Urban Fringes: Squatter and Slum Settlements in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) (Report‪)‬

Introduction Over the last decades, migrations and population displacements have produced new peripheral spaces throughout the world, on the margins of national states and of urban territories. Among these Sites are refugee camps, slums, squatter settlements, resettled enclaves, and so forth. At best, migrants live in buildings or camps provided by their employers. Yet the key features of most of these spaces are the non-permanent and transitory conditions, the vulnerability, and the poverty of the populations. For the sake of analysis, they can be called outplaces, i.e. neither belonging to the urban territory nor to its outside space. Their uncertainty has a serious impact on education, economic conditions, and the exercise of citizenship rights (Agier 2008). More often than not the people settled there are hardly integrated into global all-encompassing society and are considered urban or national pariahs. They are implicated in national conflictual causes, and are easily manipulated by political leaders and organisations. In South Asia,, these spaces are principally multicaste, multiethnic and multilingual. They mix people from different geographical origins and stand in sharp contrast to the previous pre-industrial territories based mainly on kinship, ethnic group and caste hierarchy. A new social fabric is emerging from these settlements, characterised by: new collective identities; an achieved status as far as leaders are concerned; social bonds based on a common neighbourhood and shared impoverished economic conditions; and lastly a vital role played by associative life. This article intends to provide a case study of such outplaces in the urban geography of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. I will focus on slum settlements along riverbanks, and address the various political and sociological issues which are central to the populations of these urban fringes. The data were collected over the last years in Kathmandu Metropolitan City, amidst growing traffic jams and thick clouds of car exhaust fumes. (1)