handed a city whose ontological order — what counts as infrastructure, what counts as encroachment — has already been decided for them, invisibly, days before their arrival. The violence is not only in the confiscation of a cart or the loss of a day’s earnings, consequential as these are. It is in the prior, structural decision about which forms of urban life are allowed to be seen as constitutive of the city, and which are treated as always-already provisional: a decision rehearsed anew with every convoy that passes.
The consequences of this outlast the visit itself. Urban planning proceeds on the basis of what is observable. And here what is rendered observable is shaped, recursively, by these episodic acts of erasure. A planner who encounters Kamla Nagar’s footpaths only through a sanitized visit, or through official records generated after such visits, encounters a city where survival-based informalities have already been subtracted from the frame. Policy made in response to that curated ontology will continue to treat the informal as encroachment awaiting removal, rather than as the infrastructural system it is.
Vendors do return, of course. The footpath reassembles itself because the city needs it to, not because the state permits it. But return is not simply an image of resilience; it is also, increasingly, a site of assertion and contest. Rehri-patri unions and hawkers’ associations across Delhi have organized protests against MCD drives, explicitly framing footpath vending as a livelihood right rather than a tolerated inconvenience. These mobilizations make visible — in a way the state cannot unsee — a claim that eviction drives are designed to suppress, that footpath economies are not deviations from urban order, but one of its most enduring producers.
Protest by rehri-patri organizations against MCD action, asserting rights to livelihood.
Delhi’s footpaths will be swept again before the next state visit, the next international summit, the next occasion demanding that the city perform its modernity for an external audience. What accumulates across these repetitions is not only material loss: disrupted livelihoods, broken supply chains, foregone income. It is a deepening ontological settlement — that some forms of urban life are provisional and others are not —rehearsed each time a jute thread goes up and a cart is confiscated. Recognizing footpath informality as infrastructure, in the sense this body of work advances, requires refusing that settlement — insisting that what is swept away for a photograph was never merely disorder awaiting erasure, but the city itself.
Vishavjeet Dhanda is an urban ethnographer focused on capturing everyday stories to understand the social and cultural dynamics of urban spaces in the Global South. As a geographer, he seeks to understand urbanism as a spatial process situated at the intersection of complex interactions between people, their surroundings, and the social, cultural, and political forces that shape their daily lives.