The focus on urban poverty in the Global South has centered on slum-centric discussions of urban marginality to explain the supposed crisis of Third World cities. Evidently, ideological and material eradication of slums is symptomatic of the erasure of urban poverty and is regarded as a developmental panacea to address all urban problems. Notwithstanding the political significance of this term to understand and respond to subaltern urbanism, the Eurocentric gaze of urban scholars and practitioners in using slum, as an analytical and developmental category, has impeded the recognition of varied forms of dwelling practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with footpath-dwelling communities in Mumbai, I argue that to understand the diversity of dwelling in the city, attention needs to be extended to what could be called non-slums, spaces that embody a set of practices and negotiations that are spatially distinct from those characterizing places officially labeled as slums and expand beyond density politics. Unlike residents of so-called slums, these groups are often dispersed and numerically weak. It is this spatial organization (or the lack of it) that shapes their everyday politics in making their place within the city. The exposed nature of their habitation makes their everyday living transient and sets forth a form of spatiality that is distinct from dense neighborhoods labeled slums. While slums are being peripheralized through various policy and state interventions, these groups continue to hold on to the urban core and in doing so produce new spatializations of poverty and varied subaltern subjectivities of dispossession and belonging.

Drawing upon ethnography among footpath dwellers in Mumbai this paper argues that hegemonic ideas and practices of urban inhabitation constrain subaltern visions of home as well as public space. In doing so, it warrants an ontology of urban inhabitation that transcends occupancy politics. It is not just the neoliberal state and property-entrenching capital but also the politics of inclusion that fragments subaltern subjectivities of belonging and dispossession. By highlighting everyday practices, particularly the use of footwear, food preparation and consumption, performance of modesty, and rearing of pets, I articulate two ways in which home is experienced and homelessness is resisted through claims where interlocutors have no spatial legitimacy: by (re)producing spatial and moral boundaries and practising multiple mobilities that enable transient domesticities. This paper thus provides an expanded sense of home that moves beyond the materialities of home making, and binaries of the "private" interior and "public" exterior.