| dc.description.abstract | Malé, the capital island city of the Maldives, is one of the most densely populated islands in the world, with an estimated population of over 160,000 squeezing into just 8km² of land. To tackle this, the Hulhumalé artificial island project was initiated, creating a new island north of Malé city with the intention of alleviating the urban press. However, even as Hulhumalé is populated and continuing to undergo development, the population of Malé city continues to increase, worsening densification and living conditions, and raising questions about scarcity, rising inequalities, and access to space. This thesis aims to fill the empirical knowledge gap on the experiences of the urban poor in a densely populated small island context. This thesis also aims to fill a theoretical knowledge gap on what urban citizenship practices look like in a small island context. Through an ethnographic case study design, researching the urban poor in Malé city, this thesis uses participant observation and interviews to focus on dynamics of exclusion and inequality across three major themes of citizenship in Malé city: housing, the economy, and the production of space. The results show that each of these themes produce and reproduce the perceived dynamics of inequality, impacting the citizenship of the urban poor by marginalising them in access to resources, economically, and in the public sphere. Resisting this, urban citizenship is defined largely by daily resilience and smaller scale acts of resistance, through the use of informality and bottom up productions of community. | |
