Whose City Is It Anyway? The Battle for Belonging in Nochikuppam

In the ever-evolving coastal landscape of Chennai, Nochikuppam stands as a testament to survival and resilience. Built on sand, sweat, and community bonds, this fishing settlement has watched decades of urban plans surge and recede like the tides itself. Yet the most persistent changes do not emanate only from the sea, but from those who plan the city and prioritize a certain vision often at odds with the people rooted in these spaces.

To study Nochikuppam is to uncover how government policies, urban renewal projects, and visions of modernization have marginalized the knowledge and contributions of women, upending ways of life that have endured over generations.

From Dawn Markets to Displacement: A Timeline of Struggles

Before the 1970s, Nochikuppam was a lively, self-reliant community. Women went to the landing point at dawn, bought fish from men returning from sea, cleaned and sorted it, then sold along the roadside. Their labour animated the street: bargaining, children nearby, neighbours ready to help. Women’s work held together both income and community rhythm.

From the 1980s, “beautification” projects began disrupting this everyday economy. Under the Marina Beach Beautification Plan, fisherfolk were pushed from their traditional spots to the Adyar and Cooum. For women sellers, this meant heavier burdens and harder access to customers. In November 1985, the AIADMK government cleared boats and nets overnight. The community protested for a month. On November 7, fisherman Godhandapani set himself on fire outside the Secretariat (Radhakrishnan, 2022a). The Supreme Court later ordered seized materials returned.

In 2002, the AIADMK’s Marina Foreshore Development Scheme, tied to a Malaysia deal for an administrative city, again threatened eviction, especially from women’s market spaces. Protests ended only when the DMK returned to power (Radhakrishnan, 2022a). The 2004 tsunami devastated the kuppam. Later, World Bank funded housing projects faced resistance, particularly from women who saw how resettlement severed ties to sea and street markets. Between 2013–15, the Loop Road plan was introduced as a “traffic diversion,” supposedly harmless to livelihoods (Tamil Nadu: Eviction and Displacement: Fisherwomen of Chennai’s Nochikuppam…, n.d.-b).

By 2022, nearly ₹10 crores were sanctioned for a “modern” fish market on Loop Road. In 2023, vendors were evicted even before it was finished. Women blocked roads in protest. By 2024, vending on Loop Road was banned and fisherwomen were forced into the enclosed market, with too few stalls and poor sales. Their message: “you excluded us from planning and destroyed our livelihoods” (Radhakrishnan, 2022a). Promised roadside shelters and a community hall never came up.

Today, Nochikuppam is celebrated in policy as a modernised fishing hub but lived as displacement. What is consistently under threat is not only the community’s tie to the sea, but also the street economies sustained by women. Fishing here has never been just work, it is a way of life where women’s labour and presence are central. “Development” has repeatedly undermined that balance (M, 2024).

This paper describes Nochikuppam’s fisherfolk, with focus on the women, and how city planning and development projects have affected their work, relationships, and daily comfort. It shows how each new project has made life harder for them and points out the need to truly listen to women from these communities when making plans about the city. The experience of Nochikuppam is important because it shows us what happens when city planners ignore the people who actually live and work in these spaces.

When the new market was finished in 2023, most vendors were told to move in. People were not consulted about the layout, location, or cost. The stalls were too few for everyone, and many women reported that fees were too high. The market building was also away from their regular customers. Where women could once see and talk to buyers, now they were hidden inside a structure that fewer people wanted to enter.

The impact was immediate: business declined, incomes dropped, and more women felt the risk of being pushed into poverty. Their ability to make small amounts of daily money, a crucial part of family income, was threatened. Many could not pay school fees, repair homes, or cover health costs.

Women at the Helm of the Market

In Nochikuppam, almost all market work is done by women. Men usually go to sea to catch fish, but it is the women who carry, sort, clean, and sell the fish. They manage the money and make decisions about how to use or share their income. They learn how to bargain with wholesale buyers, navigate the changing moods of local officers, and keep earning money against many odds. Often, these women take care of small children while working. Their houses and stalls are close together, so mothers can check in on kids, cook meals, or help aging parents while still selling fish. Because they are on the street, they can be seen by friends, neighbors, and other customers, this visibility builds trust and makes it harder for outsiders to take advantage (M, 2024).

The job is not easy. The work is physical and means long hours. Women often spend time on their feet, carrying heavy loads, or sitting and dealing with the early morning cold and mid-day heat. Even so, they value the chance to control their own day and not depend solely on others for income. Being forced into new spaces with more rules takes away this control and independence.

When Rules Replaced Rhythms

What made the change much harder for these women was losing their control over how they did their work. Instead of each vendor choosing her spot, setting up her stall, and interacting with buyers outdoors, now there were many new rules. Market hours were fixed. Security guards watched over the area. Competition grew fiercer, since only a small number could get formal stalls. The trusted helping system: neighbours supporting each other, became weaker inside the walls of the building. When women were told to move to the new fish market, they quickly faced serious problems. There were not enough stalls for everyone. Some women ended up without a place to sell. Many said the cost of having a stall was much too high, especially since their earnings had dropped. The closed market space did not have the same flow of customers as the street.

Some buyers felt uncomfortable entering, and others just did not know where the new market was. Many women stood around outside hoping to catch one or two customers, but this was much less effective than before. Now, some had to walk much further to reach their new selling place or to get back home and carrying baskets full of fish became much tougher.

Inside the new market, selling was more competitive and less friendly. The old networks of friendship and help broke down. If a vendor left her stall for a few minutes, she could easily lose customers or not get her stall back at all. Everything felt more tense and less secure. With less money coming in, many women could not continue paying for their children’s schooling or felt guilty about cutting back on essentials. Some families skipped meals or bought cheaper, less nutritious food. Rani says,” I never fought with my neighbour. We were like sisters until the fish market opened up. Now we have this competition going on as to who sells more fish and who gets the best spot at the fish market.”

Children lost access to informal childcare. In the open market and old-style homes, children learned to help their families, joined in work, and were constantly watched by the “eyes of the street.” In the new, separated buildings and markets, families felt less safe leaving children unsupervised, and there were fewer places for them to play or mix with others.

Women also spoke of feeling invisible and disconnected. Before, the road market was lively. Customers would return to their favorite sellers out of friendship or habit. Children could stay close and help or play nearby. Other vendors watched out for them. But the new marketplace shut away these possibilities. Rules now discouraged people from gathering, lingering, or building spontaneous relationships. If a dispute happened, there was less room for informal negotiation.

This was about more than just space. In Nochikuppam, women were proud to run their own businesses. They saw themselves not as passive “victims” but as skilled workers, leaders, and important earners. The loss was not simply financial it was a loss of confidence, standing, and social ties.

Different people can use the same space differently. A fisherman puts it simply: “Walkers come from 6 to 8 in the morning. At that time, we are at sea. By the time we return and the women set up their stalls, the walkers are gone. There’s no issue between us and them. It’s the authorities who create problems.”

Social sustainability already existed in Nochikuppam. Just not in the way textbooks define it. It didn’t meet official standards of hygiene or cleanliness, but it worked. Families survived. Women ran households and businesses side by side. There was rhythm, balance, care. Every iteration of city development in Nochikuppam has come soaked in narratives of modernisation, order, and efficiency. These projects frequently adopt a language that exalts wide roads, formal stalls, concrete boundaries, and fenced-off “public” spaces. Less visible in this vision is the steady labor of women, the informal networks ‘greasing’ everyday business and the careful folding of market and home into one seamless cycle.

Modern city planning tends to imagine progress through infrastructures that align with male participation like large trucks, vehicular movement, and standardized sales. Women operating from portable stools, balancing children alongside work, or moving in and out of household and vending responsibilities, exist outside this narrative of progress. Their contribution slips into invisibility, the energy and ingenuity required to maintain household and market erased or sidelined. (Saxena, 2024).

Urban planning rarely acknowledges the multitasking, risk management, and timesensitive decision-making central to women’s work. The “modern” market, in its physical form, presumes a buyer who drives, a vendor who is stationary, and a clear separation between commercial life and domestic life. But the private and public were never truly separate, especially not in places like Nochikuppam.

Space is Never Neutral

Feminist geography asserts that space reflects and reproduces power structures. It is never neutral. In Nochikuppam, spatial interventions are actively disconnecting women from their rhythms, autonomy, and everyday spatial practices. Feminist thinkers like Ana Falú argue that the right to the city must be gendered. You don’t design for women by painting a pink wall or adding a safety sign (Falú 2017). You plan by understanding how women move, care, work, rest, and survive.

Nochikuppam had all of that. The city just refused to see it. So when the women protest, when they drag their boats onto the road, when they refuse to move into the indoor market they’re not being difficult. They’re demanding that the city remember who built it. They’re claiming the right to live and work without being pushed aside for the sake of order. For these fisherwomen, the right to the city isn’t an abstract idea. It’s daily survival. Every time they set up a stall, stand their ground, or refuse to disappear, they are practicing feminist urbanism not through slogans, but through living.

In the name of beautification, the state disrupted a living ecosystem. Women were stripped of their rhythms, pushed indoors or upwards, and left without meaningful support. Urban planning here hasn’t simply forgotten women. It has actively reshaped space to make them less visible, less mobile, and less powerful. The GCC housing blocks and the indoor fish market are textbook cases of this. They present as upgrades, but function as tools of control. This isn’t just about bad lighting or inconvenient stalls. The city has been rebuilt for a specific kind of citizen: able-bodied, male, mobile, and formally employed. Women like Nochikuppam’s fish vendors who juggle unpaid domestic work and informal street-based economies don’t fit that mold. So, they are excluded. Not symbolically, but physically. When homes were verticalized and vending was pushed off the streets, the urban fabric didn’t just shift it redefined who counts. In the name of order and sanitation, planners erased a living model of feminist spatial knowledge. The street was once a kitchen, a workplace, a care space, a stage for survival. That system was not broken. It was just inconvenient for the city’s new image. Now, it has been replaced by corridors, gates, and surveillance.

What we keep circling around in Nochikuppam is not just about vending, housing, or displacement. It’s about the right to the city. The right not just to live in it, but to shape it. To belong. To make decisions. To move through it without feeling like you're trespassing. And the women of Nochikuppam have always done that. They were already socially sustainable. They didn’t need a masterplan to tell them how to use space. They cooked, sold fish, raised children, kept an eye on the street, talked to neighbours. That street was everything; workplace, kitchen, network, safety net. That was their version of planning. What’s happening in Nochikuppam isn’t just development. It’s erasure. When vending is banned on Loop Road and women are pushed into enclosed markets, they’re not just being relocated. The space they built is being destroyed. Their freedom to exist on their own terms is being stripped. Their version of the city is being dismissed as unimportant.

The complexity of Nochikuppam’s experience cannot be explained by gender alone. The lives of fisherwomen here are shaped at the crossroads of class, caste, and the informal sector. Many belong to historically marginalized communities, denied long-term formal employment and legal tenure over land. Their work, often unregistered and unprotected, leaves them vulnerable to sudden shifts in policy or market conditions. (Verso, 1994).

Intersectionality here is not an abstract framework but a lived condition. Gender, caste, class, informality, and geography intersect in complex, material ways. If feminism is to remain relevant, it must locate itself on Loop Road. It must engage with the ways these women navigate survival through embodied knowledge, habitual routines, social networks, and an intimate understanding of the sea. Class and caste barriers, although not always spoken openly, shape who gets heard and who is ignored. When government meetings happen, many women say, “We are called to listen, not to speak. It is always someone else who decides.” (Tamil Nadu: Told to Move, Fisherfolk Shut Shop in Protest - ICSF, n.d.).

Within this context, every disruption is magnified. It is not merely a battle for space, but a struggle to maintain dignity, continuity, and the possibility of upward mobility for children. The street, the home, the market, all are sites of contestation and adaptation, places where multiple identities shape everyday choices and limits.

The Cost of Not Listening

Most of the development solutions tried in Nochikuppam failed because they did not start with the real needs of the people living there. The pattern was almost always the same: the city sees a problem (like “too much noise,” “too many crowds,” or “messy streets”) and responds by building something new or moving people around, but without proper consultation or listening. Planners do not recognize that the so-called “mess” or “disorder” is actually the healthy sign of a living, working community.

Geography as a discipline has long been masculinist, built on work that, while claiming to be objective or exhaustive, simply forgot women existed. It concerned itself only with men and public life, actively erasing women’s concerns from the study of space. As Jane Darke put it, “our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” Urban planning often centers the “male-dominated” public sphere like politics, commerce, law while neglecting the so-called private sphere, the space to which women have historically been relegated for domestic work, care work, and child-rearing. (Darke, as cited in Kern, 2019, p. 13) But the private and public were never truly separate, especially not in places like Nochikuppam.

Urban space is not neutral. It is structured by power and that power has a gender. In Nochikuppam, this plays out every day. Different people can use the same space differently. A fisherman puts it simply: “Walkers come from 6 to 8 in the morning. At that time, we are at sea. By the time we return and the women set up their stalls, the walkers are gone. There’s no issue between us and them. It’s the authorities who create problems.” Social sustainability already existed in Nochikuppam. Just not in the way textbooks define it. It didn’t meet official standards of hygiene or cleanliness, but it worked. Families survived. Women ran households and businesses side by side. There was rhythm, balance, care.

City officials believed that moving everyone into regular stalls or apartments would solve problems. In practice, it broke down support systems, made earnings fall, and created loneliness for many people. It even increased tensions between people who used to be good neighbors. Many public promises (like shelters for vendors or fair stall allocation) have not been fulfilled.The labor of women in Nochikuppam is not merely disregarded as untidy; it is targeted for removal. The chatter, the physical messiness, and the flexible adaptation that anchor the local economy become problems to be solved.

Built from shoreline-up

So I’m going back to my initial question now.

In Nochikuppam, these questions aren’t theoretical. They’re lived realities. TNM Staff (2023) When women vendors are pushed out of Loop Road or boxed into smaller, costlier markets, the message is loud: your labour, your space, your presence; it’s all negotiable. A feminist Nochikuppam wouldn’t begin with blueprints. It would begin with people. Especially the women who rise before dawn, balancing fish baskets, boiling rice, settling school fees before the city stirs. Their work isn’t “informal” it’s the foundation. Visakha (2024).

Markets would no longer be tucked away as “temporary” chaos. The fish market, in a feminist Nochi, is the civic centre. It smells of sea and spice, unapologetically. Its design honours the fisherwomen as entrepreneurs: cold storage units, cooperative stalls, child-care corners, spaces to sit, eat, and breathe. The shoreline wouldn’t be barricaded or pushed back for “beautification.” It would remain porous and accessible, with shaded drying platforms designed around women’s needs, spaces to mend nets, water taps at working height, storage areas that don’t require bribing the watchman of some gated complex. Houses wouldn’t be cloned concrete boxes stacked in resettlement blocks.

The streets? Wider only where they need to be. Not highways for cars, but safe passage for women walking back from the market at 4 AM, when the city still sleeps but the fishing economy has already started. Lighting would be designed not like floodlights of surveillance, but pools of warmth and safety. Most importantly, planning would not be done by distant consultants with satellite maps. A feminist Nochi is co-drawn by the people who know it best- the fisherwomen, the youth, the elders who remember the sea’s moods. Their voices aren’t “stakeholder feedback” tacked on at the end, they are the blueprint.

A feminist Nochikuppam wouldn’t look perfect on a map. But it would feel whole. That’s the kind of city worth fighting for. A feminist Nochikuppam isn’t some far-off utopia. It’s right here, waiting to be claimed. This kuppam’s women aren’t passive beneficiaries of the city, they’re its real architects. If planning has to mean anything, it has to start by listening to them. Not as an afterthought, but as the centre of the whole process.

Imagine markets shaped with their input, not dropped on them. Streets where their right to move, sell, and gather is non-negotiable. Policies that grow from their everyday expertise, not erase it. The city shouldn’t wipe out their spaces in the name of development it should strengthen and build on them.

A feminist Nochikuppam won’t look like a sterile drawing on a planner’s desk. It will feel whole, alive, grounded.

That’s the kind of city worth fighting for.