On the rickshaw, in the evening rush hour. An elderly driver, hands on the steering wheel, khaki shirt, marking his station. His neck hesitantly swivels, as if to say something: they have arrived at their destination. An alien territory in the white-washed city. Coquettish beckonings are lined up on fractured doors as street lamps in the narrow alleys. Collapsing buildings constrict ventilation and light. A landlord’s greed is made manifest: two-storeyed houses buried beneath off-balanced extensions of disparate parts and assorted junk. Space is not given but taken. All roads lead to shining highrises looming outside. Redevelopment adverts promise a “World-class Neighborhood.” Around it, leaking pipelines crawl. Ramshackle windows remain shut. Neon lights conceal work. Others gape open, women perched behind rusting bars: bright skirts against the home’s squalor, glittering cleavages, hair bound in jasmine, and kohl-rimmed eyes popping up. Police sirens wail. NGOs offer aid. Houses lean into each other, tight-lipped and huddled, yet a sacrosanct atmosphere emerges. Ganesh pandals rise, temporary altars sprouting where light and air do not. Informality lingers: scrap wood and metal dealers, electronics recycling over carpets on streets, temporary shoe shops crouched beneath fabric awnings, recycled tins stacked as bricks, women spinning on thresholds, cinemas with in-house shrines, intermediate tea shops, perfume-making industry, liquor shops, jeans dyeing on terraces, beedi-industry on pavements, women hunched over tobacco and leaves. Time shapes these rhythms. As dusk thickens, a guided group of tourists uneasily skitters along. Kamathipura stirs. An anatomical mental map of the dense lanes and low-cost housing of Kamathipura by artist Majid Abidi. All photos and collages courtesy of Majid Abidi. Kamathipura, India’s most notorious red-light district, stands as a testament to resilience and survival ‒ a culturally heterogeneous and economically vibrant space shaped by generations of migrants, marginalized communities, and especially sex workers. It holds unparalleled iconicity in the discourse of prostitution, spatialising carceral mechanisms that enforce the marginalization and vulnerability of these stigmatized workers, growing manifold well into the 21st century with scarce provisions toward housing, healthcare, education, or labor rights. Due to its central location in Mumbai, after suffering years of stigmatization, physical neglect, and egregious hostility, the area is now a prime land. Kamathipura currently faces neoliberal redevelopment juggernauts that threaten to displace sex workers under the pretext of modernization, banishing them to grievously invisible peripheries and reducing Kamathipura to a sanitized urban landscape that ignores its layered past. Mumbai, formerly Bombay, was once a cluster of seven islands, unified through reclaimed marshland into a fortified port city by the British colonizers. Here, Kamathipura emerged in 1795, settled by lower-caste construction workers from Hyderabad, known as Kamathis. Kamathipura’s distinctive street layout, reflecting a structured approach to urban planning during that period—comprising 14 numbered lanes arranged in a grid-like, orthogonal pattern—is a legacy of its colonial-era planning. Its proximity to the Bombay Port, railway lines, and cantonment areas made it an ideal location for what became known as Lal Bazaar (Red Market), established in the 1880s as a “tolerated zone” for European sex workers. The neighborhood’s existing numbered streets, migrant labor population, and dense, low-cost housing made it easier to marginalize the area, creating a spatially confined zone for sex work, surveillance, and containment. Designed to serve as a “comfort zone” for British officers and sailors, its narrow lanes and enclosed spaces—limiting visibility and movement while reinforcing isolation—concretized this spatial logic of control, driven by colonial fears of contagion and inter-racial mixing. In Kamathipura, the night pulses with life, crowds thicken, a police car weaves through, and an NGO’s sign watches quietly. In 1864, the Cantonment Acts were established, and prostitution in British military bases became strictly regulated, with licensed brothels operating under military oversight and catering exclusively to soldiers. To protect soldiers from venereal diseases, the military enforced the Contagious Diseases Acts. As a result, sex workers were registered, licensed, and subjected to mandatory medical exams, and those infected faced forced treatment or imprisonment. Under this regime, sex workers were confined to designated areas, and their movement was heavily restricted. In the brothels of Kamathipura, this is spatialised through pinjras (cages), a grim architectural typology, and a harrowing symbol of confinement and exploitation. With nothing but an exhaust fan, a thin mattress covered in tarpaulin sheets, and curtains that act as partition veils, here is where sex workers were—and in some cases, still do—live and work. The pinjras enforce surveillance, with small, dark, prison-like rooms that deny privacy, safety, and dignity. Rather than enabling agency, these spaces contribute to a system that dehumanizes sex workers. Over the years, Kamathipura continued to be a place where poverty, exploitation, and oppression were rampant. Despite this, it became a hub for a complex array of marginalized communities who forged a survivalist space within the confines. After Independence, the new Indian government failed to prioritize the well-being of these marginalized communities as well, with Kamathipura increasingly becoming stigmatized as a “slum” and a site of extreme social exclusion. By the end of the 20th century, rapid urbanization and a widening influx of the working class in Mumbai fueled the demand for sex work, dramatically altering Kamathipura’s social, political, and legal landscape. The number of Indian sex workers had surged due to a lack of alternative work opportunities, often enabled by violence, and tacit police complicity. “Now, there is one identity. Cheap, dangerous sex,” says a sex worker in the article ‘The Fading Red Light.’ Legislation and social norms reinforced Kamathipura’s image as an immoral, crime-infested, violence-prone neighborhood. This was crystalized with the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA) of 1956, which permitted sex work in private spaces but criminalized public solicitation, pimping, brothel operations, organized sex work networks, and operating within 200 yards of a public space. Trafficking networks, brothel managers, and societal oversight sustained the cruel infrastructure of pinjras as symbols of oppression. Extreme density, makeshift extensions, and crumbling infrastructure—divided and subdivided into tiny tenements—define the tightly confined world of Kamathipura. Once Asia’s largest and oldest red-light district, Kamathipura remains an overcrowded enclave spanning 16 lanes and 500 crumbling buildings over 100 years old, teetering in neglect with residents trapped in a decaying enclosure of dilapidated living conditions. Kamathipura’s architecture is defined by dense, low-rise structures, many of which are century-old chawls—tenement-style housing—originally built for industrial laborers but later repurposed as brothels and informal residences. The extreme density of these chawls makes private redevelopment of single buildings unfeasible, forcing functions to stack atop each other with encroachments and makeshift extensions: brothels occupy the street levels to lure customers, while upper floors house generations of migrant workers—Kamathis, sweepers, artisans, and shopkeepers—who have adapted the space to their needs. Families of up to ten people often squeeze into 8 x 10 square feet, partitioning rooms, building mezzanines, and stacking lofted sleeping areas to maximize every inch. This peculiar urban condition is rooted in the Maharashtra Rent Control Act of 1947, updated in 1999. Originally intended to protect vulnerable tenants from exploitative landlords, the Act inadvertently froze Kamathipura in time. Landlords, unable to charge market rents, abandoned maintenance, leaving properties to deteriorate. As communities remained in the same spaces for generations, organic urban renewal stagnated, locking Kamathipura in a cycle of physical decay. With Mumbai’s 1991 Development Plan, aimed at promoting private sector participation in real estate by relaxing land regulations, Kamathipura underwent violent fragmentation, trapped between transformation and gentrification. Luxury housing and commercial projects threatened to erase its original inhabitants, but, for developers, Rent Control became a financial roadblock. Redeveloping Kamathipura meant negotiating buyouts with long-term tenants or providing subsidized housing in new projects, cutting into potential profits. Some residents view redevelopment as a chance for better infrastructure, while others fear eviction. “We want redevelopment urgently because we are living on a ventilator. Buildings are falling,” quotes a resident in the digital exhibition Make/Break. Rising distrust between communities has become a significant barrier to broader alliances against displacement and exploitation. Dilapidated buildings gasp for survival, while promises of a “world-class neighborhood” remain trapped in limbo. Sex workers see Kamathipura as a rare space of community, while others wish to dissociate from the red-light identity. “This redevelopment will rid us of the ‘daag’ (stain) forever. We will also have bigger and new flats with in-built toilets and open spaces,” says one, while a sex worker laments, “the residents are against us now.” This fragmentation is rooted in competing interests, social stigmas, and historical divisions that redevelopment pressures have aggravated. Ultimately, redevelopment stalled due to financial constraints, low-profit margins, and fragmented consensus, leaving the neighborhood in limbo, partially demolished, abandoned midway, and trapped in a perpetual state of uncertainty. Once home to 45,000 sex workers in 1992, the community dwindled to just 1,700 by 2022, partially due to the rise of AIDS and partially due to the displacement effects of urban renewal. This overcrowded and unsanitary environment creates a claustrophobic form of housing, where residents live in conditions more restrictive than incarceration. By comparison, the United Nations recommends at least 32 square feet per prisoner in a jail cell, while the global minimum standard for long-term housing is 97 square feet per person, a stark testament to Kamathipura’s entrenched spatial injustice. Dilapidated buildings gasp for survival, while promises of a “world-class neighborhood” remain trapped in limbo. Just as the built environment confines, the legal system offers little reprieve. In 2022, the Supreme Court of India issued directives recognizing “sex work as a profession,” asserting dignity, equal protection, and noninterference with adult, consenting sex workers. Despite this, the legal framework under the ITPA remains unchanged: while the act of prostitution still remains legal, the laws surrounding it create a complex web of restrictions, rendering many aspects of the trade illegal to protect sex workers but not those who profit off from the trade. Thus, operating in a gray area, such partial criminalization subsidiarily subjects sex workers to overtly carceral environments characterized by heavy policing, frequent raids, social ostracization, and pervasive surveillance, reinforcing Kamathipura’s status as a spatially and socially contained zone where sex workers lack proper legal protection. More often than not, the public perception of Kamathipura as an immoral place overshadows the resilience of its migrant communities, who have struggled to carve out a home in the city. Its notorious reputation masks the deep-seated patriarchal stigma, lascivious harassment, and systemic neglect that both the sex workers and the neighborhood have endured. While the 2023 redevelopment plans promise 500 square feet of housing per resident—far more than the current 80—these changes effectively push out the working-class communities that have long defined Kamathipura, eroding its intricate mosaic of fringe identities and occupations. The moral stigma attached to historically marginalized red-light neighborhoods creates a paradoxical situation where it both prevents sustained municipal intervention since its inception in the colonial era as well as catalyses advances of large-scale redevelopment proposals due to globalization, privatization, and economic liberalization. Kamathipura’s peripheral status is ringed in by a looming vertical expansion of towering offices, luxury residences, malls, and hotels, that signal its imminent encroachment. As the neighborhood teeters between preservation and erasure, it stands as a stark reminder of how the politics of urban renewal often render the most vulnerable invisible. Amid Kamathipura’s cramped streets, resilient economies persist in the shadows of daunting high-rises. Courtesy: Majid Abidi, MONTAGE Unfortunately, this is not just the fate of Kamathipura’s red light district, but many such areas of India, including Delhi’s GB road with 90 brothels and 5000 sex workers, where redevelopment threats are lurking over for a shiny makeover. As cities fracture into exclusive islands for the rich and neglected peripheries for the poor, spatial injustice becomes a defining feature of the urban condition of India, intensifying the divide between valorized and devalorized spaces. Kamathipura exemplifies this growing spatial injustice, where redevelopment threatens the very right to exist in the city. Seen as a blight or a din on the nation’s aspirations for global status, government policies, social norms, and urban planning regulations converge to create a global peripheral class that is socially, economically, and legally marginalized, facing systemic exclusion, containment, dispossession, and eventual erasure from the country’s urban narrative. Kamathipura’s streets become shelter, resistance, and home for those the city leaves behind. Yet, Kamathipura has long resisted being reduced to a mere relic of the past. It remains an exceptional indignant space, stretching and adapting to accommodate those cast out from the city’s formal economy—the homeless rag-collectors’ community, stigmatized untouchables and outcasts, sex workers, migrant laborers, and trans people. These groups, forcibly excluded from the circuits of corporate capital, continue to resist, challenge, oppose, and influence their hostile displacement, reclaiming their right to the city at the risk of being sequestered. As brothels shut down, sex workers move to the streets. As authorities clear encroachments, the homeless set up temporary shelters on pavements and disputed plots. As waste-recyclers face eviction, they shift into half-demolished buildings to continue their trade. Kamathipura’s marginalized and migrant communities resist erasure, defying stigma to reclaim and reshape their neighborhood. Kamathipura, though outwardly unchanging, is in reality an extremely volatile neighborhood. As the vision of a “world-class neighborhood” remains locked in a stalemate, the consequences of this prolonged limbo weigh heavily on its residents. Since the first whispers of redevelopment in the 1980s, Kamathipura has endured a carousel of broken promises and fragmented attempts, each reducing its residents to plot sizes and vague categories. But what remains clear is that without centering sex workers and other marginalized groups, redevelopment is a cover term for erasure. From the cage-like pinjras to collapsing tenements, Kamathipura’s architecture has long mirrored the city’s neglect. Yet resistance—through occupation, survival, and refusal to disappear—is a demand to exist, it is the only just future of Kamathipura.