["International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article develops the concept of differentiated infrastructural citizenship (DIC) to explain how infrastructural citizenship is materially mediated, socially differentiated, and unevenly exercised in a rapidly urbanizing small city. It advances scholarship on infrastructural citizenship and everyday claims‐making as political participation by arguing that the material‐institutional terrain structuring infrastructural claims is not a neutral backdrop, but is produced through a hybrid waterscape that is itself an outcome of casteized land and housing tenures. By tracing DIC and its material and political outcomes in Tiruppur, a fast‐growing small city in India, the article provincializes urban theory in two ways. First, it shifts analyses of infrastructural citizenship away from metrocentric accounts by theorizing how subaltern agrarian urbanization creates distinctive conditions for experiencing and exercising infrastructural citizenship. Second, it shows why critical theories on citizen participation must account for smallness: invented spaces of participation are unevenly accessible and difficult to sustain or scale in institutionally sparse contexts with fewer, segmented intermediaries. Findings from Tiruppur show that physical proximity to the state is insufficient for effective claims‐making; DIC produces incremental, differentiated improvements without unsettling underlying structures of exclusion. It thus complicates normative claims about the potential of everyday claims‐making to effect transformative urbanization.\n"]