Deep Segregation: Informality, Trust and the Making of Discrimination in Markets

Abstract

This article advances the concept of deep segregation to theorise how social exclusion is produced through the everyday organisation of market access rather than through spatial separation alone. Deep segregation refers to a relational and processual form of segregation constituted through segmented routes of access, intermediary networks and communalised market logics that translate social prejudice into ordinary practices of valuation, trust and risk. Drawing on a 3-year ethnography (2017-2020) of rental housing markets in Delhi and Mumbai, the article develops this concept through an analysis of how Muslim tenants navigate urban housing under conditions of informality. We show that discrimination is not merely the outcome of landlord bias or episodic refusal, but an immanent logic of the rental market itself, enacted through trust-based brokerage networks, reputational economies, housing-collective gatekeeping and digital platforms. Muslim tenants may reside in close spatial proximity to Hindu neighbours, yet arrive there through truncated, contingent and communally segmented market pathways long before a tenancy is secured or denied. By conceptualising segregation as a matter of how access is organised rather than only where people live, the article reframes debates on housing discrimination, urban informality and market-mediated inequality. Although grounded in Indian cities, the analysis offers a transferable framework for understanding how exclusion is reproduced through intermediated markets across the urban Global South and beyond. Show more