7
Sitting in the Saltwater Café in the smart neighbourhood of Bandra with Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove, the two founder members of URBZ, a radical design and study activist group, I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable. I had now been in Mumbai for more than a week, walking through the numerous suburbs and neighbourhoods, trekking northwards from Colaba at the tip of the peninsula, attempting to understand this most complex city.
I had already seen much that challenged my assumptions about the Indian metropolis that at once felt so familiar but was also so alien. Rahul, with a sympathetic smile and with the best of intentions, was suggesting that perhaps the title for my book was, well, problematic, and cities were not necessarily good for you. In addition, perhaps I was being too simplistic about my definition of what a city was. From the balcony of this decidedly chic bistro, serving European cuisine as muted electro-Indian pop played through the speakers, life was undisputably fine. This was what the city was so good at providing: the bringing together of the best of things. But Mumbai was an city that was an urgent reminder that the city was also a place of extremes.
Beyond the confines of the café, Mumbai was in a maelstrom of transformation. As I wandered through the crammed, busy streets, walking past exquisitely dilapidated colonial houses, remnants of earlier empires, I was also mapping an ultra-modern city, plastered with Vodafone banners and Bollywood posters.
Vast new tower blocks were rising above the historic city, oblivious to the everyday hustle that swarmed at their base. Old cotton mills had been torn down and replaced by galactic shopping malls. Young men in hard hats and shorts turned concrete that was to be shovelled into baskets and pulleyed far above the cityscape. Walking through ordinary streets I was suddenly assaulted by the empty shell of a twenty-seven-storey tower block, rising into the polluted sky, surrounded by bamboo scaffolding that seemed to be the only things binding the skeleton together. This was not a building boom; this felt like a game of Tetris played on a massive scale. Work had just finished on a sixty-storey tower, proud to be the tallest in the city, and already the first floors of a new ninety-storey structure were soaring into the air.
On one of my walks, I stood and stared in wonder at the most expensive house in the world, Anthilla, the $1 billion home of Anil Ambani, ranged over twenty-seven levels, with enough parking space for 160 cars and three helipads; and living space for 60 servants. With a swimming pool and cinema, it also included a ballroom that was described by the celebrity novelist Shobhaa De as ‘one of the wonders of modern India’ that would put Versailles to shame.1 On the other hand, the writer Arundhati Roy interprets the building as a symbol of the ghostly spectre of Indian capitalism:
‘Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? . . . Is this the final act of the most successful secessionist movement in India? The secession of the middle and upper classes into outer space?’2
Anthilla, the most expensive house in the world
On another day, I exited Mahallaxmi train station and walked past the Dhobhi Ghats where the laundry of the city was washed within 2,000 soapy concrete pens. I passed a sea of purple hotel towels that billowed in the wind like a field of lavender and walked towards Jacob Circus and then south down Maulana Azad Road. As I meandered down the street, I looked at the stalls and the diurnal theatre of urban life: a shop selling ‘Leevee jeans’; a man selling watches from a washing bowl in which the timepieces were immersed in water to prove their water resistance; a sports shop with a canopy fringed with cricket bats; teatime at the Rolex Café; the constant frying of patties and puffs in vast roadside kitchens; red chicken legs rubbed with chilli and charred by the coals standing ready for a hungry buyer. And, above the hubbub, the call to prayer breaking through the sounds of banging and traffic.
The human traffic of Mumbai is overpowering. This is the fourth largest city in the world, with nearly 13 million within the city limits and 20 million people throughout the metropolitan region; it is also the most dense city with an average of over 27,000 people per square kilometre, the most dense neighbourhoods rising to over 100,000 per square kilometre. In comparison, New York averages at 10,000 and London at 4,900 per square kilometre. This population explosion had only occurred in the last decades – rising from 4 million at Independence in 1947 to its current levels, half of these people arriving in the 1960s and 1970s. The pilgrimage continues: 500 families arrive in Mumbai every day to seek their fortune, driven from their rural land, desperate for shelter and work. It is estimated that by 2020 Mumbai will be the most populous city in the world.
On another day, my wanderings took me in a different direction and from Bandra station I walked towards the BKC, the Bandra Kurla Complex, the latest redevelopment project in the city, an ambitious glistening enterprise zone, planned as the home for the latest multinational corporations, banks and the stock exchange. Wandering through the empty streets of the new enclave, I found the avenues lined with grand offices designed in the blandest business-park modernism: steel and glass shapes that could be seen anywhere from Singapore to Helsinki or Houston. This neo-liberal non-space, a corporate wilderness, is the yang of the rest of the metropolis: the new Indian dream of the future.
The BKC is conveniently located within a short distance of the newly rebuilt Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport that links Mumbai with the rest of the world. As India’s business city, the latest hopes for Mumbai are to transform the chaotic mass into an aerotropolis, an urban hub based around the airport, so that international businessmen travel smoothly across the globalised market without having to encounter real life. As the economist John Kasarda notes: ‘The aerotropolis represents the logic of globalisation made flesh in the form of cities.’3 But where are the people in this vision?
The divide between the ambitious dream and the evidence on the ground became clear as soon as I left Bandra station and walked towards the BKC. An elevated walkway – the skywalk – rose from the station concourse above the tracks and then continued to direct me along a lengthy covered pathway. From this height, it soon became apparent that the walkway was not just avoiding the rail lines but also a squatters’ colony that stood only a few yards across a rubbish heap from the busy tracks. Here a community had found space to build a collection of huts and stalls, erecting a home within the no-man’s-land of the city. Children played, women stood at their doorways and gossiped, goats chewed at scraps – this was a well-established community getting on with their everyday life.
On the skyride to the Bandra Kurla Complex
The skywalk continued, crossing over a main road which led to another, larger squatters’ colony. Here the dwellings were even more established; some constructed with bricks, others even rising over three storeys. At that height one could look into the top rooms from the elevated pathway. On the street level, which had clearly been given a new layer of asphalt recently, there were shops, workrooms and stores. If these were slums they were long-standing, well organised and industrious – a stark contrast to the empty streets of the nearby BKC. Clearly, the skywalk had been created to link Bandra station to the complex without having to cope with the dilemma of the squatters’ commune. This seemed like a strange way to build a city.
The development of BKC and the dreams of the Mumbai aerotropolis have made the real estate around the airport extraordinarily valuable. This also happens to be the same land that is home to one of the largest slums in the world, Dharavi. As I walked southwards away from the BKC, within five minutes of following the Bandra Sion Link Road, I was on the edge of the densest slum in Asia, a community now housing up to 1 million people in an area of 590 acres (just over 2.4 square kilometres).
The first studies of slums were conducted in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s, when liberal reformers such as Edwin Chadwick made a connection between poverty, housing and health. London at that time was the greatest city in the world, but between 1800 and 1840 it had almost doubled in size, stretching the old fabric of the capital to its limits. In 1861 journalist John Hollingshead visited a notorious rookery and found:
The small yard seemed rotting with damp and dirt. The narrow window of the lower back room was too caked with mud to be seen through, and the kitchen was one of those black-holes, filled with untold filth and rubbish, which the inspector had condemned a twelvemonth before. The stench throughout the house, although the front and back doors were wide open, was almost sickening; and when a room-door was opened this stench came out in gusts. In one apartment I found a family of six persons, flanked by another apartment containing five.4
Nineteenth-century London was not the only metropolis of extremes. At the same time in Paris, Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann to level to the ground the old medieval housing stock and replace it with sweeping new boulevards. This was the first instance of slum clearance on a grand scale, but rather than eliminating poverty, it simply shifted it to the already-desperate quarters of the city that spiralled further into despair. The poor were considered a waste product, residue from the improvement programme, which could be moved or removed at will.
Similar projects aimed at clearing out the human overspill of industrialisation were conducted across Europe. In most cases the slum regions were created by inadequate housing, where demand outstripped supply. Buildings in the poorer neighbourhoods were therefore divided up and rented out at a pittance. With such a low income, owners saw no advantage in improving their property and so it was left to decay. Hope departed soon afterwards, leaving disease, poverty and desperation to do the rest. The political philosophy of the day adopted the latest science to accuse the poor of genetic degeneration; racial stereotypes were used to label the wretched as ‘other’; moral judgement was made from the pulpit, and victims lost their identity and pride.
In 1880s New York, a young journalist, Jacob Riis, visited the warren of tenement houses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Riis had arrived in America from Denmark with only $40 borrowed from friends, a gold locket and a letter to the Danish consul, and experienced first-hand life within the slum. He then left the city to seek his fortune working as a carpenter, farm hand and brick maker, which forced him to suffer periods of destitution in which he slept on tombstones and ate only windfall apples. He returned to New York as a successful salesman, only to be cheated out of his profits and his stock by unscrupulous partners, forcing him back to life in the Five Points slums. He then dedicated himself to politics and journalism, gaining a contract at the New York Tribune as a police reporter. Thus he set his office up on Mulberry Street and started to record the slum life that surrounded him.
Riis’s book How the Other Half Live, published in 1889, is a portrait of the Five Points that revealed the horror of poverty within New York, and was a call to action to combat the vicious nature of the slums. The neighbourhood had not always been down at heel, but was once home to the ‘knickerbockers’, the aristocracy of Manhattan. Yet over time the rich moved out and the development of tenement housing attracted a different kind of resident. Local landlords exploited the itinerant labourers and immigrants who came for work, squeezing six men into a room to maximise profits. Housing conditions and living standards swiftly collapsed, as Riis noted: ‘The 15,000 tenant houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the past generation have swelled into 37,000, and more than 1,200,000 persons call them home.’ As immigration continued, the crisis became calamitous and disease frequently ripped through the populous disregarding race, age or gender.
In one notorious corner of the slum, the Bend, Riis revealed the full extent of the problem:
From Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Live. A room in a migrants’ hostel, Lower East Side
In a room not thirteen feet either-way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor. A kerosene lamp burned dimly in the fearful atmosphere, probably to guide other and later arrivals to their ‘beds,’ for it was only just past midnight. A baby’s fretful wail came from an adjoining hall-room, where, in the semi-darkness, three recumbent figures could be made out. The ‘apartment’ was one of three in two adjoining buildings we had found, within half an hour, similarly crowded. Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there for five cents a spot.
Another room on the top floor, that had been examined a few nights before, was comparatively empty. There were only four persons in it, two men, an old woman, and a young girl. The landlord opened the door with alacrity, and exhibited with a proud sweep of his hand the sacrifice he had made of his personal interests to satisfy the law.5
Looking at Riis’s photographs of Mulberry Street in 1888 and walking through Dharavi today, one senses that slums have faced the same challenges across history. Whatever the historic causes of inequality and poverty, the results are similar. Yet what is most strikingly different is the scale of the problem today.
In 2003 the UN-Habitat produced a report, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlement, which proposed a new agenda for the twenty-first century on the key issue facing the future of the city. The UN had long predicted that the world was on the verge of becoming urban, reaching 50 per cent by 2007; yet perhaps less obvious to observers from the developed world was where this growth was going to occur, and what it looked like. The 2003 report aimed to set the terms and plan for facing the next human crisis. In 2001, it stated, 924 million people, nearly one in three of the urban population, lived in slums; and this number was increasing.
As journalist Robert Neuwirth calculates, 70 million people arrive at the city somewhere in the world every year, that is to say 1.4 million arrive every week; which is 200,000 every day or 8,000 an hour or 130 every minute.
Yet this single figure – the total sum of 924 million slum dwellers across the globe – does not quite give the full picture, while the median figure, one in three of the world’s population, disguises a more stark reality. Within the west, 6 per cent of the urban population live in slums; at the other end of the spectrum a staggering 58 per cent of the urban population of south-central Asia currently live in extreme poverty. In Mumbai this figure is closer to 62 per cent, nearly two out of every three people. If that was not bad enough, it was also calculated that over the next thirty years this total figure will more than double, so the number of slum dwellers in 2050 could exceed 2 billion.
So where do we start? How can we define the nature of the problem: the identity of the slums? Is it a question of corruption, weak government, or complexity itself? Is the slum a universal phenomena or does every neglected neighbourhood have unique causes and histories? Is it an essential part of the developing city, a dialectical moment of transition? Where does the solution lie: is it a problem for the politicians, charity or the slum dwellers themselves?
The 2003 report attempted to define what a slum was, and therefore attempted to measure the dimension of the problem. This, however, begins with the difficulty of language. In 2002 the UN Expert Group Meeting devised a simple five-point definition that offered broad parameters. Every slum is unique, it proposed, facing its own challenges, and the product of a particular set of causes but in each, in varying degrees, one can find inadequate access to safe water, inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure, poor structural quality of housing, overcrowding, and insecure residential status.
Both Rahul and Matias told me that they did not like the word ‘slum’, because this was a pejorative term that connected Dharavi with a long history of condemned places. Indeed, few who actually live there call their home a slum; instead it is more likely to be termed un bidonville or les quartiers irréguliers in France, barraca in Barcelona, conventillos in Quito, colonias populares in Mexico, solares in Lima, bohios in Havana, Elendsviertel in Germany, shammasa in Khartoum, tanake in Beirut or an aashwa’i in Cairo. In Brazil the favela is a well-known nomenclature but you can also find morro, cortico or communidade; the famous Istanbul slums that have become centres of civic politics are called gecekondus. In Mumbai, no one spoke to me of the slums; rather it was divided up into pavement dwellers, chawls or chalis; elsewhere, such as in Kolkata, it is bustees. In Manila there are even more specific terms: the iskwater is a run-down collection of shelters made from poor materials; the estero are streets narrower than sewers and with a distinct smell; eskinita is an alley that fits only one person at a time; and dagat-dagatan is a site that is frequently flooded.6 Can one find a single set of definitions within this array of labels?
Perhaps geography might offer a simpler definition. Many slums are to be found on the edge of the metropolis, places that the rest of the community has disregarded, municipal land that can be populated with few official restrictions or where land ownership is contestable. Other slums are closer to the centre, places that have been evacuated or disregarded by the rich, and exploited by the poor who need cheap shelter and proximity to places of work. Often the slum is in a place that is cut off from the rest of the city infrastructure: water, transport, electricity. Dharavi first emerged in the 1960–80s in a period of extraordinary urban growth, and was developed on land that had been abandoned, despite being owned by various agencies, state government, local municipality and private hands.
Between 1971 and 1981 Mumbai grew by a total of 2.2 million, or 43 per cent. By 1985 it was estimated that half of the 8.2 million population were living in temporary homes or on the pavement. The people who settled there came from across the subcontinent: Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. For many Mumbai was the final destination after a long journey, often driven from their rural homes by debt, disaster or drought. Dharavi comprised approximately 75,000 huts and houses constructed on one storey, with plastic sheeting or a tiled roof. The average wage for a new arrival making his way in Dharavi in 1978 was 459 rupees per month.
As I walked around Dharavi, I encountered the different faces of the slum as defined by UN-Habitat, but I also found other things that I was not expecting. Within the area given over to heavy trades I came across ingenuity and a recycling industry that, statistically at least, makes Mumbai the greenest mega-city in the world; in a community centre I found a group of young Muslim women learning English, hoping to gain good jobs in local call centres; every time I looked to the skyline I could spy a mobile-phone mast, while on the central 90Ft Road I found shops and stalls all along the thoroughfare selling the latest smartphones.
This reminded me that the slum was part of the city, not apart. The literature of the slums often treats the squatter camps and temporary shelters as a separate place, detached from the rest. However, throughout history the slum and the city have shared the same story. Perhaps the most pernicious thing that slums have done is not to separate people from the city, but to render them invisible.
In a survey that the sociologist Janice Perlman conducted amongst three generations of Brazilian favela dwellers, each was asked about what it meant to have a successful life, and whether life had got better. In 1969 only 24 per cent of the first generation reported that things were good; when they were asked the same question again in 2001, it elicited a more positive 46 per cent. The next generation, their children, were also optimistic, with 63 per cent agreeing that things were better. Meanwhile 73 per cent of the grandchildren’s generation considered that their prospects had improved.
This, however, hid a more invidious truth: while life had got better the sense of belonging, of being a ‘gente’ – someone – was still a distant, ungraspable dream. It is as if life in the favela robs the dweller of the usual rights to the city. As one elder community leader admits, despite spending many years campaigning for the rights of slum dwellers: ‘I thought I would become gente someday, but my time has passed.’7 A slum is not just a place but also a social status.
In another instance, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the problems of becoming somebody are more starkly delineated. Diepsloot is a new twenty-first-century settlement that emerged off the William Nichol Highway at the very edge of the city limits, beyond the malls, golf courses and gated communities of the suburban rich. It was assembled in the last days of the apartheid era. In efforts to improve the slums that circled the city in the 1990s, new residency rules were imposed on the community of Zevenfontein; anyone who did not have papers was not invited to share in the ‘de-densification’ projects and was forced to move on.
Many ended up at Diepsloot, which was set aside by the city government. Local landowners tried to block the government’s plans for a ‘less formal settlement’; one threatening, ‘If they move here, I will be shooting ten or fifteen every season. I’m not scared.’8 However, when the ANC won the first democratic elections in 1994, there was hope that the new government would fulfil its promises of houses, jobs, services and education.
Instead the crisis got worse. In 2001 the improvements to Diepsloot were no longer a priority, despite the continued trail of new arrivals from the slums at Alexandria. By 2007 it was estimated that there were nearly 200,000 settlers, and that 30,000 more were arriving every year. Whatever housing scheme the government planned and implemented it could never respond to the escalating level of demand. As a result unemployment rose to over 50 per cent and nearly 75 per cent lived beneath the poverty line. In addition, living conditions were also seriously lacking: the waste system was almost five years behind schedule and every street ran with ‘daylight sewerage’. In 2009 tension and jealousy over the allocation of the few resources exploded into a series of tribal riots. Yet the local ANC government delegates continued to celebrate how far they had got. As Anton Harber, who has studied the problems within Diepsloot, drily notes: ‘After every interview with the leadership, I walk through the area and am struck by the disjuncture between the progress they proclaim and the reality that presents itself.’9
If things were not difficult enough, Harber highlights how the attempts to redevelop the community have been obstructed by the plight of local wildlife. When an environmental impact report was commissioned to look at how the development of housing might affect the region, it was stated that part of the plans would cover over breeding grounds for the protected native giant bullfrog. The report caused an outcry amongst environmentalists and scientists, and there was a wide-ranging debate on whether to move the frogs, or to halt the development programme. It was no small irony that a large section of this wetland had already been recently destroyed to make way for the new middle-class suburb of Dainfern; yet when the news was announced that more would be lost to slum redevelopment the condemnation reached fever pitch. It was eventually decided that the bullfrogs could not be moved, and that development would have to go around the breeding wetlands.
The word slum invites us to see a place that deserves demolition. Instead, we should try and rethink the definition of what such a place is, and what it might be. In order to do so we need to make the invisible and the forgotten visible. We need to recognise that the slum, just like the city, is more than its buildings, huts and infrastructure; we must also remember the people who have travelled vast distances to be there, their hopes for a better life, their expertise and their industry that prospers within the chaotic confines. They are as much a part of the life of the city as well as being the source of its future success. To address the problems of the slums we must address the difficult, wider issue of the right to the city for all.
On the edge of Dharavi, the road was packed with trucks that were being unloaded by teams of workers. It seemed as if the detritus of the city was being dragged into the narrow alleys that ran from the road into Dharavi: broken machines, heaped rattan sacks of plastic bottles, car parts. This was the rubbish of Mumbai that had already been sorted and was being brought to Dharavi for recycling. As a guide led me through the warren of packed-mud streets, he pointed into the dark doorways of some of the factories and warehouses.
Outside Dharavi, where all the garbage of the city is delivered
The neighbourhood still has a thriving leather market, though the skins are no longer treated there, but one can visit where the fabric is cut and sewn, buy bags and jackets on Mohandas Gandhi Road for a third of the price on offer on touristy Colaba Causeway. In another room, a length of silk fabric was stretched and pinned to a long table, and on either side two men in vests and caps pressed dye blocks at extraordinary speed, creating exquisite patterns, without error or hesitation. Nearby, the open door revealed a furnace where a man stripped to the waist, wearing goggles and gloves, stirred molten aluminium, melted down from beer and soda cans that had been scavenged by teams of recyclers who wander around the city, picking up the rest of the metropolis’s discarded rubbish. This molten metal was next poured into bars which were then moved to another factory a few alleys away where it was melted down again and moulded into machines that would be used to break down recycled plastic in another nearby unit.
In one warehouse I was shown a sack of white plastic pen tops, similar to the type I had used at school. I could not calculate how many there were, which had once filled the city’s pencil cases and now filled such a large bag, but each one had been cleaned in preparation for the grinder. In another warehouse the large old cooking-oil cans used by restaurants were stored ready to be cleaned in boiling vats of water and then resold back to the oil manufacturers. There were also stacks of paint pots that were cleaned in an oven, the flames burning off the old paint, then to be reused. Bales of used paper were being sorted, bound together and made ready for shipping. One whole area, populated by recent arrivals from Tamil Nadu, was dedicated to pottery, and in between the houses, flat rectangular kilns were built in which the pots were fired. The fronts of the surrounding houses were blackened with soot.
Moving out of the neighbourhood into another quarter, the work continued. There was a bakery that made snacks, pastry puffs, that would later be transported across the country, and beyond. There were carpenters and woodworkers carving intricately decorated works that would soon be for sale in the best stores in the city centre. Elsewhere, women sat in the shade, ripping handfuls of dough and rubbing it upon a flat plate, making poppadums that were then left to dry in the sun on wicker racks that fanned out like open umbrellas. On the main alleys, there were vegetable sellers with mountains of shiny red tomatoes, mobile-phone shacks, butchers with meat hanging off hooks, juice stalls grinding the pulp out of sugar cane, while a man skinned and carved a pineapple to be sold alongside a slice of melon and papaya.
According to a report by the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad, Dharavi contains 5,000 industrial units producing garments, pottery, leather and steel goods as well as a further 15,000 single-room factories. It is a place of extraordinary industry and produces almost $500 million in revenue every year.
This is proof of the power of the informal economy or what the journalist Robert Neuwirth calls ‘System D’. It is economic activity that is rarely recognised by governments, economists or business leaders, but is at the heart of developing communities like Dharavi. As Neuwirth writes, System D is ‘the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy . . . off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and more often avoiding income tax.’10
It is estimated that today System D includes 1.8 billion people worldwide; and by 2020 will include two-thirds of all workers globally. If it was possible to calculate the total income generated from the informal economy into a single figure it would represent the second-largest nation in the world. With such sums it is foolish to think of what occurs in places such as Dharavi as outside the system. For the vast number of people around the world it is the only system available, as Neuwirth notes: ‘It makes no sense to talk of development, growth, sustainability or globalisation without reckoning with System D.’11 When 65 per cent of all Mumbaikar live their lives within System D it is ludicrous to continue to pretend that this is an invisible marketplace, somehow less important than the business of the neighbouring Bandra Kurla Complex.
Settlements like Dharavi are the essential location for System D economics. They are places of transition, or, as Canadian journalist Doug Saunders calls them, ‘arrival cities’, places that mark the movement from the countryside into the urban world. The informal economy is the system that accommodates the latest arrivals who are unable to integrate into the urban economy straightaway, and it is also the means through which the refugee gains both economic stability and citizenship. As Saunders says: ‘These transitional spaces – arrival cities – are the places where the next great economic cultural boom will be born, or where the next great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice, and our willingness to engage.’12
Both of these ideas offer some insight into the fraught story of the relationship between Dharavi and Mumbai. Since the 1960s there have been numerous attempts to get to grips with the settlement, to find a solution to the problems of the slums as well as the human question of what to do with the squatters themselves. This sequence of government initiatives, policies and acts of violence are interwoven with the life and struggle of Jockin Arputham, who was born far from Mumbai in the gold fields of Kolar, outside Bangalore. The parallels between the two reflect the two different ways of looking at the slums: a top-down determination to get rid of the unsightly settlements, and the bottom-up, people-centred hopes to improve the lives of those who live there.
Son of a prosperous engineer, the young Arputham enjoyed a comfortable childhood – ‘we had a 100-acre farm, a British car (an Aston) and were well off enough for me to have a tea boy to carry my books when I went to school’.13 However, his father began to drink and the family fell on hard times. He was forced to leave home at sixteen and began a career as a carpenter in Bangalore. In 1963 he moved to Mumbai, then Bombay, persuaded by an uncle that the city was a place for ambitious young men, only to find that his relative lived in a shack by the railway and survived as a smuggler. Arputham was soon forced to live on the streets without shelter. He would not sleep under a roof again until he was married twelve years later in 1975.
In the 1950s and 1960s the state’s reaction to the slums was simple: most of the groups had settled on officially owned lands, which were poorly policed, and often the encroachment onto the land was eased with bribes and the turning of a blind eye. Long periods of inactivity were sporadically disrupted by moments of violence as the state and the municipality attempted to demolish the settlements and drive the squatters out of the city. While the state had strict laws about the resettlement of people moved by rural projects, there was no similar obligation to house those displaced in the city and as a result the problem only became more complicated. When people were moved on there was no importance put on the family, work or social network that was being uprooted.
Things changed in the 1970s when the state realised that if slums were to be demolished there needed to be some form of resettlement policy and as a result the Slum Improvement Board was launched. Attempts were made to bring amenities to established settlements. In order to do this, however, the government needed to know the extent of the problem and so the systematic counting of the slums began. The explorations found that 2.8 million dwellers were spread out across 1,680 informal locations. The state then had to decide who was, and was not, to be allocated services. Anyone living on central government or private land was excluded; those who were deserving were given a photopass. A similar accounting was repeated in 1983, revealing that 4.3 million now lived in 1,930 camps around the city. Knowing the extent of the problem at this stage was the first step in confronting it.
Meanwhile, Arputham was still living on the streets near the Janata colony, a camp built out of the mangrove swamps on the eastern suburbs of Mumbai. One afternoon, after talking to a collection of street children, he decided to set up a choir as a community project. The scheme was wildly popular and within a few years had hundreds of participants and a crowd of interested observers. The choir evolved into a street school, attracting over 3,000 pupils in the first month. In the monsoon season Arputham had to find a shed to hold classes, and when that was not big enough, the group built another one on open ground.
At the time one of the problems of the settlement was that no one was coming to collect the garbage, which gathered in piles, rotting on the edge of the community, threatening disease. On one Sunday Arputham organised a picnic where each pupil carried 1 kilo of rubbish and dumped it in front of the municipal offices in the centre of the city. There was an instant response and negotiations started on how to organise regular refuse collection. The activism continued with weekly projects – cleaning a toilet one weekend, collecting rubbish from public spaces the next. Soon the activities gained the attention of the local Tata Institute of Social Services as well as the French NGO Service Civil International, which helped with funding and organisation.
In his campaigns against the authorities Arputham became known as a local community leader and his resolve was tested in 1967 when a serious threat came from the local employer, the Bhabha Atomic Commission, which wanted to build on the settlement land and started a process of eviction with the full compliance of the authorities. The squatters were forced to defend themselves as well as prepare for a legal battle by proving that the settlement was not a temporary colony. After research in the library, talking to old residents as well as numerous ‘Parsi Babas’, they proved the land belonged to the government, and therefore the redevelopment was illegal.
The case gained such prominence that many high-profile figures joined the campaign and Arputham soon was moving from slum to slum helping them with their own struggles. He calculates that in the 1970s he was arrested and imprisoned at least sixty times, but the fight continued. When experts and foreign campaigners came to aid the campaign they were often given short shrift: ‘All these people, these experts, thought that they were coming to teach us – but we already had our own techniques that worked very well.’14
In 1976 Indira Gandhi’s government imposed the Emergency Laws and, in May that year, the authorities came to shut down the Janata colony. Arputham was arrested, put in front of a judge three times, and three times released, the court refusing to accept the police’s allegations. Instead he was commanded to help the authorities with the eviction and displacement of the squatters and the eventual demolition that took place over forty-five days. After that, the police told Arputham to leave the country, forcing him to spend the next eighteen months in exile.
In the 1980s a new wave of slum redevelopment began, funded by the World Bank. At the same time the Indian Supreme Court ruled that ‘the eviction of a person from a pavement or a slum will inevitably lead to the deprivation of his livelihood . . . and consequently to the deprivation of life’ and so if a person could prove that he had lived in Mumbai since 1976 he was eligible for housing. As a result all projects, funded by World Bank investments, were forced to be concerned with both demolition and rehousing.
The new scheme was called the Bombay Urban Development Project and the money was divided into two areas of investment: the Slum Upgrading Programme promoted the formation of cooperative housing associations and promised services and infrastructre on a ‘cost recovery’ basis. As a result new blocks of flats began to sprout up on the edge of Dharavi and other settlements, home for 88,000 families who took out improvement loans that could then be converted into mortgages for leasehold. The second project, the Lower Income Settlement Programme, gave subsidised land to the needy; however, there was no attempt to improve the living conditions or size of dwellings built on the land itself.
While many benefited from both projects, neither scheme attempted to address the needs of the truly desperate at the bottom of the pile. The World Bank expected a return on its investment and therefore the thousands designated as ineligible for any kind of protection – the very poor, those who arrived after 1976, families who had settled on private or non-governmental land – were no better off.
Jockin Arputham, head of the National Slum Dwellers’ Federation
Yet politicians were starting to realise that it was upon the poor that their power rested. After all, many of the rich in Mumbai do not bother to vote because they have wealth enough to extricate their families from the parlous state services; therefore elections can be won or lost by garnering support and making promises to the very poor. In turn, the poor were also starting to make their own demands.
Jockin Arputham returned to India after Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 election, having travelled to Japan, the Philippines and Korea where he made contact with other campaigners. Once home Arputham realised there was a gulf of understanding between the streets and the NGOs as well as between the streets and the politicians. As a result he decided that rather than mutual antagonism, there was some ground for conversation: ‘I endlessly pawned my typewriter when there was no money . . . It was during these years that I saw a need to change the approach. I was doing all agitation, breaking this and that, being completely militant, but the material benefit to the people was zero. I couldn’t even build one toilet. I had not even asked the government if it could build the toilet.’15
However this conversation would have to be conducted on a new set of terms: it was the slum dwellers themselves who knew best what they needed: ‘If we ourselves don’t know what we want, lots of people like the NGOs and big project wallahs will be very happy to come and dance on our heads.’16
Out of this new engagement, the seeds of the National Slum Dwellers’ Federation germinated. In 1984 the Street Dwellers’ Federation united with two other locally based groups: SPARC, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, founded by Sheela Patel; and the network of women’s saving collectives Mahila Milan. SPARC began in 1984 in Byculla, another poor neighbourhood in Mumbai, when Patel noted the need for informal places where women could meet and exchange ideas, as well as find safety. Finally the slum dwellers themselves had groups and organisations that could represent them, and participate in the decision-making that would influence their own destiny.
Today, the current government attempts at slum redevelopment have benefited from many of the disastrous lessons learnt by not listening over the previous decades, but the demands to reinvent ‘aerotropolis Mumbai’ have placed new pressures on Dharavi based upon the exponential rise in the value of land in the area, the need for new infrastructure and the government’s long-term commitment to improvement.
In 2003 the consultancy firm McKinsey was commissioned by a group of booster-ish businessmen, Bombay First, to write a report setting out Mumbai’s status as a ‘World City’. The plan set out six key areas of investment, the main one being a hyper-scaling of the real-estate market as the means to kick-start the economic boom; as one critic later commented: ‘As a report by the builders’ lobby, the recommendations scream[ed]: privatisation, corporatisation and build, build, build.’ The report particularly recommended developing previously abandoned land, relaxing restrictions on building on coastal zones, and opening up the slum redevelopment authority to the market.
In 2004 the whole scheme was handed over to the developer Murkesh Metha, who had a $3 billion plan in mind and later explained to the LA Times his excitement: ‘You’re talking of a location that’s fantastic. This is the only location in Mumbai where I can bulldoze 500 acres of land and redesign.’17
On 1 June 2007 global tenders were sent out to builders inviting them to come up with new schemes to redevelop Dharavi. The slum dwellers, on the other hand, would be provided with new seven-storey tower blocks and the promise of 225 square feet of apartment space, as well as all the modern services of water and electricity. For this, the new owners would only have to pay a meagre monthly rent of around 300 rupees (generating a monthly income of nearly $10.8 million for the developers). Of the 40 million square feet that would come available from the rehousing scheme, Dharavi would be replaced by ‘a brand-new beautiful suburb’ with parks, schools and malls all provided for the pleasure of the burgeoning Mumbai middle class.
In 2009, however, problems began to emerge. A handful of contractors exited the project citing a lack of clarity and a delay in implementation, while an expert committee condemned the scheme as a ‘sophisticated land grab’. There was also a complication over how many people needed rehousing and even the number of people in Dharavi itself.
At this moment, Jockin Arputham and SPARC began campaigning for a proper survey of the settlement, as well as publishing an open letter pointedly entitled ‘An Offer of Partnership or a Promise of Conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai’, asking for recognition of the slum dwellers and their right to be involved in the planning process. The position of the Dharavi residents was clear: include us in the decision making or else.
As I walked around Dharavi, five years after this letter was sent, nothing had yet been done. In the week before I arrived there had been local elections and one of the vote-winning policies that each party was heralding was an ever more generous FSI (floor space index), promising each family as much as 300 square feet. In the newspaper the following week a story claimed that work could start immediately on the redevelopment scheme but nobody I spoke to expected any change to occur in the near future. There were rumours that Mehta might be taken off the project and the whole thing returned into government hands.
In the meantime, new immigrants continue to come to Mumbai every day hoping to be part of the arrival city; a place where child mortality rates are some of the highest in the world, where 6.3 per cent of all children under five are expected to die, where more than 1.2 million earn less than 20 rupees a day (30 pence or 50 US cents), and where over 1,000 people are killed each year because they live close to the railway tracks.
So what is to be done? Will removing ‘slum’ from our urban vocabulary change the city on the ground? From the many new perspectives on the metropolis, can we find something there that might allow us to look at these settlements differently and allow us to hope that cities might be good for us? This is what I was hoping to hear as I sat at the Saltwater Café in Bandra with Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove. Except they were refusing to accept that this was a possible topic for conversation. Not only did they question what I meant by ‘the city’ – suggesting that I had an overly western idea that did not necessarily fit with the variety of urban experiences in Mumbai – they also told me that the slums will not be changed or improved by people sitting in cafés, committee rooms or government departments. In fact, they would refute the basis of the question altogether, stating that the problem lay with the assumption that ‘the debate was about how Dharavi should be redeveloped, never about whether it should be redeveloped at all’.18
As an explanation for this seemingly unexpected view, Rahul and Matias consider that the ideas of Jane Jacobs were just as relevant in Dharavi as they were on Hudson Street. Just as Jacobs defended her home from Robert Moses, so there was an argument that Dharavi was just as vital, complex and robust. One should condemn the local authorities for the failure to address the problems of sanitation and health, but the solution was not the destruction of the place. Every redevelopment plan, as they pointed out, was not what it appeared: when politicians and developers claim to be helping Dharavi, they often mean that they want to sell something. Dharavi offers an alternative, a rebuke even, to the mall and the air-conditioned business park beyond. Thus the Slum Rehab Schemes of the government were all market solutions and did not actually address the real needs of the neighbourhood.
In the 1990s the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto proposed that the slum dwellers’ right to the city was linked with access to the formal marketplace. If only the poor could trade with the rest of the city, they would soon integrate. De Soto suggested that each slum dweller should be given land rights over their informal property. This simple act of legal rubber-stamping, legitimising what had already taken place, would release ‘trillions of dollars, all ready to put to use . . . transformed into real capital’.19
Ironically this policy has already been adopted by the many left-wing parties in Latin America as well as the Indian Communist Party, but de Soto’s promise turns out not to be what it seems. The new homeowner can indeed trade and leverage the value of his house, by selling or mortgaging it; yet the gift of ownership comes with strings attached that can jeopardise livelihoods and communities. The recipients are also forced to pay tax, register income and become full-blown actors in the formal market. This is therefore less an offer of rights to the city for slum dwellers and more an invitation for the city to invade the slums. Eventually, it will only lead to increased poverty and inequality. Why would one offer this up as a prize to the poorest as if it were a cherished gift?
Governments should be encouraged to face the problems of the slums, but the solution does not come from the top down alone, and nor does it comes from exposing the most vulnerable of the city to the full power of the marketplace. The solution to the slums is not to force them to engage with the market. The best people to know what the slums need are the slum dwellers themselves; and rather than wholesale removal and redevelopment, the best possible solution for the problem of settlements like Dharavi is to replace the bulldozer with slum upgrading, bringing about improvement from within.
Everyday life in Dharavi
Slums often begin in discarded places: Dharavi was built over a stinking creek in a neighbourhood that already had a bad reputation as a noxious tannery. Many of the favelas are constructed on hillsides that would not pass regular safety inspections and are often victims of dangerous landslides during heavy storms. In Dhakar, Bangladesh, the slums grew along the river’s edge and are annual victims of flooding. It is the precarious nature of such places that makes it possible to build informal settlements: no one else wants to be there. Slums are by their nature victims of geology and geography. They are also losers in terms of civic infrastructure: they are situated far from convenient transit; water, electricity and sanitation are slow to follow the setting up of communities as neither government nor utilities see the value or profit in it.
These neighbourhoods survive on a patchwork of services. Electricity is often pirated from the city grid and alleys are criss-crossed with a web of cables and wires connecting the houses to the outside supply. As Jockin Arputham showed at the Janata colony, it was always possible to connect to the nearby water supply and service illegal taps. Otherwise, there are water trucks run by the local mafia which bring water every day, often costing four times more than the municipal supply. The lack of proper sewerage and latrines can cause severe health problems.
In the 1970s Mumbai borrowed nearly $200 million to improve its sewerage system, but none of these new works had any impact on Dharavi. For a number of reasons, there has been an official reluctance to provide toilets and water to the communities that need them most. For the landowners, the provision of services is an implicit acknowledgement of the slum dwellers’ rights to the land. For international agencies and NGOs, who hoped to build new houses with their own toilets, the building of public blocks was never seen as the solution. Government itself was averse to initiate projects that meant they had to negotiate with the slum dwellers. Instead whole communities were forced to queue, and often pay, to use the wholly inadequate toilet blocks that were generally poorly constructed, filthy and controlled by local gangsters.
Sheela Patel, head of SPARC, reports that access to water and toilets were some of the most consistent demands from women who came to the centre in Byculla. While the NGO’s dream of an indoor toilet was a noble one, it made more sense, and was more achievable, to campaign for the construction of well-managed communal blocks. At the time it was estimated that there were 1 million people fighting over 3,433 public toilets across Mumbai, of which 80 per cent were not working. When SPARC proposed a scheme in which the World Bank paid for the construction of 320 blocks, after which the alliance would manage and maintain them, the Bank insisted that there should be an internal bidding process, opening the project to speculators; as a result the project faltered and was not revived until 1998.
In the meantime SPARC started to construct a series of toilet blocks in Pune, to the north of Mumbai, developing an alliance between government agencies, NGOs and the communities themselves. In the next two years more money was spent on toilets in the city than ever before, consolidating the relationship between the different groups; as Patel notes: ‘The programme helped to reconfigure the relationships between the city government and the civil society; NGOs and communities were no longer “clients” or “supplicants” but partners.’20 By 2001, 400 blocks were completed with 10,000 seats. Working alongside the community also had an impact on the design of the blocks: attention was paid to how people had to queue to use the seats, the toilet doors swung both ways, each seat was connected to the main sewer to avoid blockages, and needed only half a bucket of water to flush. In addition, special blocks were constructed for children. It was proof that the right to have clean water is a right to the city not a right to the land. The toilet block is not a claim to own property but a claim to be allowed to be part of the civil society.
In 2007 the writer Suketa Mehta was asked by the Urban Age Conference to judge a competition for the best project that could change the living conditions of Mumbai. On the panel alongside the author was a former mayor of Washington DC, and the Bollywood actress and activist Shebana Azmi. There were seventy-four entrants in all, from the World Bank itself to NGOs, individuals and community groups. As Mehta records, the prize went to a more humble project:
Out of the hundred-odd entries we had received, only one came handwritten in Marathi, the local language. It was a home-grown project from a group of local residents. Hundreds of them shared a public toilet, which was a pretty disgusting place. Because it was everybody’s property; it was no one’s . . . So they came up with a solution: they put a couple of rooms on top of the building housing the toilet, and made it an educational centre. They planted flowers around the toilet. The community centre offered simple English and computer lessons, and became a social centre for the neighbourhood. To get to the community centre you had to pass the toilet, and so people started to take responsibility for the cleanliness of it.21
The central role of groups like SPARC in the improvement of the slums should come as no surprise; not that they are community-based activists, but that they are women. At the same time as Sheela Patel was setting up SPARC, its centres were also becoming the places for organising its sister agency, Mahila Milan (‘women together’ in Hindi), a loose network of saving cooperatives.
Most slum and street dwellers could never conceive of using a standard bank but Jockim Arputham sees the development of savings associations, particularly amongst women, as an essential part of self-help and determination: through savings, he notes, ‘we don’t have to demand that politicians improve living conditions or economic conditions or homes. We can do what we want to and achieve what we want to. Because of savings, you empower yourself.’22 Each slum settlement that joins the Street Dwellers’ Federation is encouraged to set up a micro-bank, families contributing what they can – as little as 2 rupees a day. Emergency loans can then be applied for at an interest rate of 2 per cent a month, or 24 per cent a year. The results are impressive: as the saving group of Byculla announce on their own website:
We, the women and men of Mahila Milan-Byculla, have to make our homes on the pavement of Bombay out of necessity, not out of choice. The city wants our labour. But it wants it as cheaply as possible. So we make our homes where we can, to be near our work, to earn enough to feed ourselves and raise our kids . . .
But we know we’ve done a lot of it ourselves. We’ve learnt that it doesn’t matter how you dress, where you live. It’s what is inside you that counts. We’ve been very lucky. We’ve been helped to learn to change our minds, to overcome the fear within, to learn to sit across the table from the politician or the policeman or the ration officer and face them as equals.
We’ve learnt that formal literacy is no bar. That differences of religion or race or ethnicity or gender need not get in the way of coming together to solve common problems. But above all, we’ve learnt that poor people really can take charge of their own lives and change them. They can’t do it alone. They need help. But they can do a lot more than some of you give us credit for. And that’s what we try to tell others, in India and in other parts of the South.23
According to Slum Dwellers International, women are the engines of development, and schemes such as Mahila Milan are means to challenge the assumptions about gender. Saving is the first step towards self-improvement as well as collective action; it moves women into the public sphere as organisers and decision-makers, and creates a community for women where they are not so isolated. In addition to savings schemes the groups have also developed a social agenda: they have challenged gender abuse, starting workshops on domestic violence, working with the police to set up community stations within the slums as well as campaigning for the closure of illegal drinking dens, where there has been a common link between alcohol and abuse against women.
It is impossible to consider the problems of the slums and not discuss gender issues. Even when thinking about the design of toilets, the privacy of women is an essential component. Where there are too few seats and not enough privacy, many women have to wait until it is dark to ablut, or even the middle of the night when there are no queues. Often they will not eat or drink in the day to avoid embarrassment. It is also common that women in the city suffer from higher levels of sickness and mortality than men as a result of less access to food, increased danger during pregnancy and giving birth.
Yet it is coming to the city that also offers the best hope for women, for as Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, noted in 2001: ‘In the village all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.’24 The future of the city must address gender as much as it looks for solutions to the problems of inequality and poverty. The provision of toilets and the organising of women’s banking groups may seem small compared to grand conferences and the announcements of millennium goals and initiatives but they are created by the people most in need to help themselves.
Another example of women helping themselves was seen in 1997 when SPARC was instrumental in organising protests against the arbitrary relocation of thousands of dwellers who lived on land belonging to the Railroad Transport Authority. SPARC and the National Slum Dwellers’ Federation were able to negotiate the process of removal and help the formation of cooperative housing for the displaced families. As a result what could have been a very traumatic and perilous procedure was managed with more consideration than had previously been expected, with local groups working with the railway authorities to decide on issues of eligibility, timing and the needs of low-income families. Over 50,000 families were moved into new housing in the suburbs of Mankhurd while new tenements were constructed. The results were twofold: the railway authorities were able to start their improvement project earlier than anticipated while the community felt that they had shared in the process and were willing participants whose voices were heard.
The role of women in the slums is perhaps the most important pressing question, but it is also – potentially – the solution. As Jockim Aputham noted in an interview with Forbes magazine, it is often women who have to face the greatest difficulties as they enter the slum. However:
When we go to a settlement, we start working with women. We do a survey of the settlement starting with the hut count, the area’s boundary, the age of the slum. We ask when did you come, how did you come, who is the landowner, what are the facilities you have, do you have drainage, water – and many other questions like that. Then we call for a meeting. In Mumbai, there are 150 settlements with no toilets. We tell them, write a letter to the corporator and go and demand action. Go and meet the corporator, ask him to come with us, go with him to the municipality and ask them for a toilet. Go and demand from the government.25
It is often assumed that the invisible slum dwellers have fallen out of mainstream society, that life within the settlements is intolerable and of last resort. Yet Dharavi is a brimming community of industry and family life: unique in its original, spontaneous use of space; as one journalist has suggested this ‘probably qualifies [Dharavi] as the most efficient and productive district in the city’.26 However, we need to remind ourselves of the human aspects of the community as much as its fabric.
Current government policy plans to demolish all of Dharavi and make it available to developers. There is a pledge to rehouse all those who can prove eligibility and each family will be given a 225 square-foot apartment. Yet will this not destroy the finely balanced complexity of the community?
At URBZ, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove both feel that looking at what is actually happening within the homes and workshops of the community is an essential, but much ignored, practice. Studying the history of the URBZ office itself, off the main Mohandas Gandhi Road, they discovered that it was originally a corrugated-iron shack built by the local government twenty-five years ago for displaced slum dwellers, the Raphaels. Since then:
It became a tobacco stand, general store, gift shop, ice-cream bar, Chinese takeaway and a mobile-phone shop. About fifteen years since their arrival, the structure transformed into a brick and cement house with a little toilet attached. Three years on, it sprouted two more floors. The space now includes three businesses, four families, a few seasonal workers, an embroidery workshop and our office – a little rectangular room with whitewashed walls and windows that stares into a low-rise roof-leaden landscape of corrugated cement sheets, blue plastic sheets and tiles.27
The URBZ office
It is easy to judge this as outmoded, pre-industrial and un-modern; is this why the government wants to demolish it? Surely the city of the future is big enough to accommodate both the factory and the ‘tool house’, the informal workshop that can be found throughout Dharavi. As they continue:
It might be time to acknowledge that for all its lack of infrastructure and overcrowding, several informal settlements reveal a trend that can be well integrated into a post-industrial landscape. They will then emerge not as much as slums in dire need for redevelopment but as a highly successful model of bottom-up development, with the tool house being at the core of its system.28
The slums do not need to be redeveloped in order to integrate the informal economy into the mainstream. Rather, the city needs to make itself more open to other ways of working and living. The ordinary city has much to learn from the slums about the urban future.
It was this simple truth that Rahul and Matias were politely attempting to reveal to me as we sat together on the balcony of the Saltwater Café in Bandra. It was not necessarily that they did not agree with my title, they were just sure that the idea of the city – what it was, how it worked, who was there – had to change. Nonetheless, when I asked them at the end of our interview whether they were hopeful for the future, they both smiled.