All through the world, from Japan to China, the African continent to Europe, economic specialization and attempts to organize crafts, manufacturing and trading processes, have been integral to urban life. In Europe, medieval guilds that interacted, resisted or cooperated with the State and the Church have impacted political and social trajectories involving, power, monopolies and conflict for centuries. Even after the spread of industrial capitalism and the rise of corporate globalization, European cities still show traces of the influence of guild-based systems. This can be seen in the way economic activities from wine-making to copyrighted design, from brands and labels to architectural styles, try to bridge traditional practices and modern demands. While contemporary urban planning practices and norms do not always respond as flexibly to economic activities as they did in the past – the legacy of strong lobbies and traditional elites controlling the urban landscape is still visible.

According to scholars such as Max Weber, the role of guilds played a special role in the emergence of a certain kind of economic urban character – distinguished significantly by an attempt to control urban life, create protectionist systems as well as maintain secrets connected to trade activities.

The development of patents and intellectual property rights are specifically connected to the history of guilds, which have been equally vilified by both, right and left wing economists in equal measure. However – Weber points out that the special quality that European guilds had was their direct connection with city based spatial regimes, local resources and in-house apprenticeships, which were often open for anyone with skills who belonged to the city, town or village. At the same time guilds were also closed when it came to taking in people from outside – sometimes discriminated on the basis of region or language.

This was unlike in India where exclusion was based on a more abstract principle, caste. Caste was capable of making someone from the same village or town socially distant. Someone from a different caste could be from your village or neighbourhood but physical proximity did not transcend social distance.

What this caste based exclusion did was make people move more. India’s relationship with physical mobility, with individuals, families and communities constantly circulating across the subcontinent has been historically documented by scholars like Sanjay Subramaniam and Ravi Ahuja. People forged linkages with caste based professions across vast regions. This explains how Indian traders and labourers travelled the world over through navigation systems or spread extensively across the sub continent.

Of course, wherever people went, they took with them the same structures of hierarchy. Sometimes they could rise up the social ladder, but mostly the social structures reproduced themselves in new geographies. Which also explains how most Indian cities often tend to reflect spatial configurations like the traditional village, with poor and rich communities developing co-dependent relationships. The emergence of a slum narrative in a city like Mumbai is a reflection of such forces. Several – though not all – slums tend to be dominated by communities which are weaker in socio-economic and ritual terms. Leather workers and potters in particular are the most marginalized groups because the material of their crafts is deemed impure.

In the European context, while ghettoization and segregation did exist, especially in terms of the designated outsider – there was a deeper process at work in which economic associations played a strong civic role in shaping urban centers.

The guilds may have had several problems, as they were often monopolistic, exploitative of labour and resistant to the control of mercantile capital from elsewhere, which explains their antipathy to right and left economic practices. But they did leave a huge impact on urban Europe in terms of the development of cities and towns, and towards the modernization of several crafts and artisanal practices. The continued dominance of European design in contemporary production and manufacture, the strong control of local natural resources, innovation in technology, the persistence of high living standards in terms of habitats are to some extent continued legacies of systems that paid attention to artisanal skills, valued excellence and were open to all within the shared space. Leather based brands as well as pottery from Europe – represent a completely different trajectory then what we see in India.

European urban landscapes are definitely a direct consequence of the way in which economic associations played their role in shaping them. Combined live-work spaces and neighbourhood streets as economic sites of exchange were as integral to the experience of medieval European cities as in contemporary Asian ones. While modernization of urban planning practices destroyed older, hierarchical and exclusive systems, it is undeniable that the strong role of economic associations through guild systems also shaped the way in which these transformations happened.

In India spatial configurations have rarely had a unified articulation, split as they always have been along divided social lines. The co-existence of the rich and poor in Indian cities is as much a factor of codependence thanks to specialization of roles than anything else. While professional associations are highly organized across territories, almost always affiliating with their own kind, the principle of urban space is inevitably splintered within – making inequalities starkly visible.

A neighbourhood like Dharavi sits in a place like this. It is not simply a physical space. But one that is shaped by social and historical contours to which it belongs. Leather workers and communities involved in tanning, processing and making finished leather goods as well as the potters have shown great enterprise and been victims of traditional marginalization.

Our practice explores how factors deeper than simply distribution of resources, urban planning or political intention can change cities. These deeper factors have do to less with psycho-cultural mechanism than with historical factors that shape two important aspects of urban life – livelihood and shared living.

This is the summary of a talk given at Oris – House of architecture, Zagreb, Croatia on June 16th 2016, which was part of the the Future Architecture Platform. Illustrations by Ismini Christakopoulou, Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava.

The modern notion of the future is based on a Biblical timeline, which has raised messianic expectations ever since Daniel’s prophesies. Such an understanding of the future even spills over into worlds where a more cyclical notion of time dominates – for example in the Asian context – and generates constant excitement of impending change. It prevails also in secular milieus, which believe that our future should be in our own hands rather than in those of the divine.

The quest for a better future is something that seems to infuse modern life, from political revolution to consumerist aspirations, from technological fantasies to ecological utopias (and dystopias). The strong faith in the possibility of a future that is radically different from the present has fueled architectural ambitions throughout the twentieth century. And it still prevails in some of the most dominant architectural practices today. ‘Parametricism’ being its latest and most hopeless expression.

Such moves are locked in linear time, where the past becomes a source of nostalgia or a vast archaeological site to be preserved in museums, while rendering the future into an amusement park of technological wonders, which promises to leave the misery of the world outside. Such grand architectural gestures always seem to provide the future in a self-contained form, managing to exclude misery out altogether in that ideal world.

The present becomes an awkward point of transitioning from an imagined past into a desirable future. It also has the irritating habit of tripping big plans and visions, by asking mundane and profane questions. It is in the present that ugly, mistaken or confused architecture sits cheek by jowl with political problems that challenge architectural ambitions.

Narratives of injustice and poverty may clearly go beyond the scope of architecture as a discipline. However, that doesn’t prevent the well-meaning architect to make a valiant attempt at becoming a saviour. He gathers as much of political energy as he can and gifts his architectural solution to the world, which can either emerge in the form of a master plan (for instance to rehabilitate millions of slum dwellers) or as a small but perfectly controlled architectural object (such as the $300 house project -R.I.P.). That these projects actually have no relationship to the context they are supposed to transform doesn’t bother him the least.

To the young heroic architect aiming at making a difference, looking at the present is not as straightforward as it seems. Especially when the dominant gaze is already coloured so heavily by a linear notion of time. The present is infinitely complex and dynamic, fusing the familiar with the unknown with disconcerting fluency.

Thankfully, linear time is not the only way to relate to the world. If anything at all – it only seems to distract us from a creative, imaginative and direct engagement with the present.

The present contains its own ‘becoming’. It inevitably moves in different directions, pushed and pulled by all of us. But we, who produce the present, are also firmly embedded in it. The present absorbs the future – not through the projected fantasies of a few visionaries but through the chipping and shaping away of the present by those who live in it – the unruly multitude of inhabitants.

The full range of architectural concerns, where the language of space, time and depth shape worlds and animate built-forms are all pervasive processes. These are important and exciting holistic moments. It is a real pity to split them up along a linear representation of time.

What would a practice of architecture and urban design that is not projecting ‘the future’ look like? One which is rooted in the present, rather than in a nostalgic notion of the past, or a wonder of the future, even though it may be inspired from and powered by those fantasies?

The notion of ‘recognition’ provides an important clue. Forms would not simply be projected out of nowhere, but are based on the recognition of processes at work in the production of places (economic, cultural, political). ‘Form follows recognition’ is the tagline of our current exhibition at the House of Architecture in Graz. In our introduction to the exhibition we explain that:

The process of recognition involves a reorientation of our gaze, and the way we interpret and deal with the world around us. It is about framing the reality in a way that allows us, and everyone else, to become legitimate actors. It is about the acceptance of our world as an unfinished and imperfect, collective work in process. And taking part in that process.

According to Amitav Ghosh, “Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge… The knowledge that results from recognition … is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.” (The Great Derangement, 2016, pp: 5-7). The act of recognition thus involves the establishment of a relationship between the subject and the object – which may be almost fusional. It is not a passive observation but an active engagement with the present and the potential that it embodies. Pre-cognitive forms of intuition and creativity thus have a central role to play in the act of recognition.

In another exhibition, currently showing at the Maxxi in Rome, we show wood, steel and acrylic models of ‘dream tool-houses’ designed by artisans in Dharavi, Mumbai, with the help of the urbz team. A tool-house is a typology that is very typical of unplanned settlements such as Dharavi, but which is also pervasive throughout Asia – from India to China and Japan. It merges residential functions with productive functions, thus optimising the use of space in dense neighbourhoods.

The tool-house models we produced with local actors in Dharavi are fictional and idealised representations of the reality they live in. They represent a potential that is at once hopeful and pragmatic, which draws on local skills and responds to local needs better than any utopian urban design for the future of Dharavi ever could.

Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, Mumbai

Global anxieties about population growth have been around at least since Malthus, with a peak in the 1960s when American academics started talking about a “population bomb” that would throw the rich world right back into poverty -and annihilate India once and for all. The particular shape of that anxiety in the form of a housing crisis set to swamp the world is relatively more recent. We seem to now firmly believe that population growth will overtake the capacity of governments to house people at decent standards. Subsequently, the world will get slummed up beyond redemption. There is a prophet of doom – à la Mike Davis – for every urban crisis that we face in different parts of the world.

However the apocalyptic vision itself has a narrative thrust. In it, greed and fear dominate over humanity and creativity. It calls for drastic and swift responses. Our fear is that, unfortunately, these responses may actually be more catastrophic than the reality they wish to contain.

We believe that the most urgent thing we must do is step away from such anxieties as a starting point, while looking precisely at the factors that cause them. While we definitely must analyze why more and more people are getting constituted as the surplus humanity which modern urban administrations seem to have given up on, we need to look at the pressure points afresh. We simply don’t see the weak joints where others seem to– basically the dark horizons of megalopolises being invaded by multitudinous migrants – moving in hordes across national or rural-urban borders.

We believe that the preponderance of slums in a global landscape that continues to urbanize rapidly, is a legacy of faulty policy and worse – a lack of imagination about what makes for good cities. It is also a lack of memory about how slums have always been part and parcel of urbanization and the many ways in which they have been integrated in cities throughout history.  Architectural and planning professions and other urban commentators have an amazing capacity to forget how so many of the neighbourhoods that we love have gone through many stages of development before becoming what they are. Many of the quarters of New York, Paris, London or Tokyo were once slums, by any contemporary standards.

Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, Mumbai

It is our contention that the inability of incremental housing in cities like Mumbai, Rio or Nairobi to translate into a successful tool of urban transformation is due to factors other than its intrinsic merit or fault. The issue of affordable housing is a problem not because there are simply too many people lacking resources or means to find or make decent homes and neighbourhoods, but that there are a handful of people who refuse to see cities and habitats in any other way but as a place of fixed and limited choices.

Around eight years ago, we set up a small office in the famed and notorious so-called ‘slum’ of Dharavi. In the global map of slums, we placed ourselves at the epicentre of what was mistakenly referred to as the largest such settlement in Asia. We were the latest entrants in a field that was populated by activists, NGO’s, political parties and other do-gooders and got absorbed in heated waves of discussion, debate and dissent. The government’s redevelopment plan, originally master-minded by a New Jersey consultant of Indian origin, was slated to become a single point clearance agenda for redeveloping this neighbourhood.

We interacted with Mumbai’s diverse set of activists and citizens with more diverse viewpoints and ideological moorings. And even where there was an overlap, we often found ourselves saying things that were counter-intuitive.  Those conversations helped us sharpen our conviction more than ever, and over the next few years, we found ourselves being immersed in the practice of incremental development strategies in Mumbai. We have since then resettled our office in Shivaji Nagar, Govandi – a settlement which is not as much in the limelight as Dharavi, but which is struggling just as much to reinvent itself.

We worked with local community leaders, with local house builders, residents and children and began to understand what community and neighbourhood life in a ‘slum’ was all about. All through the years, what we saw seemed to be some kind of real-time unfolding of incremental development strategies – the way we had read about them, or quickly glimpsed in Latin American contexts. Our practice sharpened, convictions became firmer and communication became smoother as we started conversing more confidently.

We had started our journeys in diverse, overlapping and occasionally parallel worlds. Our practice became a mashup of urban planning, anthropology, economics, architecture and design. Our ideological make up reflected all the unacknowledged intellectual confusion and fierce ethical commitment that our generation had grappled with thanks to the tectonic shifts of national and political maps since the 90s.

Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, Mumbai (photo by Ishan Thanka for urbz)

We attempted to connect our practice in Mumbai to a larger set of conversations that happened as we found ourselves travelling to Tokyo, Barcelona, Geneva, Sao Paulo, Rio, New York, Istanbul, Perugia, Milan, Shenzen, Belgrade, Johahhnesburg – wherever we went we found ourselves making linkages to the city and coming back to familiar practices – which somehow or the other involved watching people make their homes and lives over a generation, creating bonds with each other, sculpting communities from basic human needs of co-dependency and good-naturedness. We found a bit of Mumbai everywhere in the world.
And the people who we encountered through these journeys – our colleagues, our supporters, our collaborators, our critics and intellectual comrades – were the real touchstones of transformative learning. They all helped shape our central argument that connects our work:

Human beings as productive agents have the collective capacity to create their own built environments. If their environments are degraded in any way – that is to say if they happen to be slums – this state of affairs is connected to a set of factors that has little to do with their capacity or ability to create quality built environments. These factors include land arrangements that do not recognize occupancy rights as a valid mode of living in a city. They also include legislation that prohibits them to improve their environment because that would mean developing a sense of ownership towards the land on which they exist.

This is not allowed simply because cities today are shaped by speculation on land and space which is so tied down to its exchange value that it becomes out of reach for most of its residents. Especially those who find it more economical to use it for productive means. And it has to be deliberately kept out of reach as only then would the exchange value become genuinely lucrative. Due to this, civic authorities refuse to acknowledge that the city’s workers and the poor who contribute to its economy, need a different regime of occupying urban space, one which is based on use-value.

It is in this state of affairs – more than anything else that the urban crisis of today is predicated and this is what needs to be unpacked and understood – in the greatest of detail possible.

Shvaji Nagar, Govandi, Mumbai (photo Ishan Thanka for urbz)

#naturalcity

Final touches for a flower bed on the first floor of a home in Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, Mumbai, challenging the norm – of a deliberately shabby look that most prefer, to avoid municipal attention.

There are some lanes in Govandi’s Shivaji Nagar, a neighbourhood in northeast Mumbai, where residents deliberately avoid making their house look good on the outside. Some local contractors even make an extra effort to ensure that recently done-up homes look old and shabby. This is mainly to avoid attention from local municipal authorities who work hard at maintaining the slum-like quality of Shivaji Nagar. The tension between the willingness of residents to invest in their homes and a hostile civic environment is a major cause for the perennial presence of slums everywhere in the city.

Shivaji Nagar stands on soggy ground that was once reclaimed from marsh. This is one of many things it shares with the more notorious ’slums of Dharavi’, only a few kilometres away. Other shared features include hyper-density, a dramatic lack of infrastructure and a population that has historically been discriminated against.

Whether they are poor Muslims or low-caste Hindus, most of them have to make do with some of the lowest quality of life levels in the city.

Residents of Shivaji Nagar are well aware that the gas fumes emanating from the nearby dumping ground – the largest in Mumbai – are not exactly salubrious. Large parts of the neighbourhood do not have running water, and most streets have open drains – all to be expected in places that have grown outside any planning and regulatory framework. However, Shivaji Nagar, now called a slum even by municipal officers, was originally a planned resettlement colony. It was created in the 1980s to house displaced slum dwellers from other parts of Mumbai.

How it became a slum is a story of prejudice, inadequate and inflexible regulations, institutional corruption, and lack of political vision.

The result is a neighbourhood that today develops without any support and against all odds. Residents push above and beyond the once well-gridded street network, palliating the poor infrastructure with makeshift systems that are both innovative and insufficient.

Yet, for a vast majority of residents, leaving is not an option.

Having a home in the pulsating economic capital of India means access to employment and education. Being in Shivaji Nagar is no sinecure, but what could be more precious than a better life in the making?
Yet, visitors expecting to see a slum populated by depressed souls begging for subsistence are quite surprised to see something else altogether. Far from the clichés of the villa miseria, Shivaji Nagar is – for the most part – an upbeat neighbourhood, where the sound of houses being repaired and rebuilt syncs with everyday life, and where street markets are as busy as suburban trains. In Shivaji Nagar, as in Dharavi, many houses double up as home-factories producing all kinds of goods ranging from embroidery to cosmetics. A web of local artisans takes orders from all over the city for iron grills, wood furniture or polystyrene models.

Nowhere is the enmeshing of livelihood with living spaces as obvious as in the construction sector. Squads of specialized masons, plumbers, bricklayers, concrete mixers, plasterers, and electricians serve the insatiable local demand for improvement. A 300-feet house would typically take just a little over a month to build with nearly 100 people working in a well-choreographed construction ritual. Most of these labourers live in the neighbourhood, which means that at least part of what they earn is spent back in the local economy.

Shivaji Nagar’s artisans of construction are experts at dealing with constraints that would make most architects balk: limited availability of space and resources, the shallowness of the ground and corrosive weather. Add to that an indifferent or antagonistic middle-class opinion. But the biggest hurdle of all for neighbourhood builders is the generally hostile bureaucratic and legal context in which they have to operate. For instance, antiquated regulations mean that building a second floor, reinforced walls or a toilet inside a house are illegal.

People’s basic aspirations for better living are monetized in the form of bribes, which represent millions of dollars of informal revenue for some unscrupulous officers. The problem, however, is not as much corruption per se as inadequate policy, which create a black market for construction permits, much in the same way fixed exchange rates create a black market for currency. The worst case scenario would be to address corruption without addressing its root cause.

While incremental improvement by capable local builders and perseverant residents is virtuous and deserving of support, it won’t be enough to realize the potential of Shivaji Nagar and other burgeoning, struggling neighbourhoods in Mumbai and elsewhere.

What Mumbai needs more than ever is an official strategy based on the recognition of the internal dynamism of spaces that have been marginalized and repressed for far too long, and a clear mandate for the government to provide infrastructure and amenities that they lack so badly.

It is also time for authorities to come up with new policies for slums, which would formally recognize the occupancy rights of residents of Shivaji Nagar and other ‘homegrown’ neighbourhoods, so they can at last build on solid ground.

For this to happen, the government must turn the page over several decades of failed slum rehabilitation policy and realize that the most radical and innovative path may be the one that residents have carved for themselves.

This article originally appeared on NDTV.com and can be accessed on their website here.

Homegrown Settlements and New Metaphors for Urban Practitioners

Rebecca Houze in her essay ‘The Textile as Structural Framework: Gottfried Semper’s Bekleidungsprinzip and the case of Vienna 1900” (2006) analyses how significantly Europe’s rich traditions of textile design interwove itself into architectural practices.

Semper was one of the few architects who engaged with the dimension of architecture that was connected to weaving and the textile industry.  She explains: “The concept of cloth as a symbolic building material is contained in Semper’s enormous, unfinished compendium, ‘Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics’ (2004 [1870-73]). The first and longest volume of this text is devoted to a detailed analysis of the textile arts. Architecture, according to Semper, originated in the primordial need to demarcate interior and exterior spaces with dividers–fencing made of branches, for example, or hanging tapestries of woven grasses. Some of the earliest built structures were temporary tents of real cloth stretched over scaffoldings, often festively decorated with garlands, ribbons, and other kinds of soft ornament that today we might characterize as “fiber art” (Semper 2004 [1870-3]; Wilson 1995: 42-8).

While the use of new materials was absorbed into modern construction practices, what characterized Europe’s dominance in the world of architecture and design was building on its rich traditions of textile related creativity.

Anybody familiar with Indian history will immediately be compelled to make comparisons. And recognize the wide gap that existed and exists between artisanal practices and the development of institutional knowledge linked to contemporary design related professions.

While the great architectural schools, and specialized institutions dedicated to design have paid academic attention to the enormous resource embodied in India’s artisanal traditions, especially textiles, a translation into practice has not always been as successful.

What is particularly relevant to us about Semper’s observation about architecture is that he sees textiles as integral to its evolution, along with the world of masonry, ironwork and carpentry.  European architectural practice seemed to have built on technological innovation of physical materials along with integrating design processes of textiles into it. They evolved masonry, ironwork and carpentry, making technological breakthroughs while also letting loose imaginations from the world of textile design to produce an aesthetic – either through restraint or elaboration – that continues to dominate architectural practice globally.

For many artisanal traditions (including textiles) outside the European experience the path of change was much more complicated. One reason could be in the structures that energized artisanal traditions in Europe – which were based on apprenticeship and a model of skill learning quite different from India. In India artisanal practices were enmeshed with the logic of caste and were responsible for a high level of productivity in terms of quality and scale – but were simultaneously anchored to values quite incompatible with modern impulses.

In contemporary times, to extract aesthetic and design skills while filtering away social bonds that sustain them, became enormously challenging to say the least.

Nevertheless, there were some attempts made in that direction. Government initiatives to preserve artisanal traditions were reasonably funded and their attempts to be integrated into contemporary economic exchanges were partially successful – but the difficulty in reconciling caste based modes of organization with them remained difficult.

How do you preserve traditional modes that are encoded into social structures for their talent and skill and yet demand radical changes in those structures for the sake of modern social objectives?

This contrarian challenge lies at the heart of many urban realities in India and confound visitors. Its poorest neighbourhoods inevitably have some of the most formidable talent and skill in fields as diverse as embroidery, leather work, intricate wood-carving, stone sculpting and others. It is not uncommon to see exquisite craftsmanship embedded in simple designs up for sale in grubby shops on polluted streets. Dharavi, Mumbai’s most well-known settlement that has the distinction of being referred to as a slum, is also considered to be the most productive space in the city. Traditional skills of ironwork, textiles and pottery constantly adapt, like these skills have always done, to contemporary economic needs. In Dharavi, its not just old leather work, that are sold in shops in India and abroad, but manual skills that have adapted to new needs of technologies connected to computers, mobile phones and automobiles also thrive. Not being able to deal with the social and economic knots into which these highly prized skills are tied, has made India pay a huge price, evident in its poor social and economic indicators and under-serviced urban neighbourhoods.

Another example of this state of affairs has been the inability to build on design traditions that were enmeshed in India’s textile related artisanal histories and weave them creatively into a contemporary sensibility of building and architecture. While Indian talent tied down directly to those traditions seem to have made some sort of mark in the field of fashion design, architectural practice in India does not seem to have  built as seriously on those traditions.

What it did manage to do is align itself more with traditional building practices as a source of ideas and creativity. There is a body of work based on older spatial and structural principles and a spirited defence of indigenous styled in response to  ‘western norms’.

The most recognized and renowned architectural practice in India today – is typically embodied in the hugely successful work of an architect like Bijoy Jain, who has developed a practice connected deeply to local artisans. He involves carpentry, iron smith and stone work into his studio that works like a collective crafts workshop. His strength has been recognising these processes and developing an elegant framework around them. His emerging aesthetic often reminds one of Japan, which constitutes a story of similar encounters with crafts and architectural practices.

However, Jain’s work is so authentically embedded in traditional arrangements that they echo some of the problems connected to the socio-economic knots we refer to above. Just as artisanship could not quite escape royal patronage in the past – in fact it thrived on it – India’s peculiar caste story traps Jain’s practice in much the same way. His dependence on rich clients does not allow genuine experimentations in aesthetic terms as well as to explore new markets.

It may well happen that in the coming years, more innovative young architects from India try to consciously evoke the Semper moment by building on design elements from textiles and interweave them into contemporary building materials and practices by combining them creatively with Jain’s processes.

One such Mumbai-based architect, already exploring these themes, and someone we work with closely, is Sameep Padora. Coming from a family historically involved with carpet weaving, originally from Kashmir, he builds on textures of textiles and combines them skilfully into structural principles using parametrics modeling, to come out with flexible and sound designs that move through all kinds of contexts. His works exist in luxurious shopping malls but also slide easily into Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, a re-settlement colony in north-west Mumbai, where he worked with us to experiment with light construction material to create a roof-top office. He exhibited artefacts that residents could use in their homes as well. What we find particularly striking about Padora’s approach is his ability to be adventurous with material, weave in the flexibility of light and heavy moments, derive an aesthetic from all kinds of sources including textiles and carpet weaving, and work with artisanal skills in the way we find most productive – well adapted to contemporary and even futuristic technological and economic needs.

We realise that building on tradition is never easy. Moments from the past can never be revoked or recreated – least of all through simply ideating change.

The European relationship to construction, artisanal histories and textiles produced an equation that still sustains its sense of supreme confidence in the world of design that no amount of mimicking will ever recreate for another set of practices from another history.

What may be more productive is to look firmly at the present – at the existing realities that confront us and – if we want to be inspired by Semper at all – translate his moment more delicately into the present.

What we would like to draw on from him is the observation that building traditions emerging from textile and its rich allied practices – like weaving – are as valid as the ‘hard’ world of stone, masonry, ironsmith and carpentry – as architectural practice itself.

Besides this – what we would also like to pay attention to is the other element of skill formation that our world today is networked into – information and knowledge – and see how these come together to produce a new language of architectural and urban practice.  We see specific processes of thought and practice as having becoming enmeshed to produce new ways of understanding architecture.

Thus a specific building as a starting point – its spatial logic, its dimensions and its aesthetic touch is created through negotiating several anxieties about the role of the mason, the architect and the engineer.  Similarly, when a neighbourhood in a city is the site of operation, the anxieties get enmeshed differently, with the architect and engineer working together and evoking the citizens in a specific way.

In the European tradition the architect, at some historical point, became the master of practices involved with building – in terms of an appointed role. Someone who worked with engineers, masons, carpenters, artists and provided his signature to the work produced. Typically his structure was usually commissioned by the Church, royalty or an aristocrat.

Yet, there remained a world of building outside his appointed role, a world that did not require his signature. This world – for a long time remained closer to Semper’s primitive building spaces in which the metaphors in use were closer to textiles than masonry. Homes made of reeds, cloth and the use of mud as flexible material dominated simpler societies, peasants, slaves and tribal communities. Where the arch builder – the master was not needed. It must be said though that some more technologically advanced societies like China and Japan also used woodwork and paper to produce very sophisticated building traditions that used weaving as a principle rather than masonry – to produce exquisite structures.

This space of weaving homes also produced a rich source of imagery to think about places. Textiles as metaphor related to construction and design is not something that must be reduced to materials and its direct uses whatsoever.  In fact that has been the biggest problem when contemporary societies try to work with the idea of traditional artisanship. Historians point out that all kinds of productive work has been in a constant state of change and transformation and to look at the past in terms of specific material use and skill sets as if they never adapted to markets and changing contexts would be myopic.

For us the richest interpretation we could possibly make of Semper’s observations is to think through new metaphors derived from architecture and textiles. And one very powerful metaphor is that of the Urban Fabric.  In an earlier piece in this blog – we spoke about the Aesthetic of Habitats while reflecting on the idea of aesthetics in urban spaces as a whole – navigating the world of architecture and design and trying to value the gaze that looks at neighbourhoods and cities.

By re-visiting Semper we would like to argue that the patterns and elements of collective construction – as seen in the world of homegrown settlements is something that needs to be valued deeply – both as a practice and as an aesthetic. The idea of an urban fabric is a powerful one. It at once values the role of several weavers – home makers – tied to a logic of relations that produce patterns while being constructed. This represents a completely valid form of urban life that exists all around the world. Constantly improving favelas in Brazil, uncertain occupied spaces in Kenya, highly productive, skilled but marginal settlements in Mumbai, and incrementally grown neighbourhoods in Tokyo have started being recognized as having an aesthetic of their own.

Unfortunately, the reason most people see them as illegitimate spaces is not so much linked to their occupancy rights, poor quality, or misplaced and anachronistic exoticness (as in the case of Tokyo ) but as Ivan Illich would have reminded us – because they are produced in ways we consider illegitimate.

They are made through a collective intelligence, through processes that weave entire neighbourhoods with actors working in dedicated ways – without the master-builder providing a signature. Homes are woven into neighbourhoods through processes that produce their own patterns – which – through a historical gaze – have an aesthetic. But seen without imagination are considered to be without any whatsoever.

Our work in Mumbai’s homegrown settlements, provide us with new learning experiences everyday. And several more questions. What exactly is the role of an architect within such a densely and intricately woven fabric of networked homes? – is just one among them. We get some glimpses of answers in the small moves we make – project by project. A co-designed temple, a mosque, a tiny house – each of them a cacophony of intense dialogues and debates, but collectively being embraced into a landscape that seems to be emerging with its own pattern, its own style. We look forward to see what the future holds for us, as we take these small steps, we wonder what the pattern in the fabric will look like…

(These reflections were stimulated by discussions with Yehuda Safran who introduced us to Semper and Sarover Zaidi, who shared Rebecca Houze’s essay, during the Handstorm workshop organized in Shivaji Nagar Govandi – March 14-20th 2014. Photos by Tobias Baitsch)

Bhandup is densely populated ward in Mumbai, with about half a million residents — 85% of which are said to be living in slums.

James F.C. Turner, a British-born architect who worked in Lima in the 1960s, spent much of his professional life looking at the way people provided for their own housing needs using their know-how and locally available resources. He wanted to find out how planners and architects could support those processes, rather than impose their own technocratic and context-insensitive “solutions” from the outside.

On one level he was tremendously successful and influential. His ideas led to innovative housing development schemes in many parts of the world, including in Mumbai where, in the mid 1980s, the World Bank financed “sites and services” and slum upgrading schemes directly inspired by Turner. Over 10 years, tens of thousands of people benefited from policies that encouraged them to build their own dwellings on land provided by and equipped with basic infrastructure by the state. Others were encouraged to form cooperative societies that would be given leases to the land they occupied, at once converting their status without simply “giving away” the land or privatizing it.

Community ties are particularly strong in parts of Bhandup. Many residents come from coastal Maharashtra. The presence of wells as well as the architectural typology of the area attest of the the enduring presence of village ethos in homegrown neighborhoods, even at the heart of Mumbai’s 20 million-strong urban agglomeration.

Unfortunately for Mumbai, these schemes were scrapped in the mid 1990s as the real estate sector reached surreal heights and kept rising throughout the 2000s. (It continues to boom to this day). Public land became too valuable to let the poor occupy it. At the same time, officials refused to regularize the situation of its slum-dwellers, routinely referring to them as squatters and thieves despite the fact that the land they’d reclaimed was often formerly uninhabitable. Thus, Mumbai and the World Bank turned away from the progressive policies of the 1970s and ’80s in favor of “public-private” schemes that incentivize top-down redevelopment projects like the ones Turner fought against his whole life.

Today, Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Scheme is the authorities’ chief response to the challenge of improving the living conditions of slum-dwellers. It encourages private developers to clear areas classified as slums by the municipality and build high-rise housing blocks in which each family receives a free 225-square-foot unit. In exchange, the developer gets valuable “transferable building rights” on public land. This has led to the most toxic kind of developer-government nexus. A government report on the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme described it as “nothing but a fraud, designed to enrich Mumbai’s powerful construction lobby by robbing both public assets and the urban poor.”

Moreover, the quality of housing produced through the scheme has been widely described as appalling, the new buildings quickly becoming less livable than the slums they replace. Many original “beneficiaries” of the scheme have moved back to slums and sold their free flats to middle-class families who simply cannot find anything else in their budget. After decades of failed policies, the official slum population keeps rising. Today, 62 percent of Mumbaikars live in slums, according to the latest census.

We at URBZ have been actively involved in different neighborhoods of Mumbai – some of them classified by the authorities as “slum areas” – for the past six to seven years. Our office is based in Dharavi, a neighborhood that more than anything else struggles with its reputation as an immense “slum.” Along with many others, we have described how reducing this diverse and dynamic part of the city, where anywhere between 500,000 and a million people live, to a “slum” is the biggest disservice we can do to it. Dharavi and many other slum-classified areas in Mumbai have grown over the years, from small villages into densely populated urban neighborhoods. Their history and identity is marked by the influx of low-income, low-caste migrants from all parts of India over the past six or seven decades.

Many of these neighborhoods have improved incrementally over the years to become self-confident lower-middle-class areas. From the point of view of the new migrant, or that of the suburban slum-dweller, parts of Dharavi are aspirational. It is, after all, a centrally located, superbly connected business hub with seven municipal schools and dozens of private or NGO-run educational institutions. It has decent medical facilities and countless shrines and temples tailored to its fantastically diverse population. Over the years people have replaced their shacks with brick and concrete houses, which often double as retail or production spaces. Yet, like many other areas of Mumbai it remains under-serviced by the municipality. Excess garbage piles up, community toilets are overcrowded, and storm drains often double as a sewage system. These are some of the torments that residents of Dharavi cannot solve alone, without the active support of the authorities.

Like Dharavi, many other settlements have matured into neighborhoods that have more to lose from the rehabilitation schemes and redevelopment projects than they could ever hope to gain from them. These schemes are still at degree-zero of urban, architectural, social and economic development thinking. Extraordinarily, they are of exactly the same nature as the centrally administrated “massive housing schemes” and “high-rise buildings” of the ’60s and ’70s that Turner denounced. Isn’t it a rather unsettling thought that after all these years of trying different models and approaches, often at the expense of concerned populations, we are back to square one? The only difference is that now, instead of leading the process itself, the government seems content to simply provide a policy framework and let real estate developers and speculators do the job. Back to the 1960s – but minus accountability, and with infinitely more economic and technical means to do better.

Thanks in part to the protection granted by elected ward representatives, which have shielded them from the worst abuses of the public bureaucracy, many parts of Mumbai have developed fairly autonomously in spite of the hostile policies. Residents of slum-notified areas are certainly suffering from the government’s biases against them, including heavy restrictions on local construction practices. Yet the scale and complexity of the matter mean that the legal framework is only loosely enforced, if at all – as is the case in most cities around the world (U.S. cities included). Many construction-related decisions in Mumbai are – by default, not by design – determined at the local level, instead of being determined by government or developers.

Like Turner, we believe that decision-making and initiatives on housing-related issues are better dealt with at the local level. In what we call “homegrown neighborhoods,” users and construction workers are often neighbors. This proximity does something that is seldom acknowledged: It increases the agency of the end-user, and along with it, her sense of identity and attachment to the place where she lives. It also keeps precious resources within the area, distributing jobs and salaries locally. Finally, it reduces the cost and increases the quality of housing. This is because local contractors rely on their reputation within the neighborhood to get more jobs. They cannot afford to break their oral contract with their client and neighbor.

Our contention is that only by working within the existing fabric and with local actors can urbanists, architects, engineers and policy-makers contribute meaningfully to ongoing user-led improvement in homegrown neighborhoods. This is why we have just started a new project called Homegrown Cities that aims to demonstrate that an alternative to “redevelopment” is possible. We want to combine our observations with relevant aspects of Turner-inspired schemes and adapt them to the contemporary context of Mumbai.

This project will start in Bhandup, a hillside “homegrown neighborhood” located in the northeastern suburbs of Mumbai, where we have been active for a few years documenting local building techniques and contributing to the construction of a Hindu temple. From above, Bhandup looks a lot like a Rio favela. Within, it has the same vibrancy and similar issues – the biggest of all being prejudice from the middle-class and the administration. This neighborhood is typically low-rise, high-density and pedestrian. It is also mixed-use, hosting a great variety of businesses within its residential fabric.

Each time we visit the area we see new houses being built by local masons and residents. Most of them are one or two stories high on a 150-to-200-square-foot surface. Bhandup residents have access to water, and electricity is available to each house. Most people have television and cell phones. No one there is dying of hunger, and there are no beggars. What this neighborhood needs most is to be recognized as a viable model of urbanization – not as a slum. Our intention is to support the efforts of its residents and local builders.

Our long-term aim is to help improve construction techniques and promote the creation of a cooperative housing society that can take an active role in managing and planning the area. We also want to provide opportunities for cross-learning and technical collaboration between residents, local builders and professionals from outside. This is a long-term project, which will develop incrementally, along with the neighborhood.

These two houses were completed in the last 6 months by Amar Mirjankar, who is our local partner for the pilot project.

Our departure point is modest and ambitious at once. We want to build a house, together with its future users and local masons that we have known for some time. Once completed the house will be sold at the same price as any other small house in the area. Houses that are put on the market locally are usually sold within two months at most because there is an enormous demand for affordable housing in the city. We will then repeat this process until we build a critical number of houses. We want to innovate as we work, learn and deepen our relationship with the residents. One of our many projects is the creation a trust fund that would allow us to put houses on lease, so that even those with no access to capital can get access to housing. If successful, we intend to repeat that model in other places.

We do not aim to revolutionize the way construction is done in homegrown neighborhoods, and we certainly don’t want to impose a new process. We simply want to contribute to the incremental improvement that is happening already, and share our knowledge and network. This will help us highlight the good practices already existing, and show that there are alternatives to the wholesale redevelopment of unplanned and incrementally developing neighborhoods. We want to demonstrate that architects, planners and others can engage meaningfully in local processes, by respecting existing morphology, supporting the local economy and bringing in their skills and creativity.

We’ve launched a crowd-funding campaign, which we hope will allow us to raise enough capital to demonstrate the validity of this approach. This pilot project can then be repeated again there and at other places, each time bringing global exposure to local actors and contexts. This hybrid model, relying on local market dynamics and the solidarity of the global crowd, should allow us to revive some of the best features of the Turner-inspired schemes of the 1970s and ’80s, while addressing some of their shortcomings.

How You Can Help

You could contribute financially via our crowd-funding page. You could “like” Homegrown Cities and share the project with your network of family, friends and colleagues via our Facebook page. You could follow us on twitter @HomegrownCities. Or you could offer your expertise in the following realms: Legal, political, engineering, fund-raising, or design. If you wish to read more about the project, please click here.

This article was first published in the Next City blog.

Photo: Rehabilitation project in Dharavi

Quite a few architects and urban designers have cracked their heads on the urban phenomenon that Mumbai represents. What kind of logic keeps this big, bad city running despite all odds? How exactly does its urban fabric reflect the extreme disparities that have become inexorably attached to the city’s image? What does the mutation of colonial Bombay into global Mumbai mean for architectural forms and public life?

Rahul Mehrotra’s static vs. kinetic city story is one of the most compelling attempts at providing a general understanding of the dynamics and tensions at work in the making and perpetuating of Mumbai’s urbanism. According to him, the static is the official city of built forms, framed by monumental structures, birthed and nourished by broadly premodernist and modernist impulses. Sharing space, often unacknowledged and even unseen, but nevertheless very much present and active is the kinetic city, energized by the impulse of everyday human presence and activity, spilling over streets and public spaces, composed of transactions and the bazaar ethos, especially by resource and capital deprived inhabitants.

He accurately points out that Mumbai’s history and future are unimaginable without the dense trading culture and human interactions that spill in and out of its bustling streets and worn out habitats. Likewise, his critique of rigid notions of architectural heritage and urban futures that defend built space over lived space, is spot on. Anybody who comes to Mumbai and connects with its incredible street life, wrapped around and between its mongrelized Gothic colonial or post-colonial structures can immediately connect to the ideal types of the static and the kinetic city.

Mehrotra goes on to elaborate why Mumbai is essentially a kinetic city which cannot be tamed or reigned in by the static city. He does not fully buy into the standard dichotomization of the city into formal and informal sectors, which can mistakenly be overlapped onto his static-kinetic concepts. Instead, his perspective transforms public architecture into a sophisticated set of practices that involve a layered understanding of architectural heritage. He attributes a more creative role to intangible moments of public life like festivals and street economies. The transformation of the Kala Ghoda art district in Mumbai is a successful tribute to his framework.  It is to his credit as an architect that he uses imagination and a sense of history to co-produce a public project of this nature without investing in another expensive monument to celebrate existing ones.

Sadly, the concept of the kinetic city is threatened by the malaise of over-interpretation. Sometimes instigated by Mehrotra’s own hurried words. For example, it is easy to misread his observations that all structures of the kinetic city are made of temporary and recycled materials or that their limited but productive lifespan is connected to makeshift building techniques. This encourages a tendency to misunderstand some neighbourhoods in Mumbai as being disposable because of a surface reading of their dynamics. They seem to resemble the structures that Mehrotra is describing. We argue that it would probably be wise not to let Mehrotra’s slippery concept slide over the blurry boundaries of South Mumbai, to become a guiding principle to understand habitats such as Mumbai’s so-called slums. We have come across quite a few students of architecture who build on his framework and delve into the issues of affordable housing and the question of slums and shanties.

In the wider context of Mumbai city, the limitation of the static/kinetic framework becomes more pronounced the closer you look. For decades Mumbai’s poorer neighbourhoods have been seen as a kind of soft mobile stock of temporary habitats – easily removable when the right time arrives for good profits to be made. Far from being the recycled landscape one could imagine when listening to Mehrotra, slum notified areas are often made of over-engineered pucca structures, built by professional masons and contractors using industrial construction materials. Their streets are full of registered shops selling mainstream products.  Many of them also double up into what could be called post-Fordist industrial sites, organized in flexible and anti-fragile (as Nassim Taleb would say) production networks.  If there is an appearance of shabbiness to many neighbourhoods it is not because of any intrinsic quality to them but due to the myopic policies of the civic bureaucracy. Unbelievable as it may seem, it is true that local contractors in those neighbourhoods have a stock of special effects to age a building so that it does not catch the eye of a corrupt official looking to make a quick buck from a new (unauthorized) construction.  In some extreme cases, brick and mortar structures are covered up by corrugated iron sheets, to give the impression of being temporary, just to evade demolition.

On the other hand, apart from a few protected heritage monuments, the static city of Mehrotra’s is nowhere to be seen. The logic that rules Mumbai is not that of the static city, but of the speculative city. It may forgo a beautiful heritage structure in its quest for new territories, or even sponsor a street festival, as long as it is eventually allowed to invest in expensive real estate somewhere on the horizon, and get a great view on top and a parking space below. For sure, the speculative city produces all kinds of empty spaces that may look static in appearance, but are actually highly volatile real estate assets traded on global markets. A building and the flats within it can well be bought and sold several times over before having been built, with profits made at each stage –till it bursts. This is the most vivid expression of a speculative value of space that is completely disconnected from its use value. These buildings embody what Zizek refers to as the “virtual, spectral domain of Capital.” (Zizek, 2001: 3/4).

The speculative economy is heated up by infusions of global capital in search for high and quick returns. Indian corporate houses, businessmen and politicians recycle grey or black money sent off shore into real estate projects built only to be sold to fellow investors. It is no coincidence that tiny Mauritius Island, a tax haven, is the first largest contributor of Foreign Direct Investment to India.[1]

In hot speculative markets, land development is not driven by the demand of users, as much as that of investors. This explains the total discrepancy between the demand for affordable housing in many cities and what is actually being produced, which is predominantly high-end residential or office buildings (rarely mixed-use) destined to be traded on a global real estate market. High-end housing continues to be produced in large quantities in Mumbai and other metros despite the fact that, according to the district level data from census 2011, 479,000 flats are lying empty in Mumbai, 10 to 20% of which are not finding buyers [2].

This doesn’t seem to worry the developers and the authorities. In June 2012, municipal authorities approved the construction of 78 new buildings above the height of 70 meters (Midday, 2012). Twelve skyscrapers above 200 meters high are currently being built in the city, out of which six will be 300 meters or higher. In addition, another 17 buildings of 400 meters height or higher are proposed waiting to be approved. Out of these three are above 500 meters and one, India Tower designed by Fosters and Partners, is planned to reach 720 meters high, which would make it the second highest building on earth after Burj Khalifa.[3] Far from being static and defensive, the present wave of urbanization is swift and predatory, storming into forgotten parcels of land and blowing them up vertically, flying over roads and winding around corners, wild firing to remote areas like there is no tomorrow.

The speculative dynamics dominating the political economy of the city threatens the existence of neighbourhoods, which at present in Mumbai, provide living and working space for half of its population on a very tiny proportion of land. These neighbourhoods are full of vitality. Thanks to their deep integration to the city’s economy they function as vehicles of class mobility. They reinvest in pucca structures and collectively improve their neighbourhoods to the extent they are permitted by the authorities. However most of the time they are fighting a tough battle. Residents of locally developed neighbourhoods have to deal with contested ownership and occupancy rights, which are being swallowed up by the city’s speculative impulses. As they consolidate, they have to break through a mangrove-like municipal bureaucracy that informally sucks up the proverbial fortune at the bottom of the pyramid through bribes and fines. Keeping them kutcha – at least in appearance – by forbidding obvious improvement and denying adequate infrastructure makes it easy to notify them as a slum – and makes homegrown neighbourhoods vulnerable to predatory speculative development.

The government’s attitude generates a great uncertainty as far as their established occupancy rights are concerned. While many bet on the wholesale redevelopment of Dharavi for example, one can barely speculate on the future value of a single plot within the neighbourhood, for precisely the reason that all of it could be taken over in the name of   redevelopment at anytime.

As a result, while at the metropolitan/global levels, the land value of slum notified areas can be speculated upon, at the local level the exchange value of space is determined mostly by its short-term use value. The question that use-value puts forward is not: “how much can I hope to get if I sell the land in 2 or 10 years time?” but “what kind of value would I generate or attach to the space if I use it for one or two years?” The fact that there is already a local real estate, use-based market within these neighbourhoods, is often ignored. The worth of these neighbourhoods is not based on speculative value since for the inhabitants, the space has little worth beyond its use. But that does not mean that there is no value at all –quite on the contrary. In fact in the existing regime, buying a house in Dharavi or any other neighbourhood built on public land, without putting it to productive activity, makes no economic sense whatsoever. It is productive drive that makes the place so dynamic.

Simply providing residents property titles through programs such as the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) or the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) scheme, would not make things better for the city –although it would provide temporary relief to many residents of the targeted neighbourhoods. Quickly the whole neighbourhood would drown in speculative exchanges and reduce value to purely that. Which is what the speculators strive on. Since it would simply be a means of organizing property deeds and putting everything up for sale to the highest bidder. Existing residents, tenants as well as landlords, would eventually leave the place and move elsewhere, where speculation allows for use-value to still express itself, since that would still make economic sense. Externally, this would mean more actual slums sprouting up on new peripheries and future potential for investment in real estate projects by speculators.

The kinetic dynamism that exists at present in those neighbourhoods is not connected to their form or structures as much as their political-economy. It is the same use-based economy that allows space to be filled in all over the city – in the interstices of bridges, buildings and on its streets. The kinetic effect of peoples overwhelming presence – all the way from South Mumbai to North – in every inch of the city’s public spaces and in its homegrown neighbourhoods is based on the preponderance of their use-value (this is what we have been referring to as the intensive city). Every street hawker, vendor, even homeless sleeper, pays for that moment of use. They pay local goons, police, municipal workers – almost anyone who claims a right of being temporary tax-keeper.

In the process, they do have the potential of organizing themselves, improving their incomes, transforming their status, and they do this all the time – till they reach narrowly defined limits (in the case of slums it is sometimes as arbitrary as a 14 feet height restriction). The limits imposed on them force them to exist in a no-mans territory in between different regimes of land and local political control. As a result the city does not have the requisite number of rental houses for poor people, organized hawking zones, good quality incrementally built neighbourhoods, systems of generating revenue on occupied land, or even decent public toilets.

What we do get are more mass-manufactured static habitats fuelled by speculation, constantly predating on spaces of high-use value. The latter are often called encroachments, violators of public space and worse – illegal. All this while the city keeps making more place for new real estate projects – even if they are badly used, unproductive and sometimes empty. At the same time, so-called slums and street economies continue generating wealth incrementally, at great difficulty and against all odds, which they then  share in outrageous proportions with the city’s official and unofficial extortionists.

These are the processes which produce the kinetic energy that the city – paradoxically – also thrives on.

This post is the first a of series of short essays written by participants of the Homegrown Neighbourhoods Workshop, which took place in January 2013 at the Institute of Urbanology.

Agata Jaworska interviewed us for a special issue of the magazine Volume (Volume #32: Centers Adrift). Photos taken by Ishan Khosla. Here is the complete interview:

AJ: Dharavi is one of the rare situations in which a slum presents an opportunity. How did this unique situation come to be?

ME&RS: Actually, what is or is not a slum is not so clear-cut. The reality this word is supposed to describe shifts from context to context. In Mumbai, people living in areas identified as slums by the government or referred as such by the media, city builders, and politicians, often take great pains to point out that their neighborhoods are not slums at all. Sometimes they are old urban villages that had sublet pieces of land to poor migrants; their low-rise high-density form made urban authorities refer to them as slums. In other cases migrant communities were patronized by politicians who allowed them to settle on government land. The settlers were promised a place in the city in exchange for votes. They did not see themselves as encroachers or squatters since their move was sanctioned by official authorities. The history of these neighborhoods is often forgotten. Many of them have grown into busy zones of economic activity and livelihood. Their residents contribute to the city’s life in major ways. Their presence has turned Mumbai into the best-serviced city in India, perhaps in the world. They are an affordable workforce and need affordable housing.

Dharavi emerged along with other such settlements. It is not a city within a city, nor is it the exception that it is often portrayed as being. It grew around mangrove creeks on the outer edges of the colonial city. Its historical epicenter is Dharavee Koliwada, a four century-old tribal fishing village. Dharavi is particularly well-known since the city grew around it. Once at the periphery of the colonial city, it attracted leather workers and others who had no other place to go. It is now at the center of Greater Mumbai, strategically located along two major railway tracks, minutes away from one of India’s major corporate hubs, the Bandra-Kurla Complex. Dharavi has become famous for its activities that are plugged into the city’s trading, manufacturing, and service sectors.

We see this situation as one it actually shares with many other settlements. It is connected to its spatial organization that happens to combine work and living conditions characterized by the form we refer to as the ‘tool-house’. This allows for a whole lot of manufacturing, retailing, and trading activities to function from this mixed-use condition.

A combination of greed, prejudice, and ideological bias prevents the authorities from supporting the incremental, locally-driven development of Dharavi. The labeling of it as a ‘slum’ has the perverse effect of delegitimizing a neighborhood altogether and thus justifying the lack of provision of public services. This is because slum dwellers are perceived as squatters who have no rights to the city.  Thus, the label of ‘slum’ is itself the biggest obstacle in the improvement of the quality of life in Dharavi and other such settlements. This is why through actual and conceptual intervention we aim at normalizing a neighborhood that doesn’t have much to gain from being described as an exception. What we should recognize is that Dharavi is a natural urban formation, unique and banal at once. It is the tip of the iceberg. Dharavi is urban India at its best, because it is a testimony to the capacity of people to lift themselves up against all odds; and at its worst because it also has the messed up aspect of a creature that was beaten up, marginalized and oppressed by powerful forces over too many years.

The category ‘slum’ is considered to be the antonym of what is supposed to be the formal city. The formal city itself is a notion suspended somewhere in our collective imaginary. A fantasy that only the most developed East Asian and North European nations succeed in upholding in the urbanism of their cities. In Mumbai the formal city evokes high-rise blocks in segregated zones, connected by motorways, flyovers, sea links and (perhaps someday) monorails, and a neat division of functions between residential, recreational (i.e. shopping), and working quarters. This image is so twentieth century! Especially when we know that at the heart of what we consider to be the formal world’s economy is the web – that incredibly free and user-driven system – and global finance, which rides on deregulation, borderlessness, risk-taking, and cocaine.

In fact binary categories like the formal and the informal become rigid formulations that don’t do justice to the urban dynamics that exist in a city as diverse as Mumbai.

Dharavi and many other settlements like it are fully plugged into the economic dynamics of the city. Their mixed use spatial logic and cheap labor supply support the activity of large-scale corporate groups through manufacturing and retail or by providing services at cheap rates.

Seventy percent of the total workforce is said to belong to the ‘informal’ sector. And matching this figure is the overwhelming population that is supposedly living in ‘slums’ as well. If this is the dominant condition how can the economy and the settlements be referred to as informal, marginal, or peripheral?

AJ: Dharavi came to exist because of the lack of infrastructure ­– any area that was serviced would have been unsuitable, as affordability was the key determining factor. If Dharavi gets serviced, will it still exist? How would retrofitting infrastructure change its dynamics?

ME&RS: Actually a close observation of Dharavi’s history reveals an incremental growth of infrastructure over a long period of time. Schools, roads, and community toilets have been built over decades. Sometimes with state support, sometimes entirely by the state, sometimes privately and sometimes through community initiatives. Compared to other neighborhoods identified as slums, many parts of Dharavi are decently serviced, though the scope for improvement is tremendous. Municipal authorities often have to be bribed to fix a pipe. Electricity is legally provided by private companies, metered and paid for. The proportion of toilets per capita is low. Only those few who can afford to have them built, have them at home. Some just don’t have enough space or resources and have to use community toilets or the streets themselves. This state of affairs is something that is connected to civic clout and varies street by street, or neighborhood by neighborhood. If Dharavi gets improved services, it will still exist, and better than ever before, but only if such improvements are not clubbed with wholesale changes in the built-form of the neighborhood.

AJ: While governments are busy setting up special economic zones, Dharavi has self-established itself as one. Could this economic hub have come to exist with government involvement? How do you think the government can now plug in?

ME&RS: If the government had appreciated how the artisanal energy found in the communities here provided highly-skilled but cheap labor to the city, they would have connected these efficiently to the emerging industrial and service sector. Then the story of Mumbai would have been different. Right now the efficiency of Dharavi is connected to its spatial logic, the autonomy and independence that its small-scale economic units enjoy and the presence of community histories embedded in the neighborhood.

Dharavi residents refer to the area as a special economic zone in an ironic manner, often with sarcasm. After all, most special economic zones are pampered with facilities. The opposite is true of Dharavi.

For this one can attribute prejudice and ignorance, or a combination of the two as the main reasons. Privileged classes in India are used to a high level of subsidized labor and a cheap service economy, shaped by older modes of social stratification. To have entire neighborhoods living in poorly serviced conditions, where the service providers are badly paid is completely acceptable to them. Such neighborhoods can exist cheek by jowl with privileged ones. Since they often emerge on government land, or by paying cheap rent to small-time landlords, their presence is seen to be the result of charity or disrepute. When market forces start eyeing that land, for real-estate development, the ‘slum-dwellers’ are seen as encroachers and squatters, with their continued presence there being constantly under threat of demolition.

The state or municipal authorities, which had been complicit in the development of such neighborhoods in the first place, then start to work hand-in-glove with developers and try to clear them out. Neighborhoods with stronger political clout manage to survive these maneuvers to a certain degree. Dharavi, through its density, demographics, and political clout has managed to push forth its own agenda fairly successfully, but is under threat now by the weight of its inaccurate reputation as a ‘slum’.

AJ: Almost all companies in Mumbai have some sort of contact with Dharavi – whether through products or with waste. Can you tell us more about some of these connections with Mumbai, India, and the rest of the world? How does informal Dharavi interact with the formal world?

ME&RS: It would be best not to look at Mumbai as framed by formal and informal channels. But as a web of activities located in different neighbourhoods, each with their own advantages and strengths. There are people working for multi-national companies as secretaries, drivers, security guards in so-called formal spaces, but they themselves live in neighborhoods qualified as ‘informal’. In their homes, other family members are making small components that are then sent off to assembling units that produce taxed goods. Many shopping malls may have products, in their restaurants or in shops, made in settlements like Dharavi. Export of goods, especially leather and clothes, from Dharavi to countries around the world is fairly well-known. Within Dharavi, residents are provided with goods and services by local agents all the time. The neighborhood is a hub for exchange of goods and services from throughout the city. Its central location, connected to all three railway lines – western, central and harbor – as well as by bus-networks, makes it a very convenient transaction point. Recycling of waste is a major chunk of its economic activity and is networked all through the city through agents, collectors and suppliers. Material comes by hand carts, taxis, trucks, and trains. Local construction activities are another substantial economic activity. Dharavi is a market for cement, bricks, pipes, and other construction material, and is constantly building and rebuilding structures all over the neighborhood.   Dharavi interacts with the city, country, and world pretty much using all existing resources – mainly through agents, business networks, the city’s transport systems, and mobile and communication devices.

It would be interesting to turn this question on its head and ask how ‘formal’ middle-class residential buildings in Mumbai are connected to the city around them. A typical high-rise apartment block is serviced by dozens of unregistered workers on every floor: guards, cleaners, maids, cooks, nannies, drivers, and an army of deliverymen. Its residents often work from home (without commercial license), download all kinds of files from the net, hide gold from the surveyor, transfer cash to foreign accounts, pay bribes to officials, buy real estate in cash and so on.

What we need is a new way to think about production and services in the city. In a study we are currently conducting in Dharavi, we are looking at mobility from the point of view of home-based economic activities. What we are observing is that the house is connected to the city through a constant flux of goods and people moving in and out. Our cities are not organized in formal and informal zones. The division between the center and the periphery are blurred. The city’s activities are organized in webs and hubs that span across places and classes. On one level Dharavi is one such hub. On another, it is a collection of small producers themselves clustered in different parts of the neighborhoods, working in a networked fashion, each according to their own traditions and specializations.

AJ: For Dharavi to have a leading position within economic chains, it possibly needs to shift from executing orders to also initiating them. Can we expect that to happen in Dharavi? How would you describe the role that Dharavi fulfills within national and international chains?

ME&RS: Dharavi’s strengths are in recycling, manufacturing, construction, and services. Its localization at the center of the city, its spatial logic, its deep social networks, its cultural diversity, its extreme density and clustering of activities, are strategic advantages in the domestic and global market. We are not sure if we can simply project the wisdom of the day in terms of planning and development onto Dharavi’s future. Not everyone aspires to be a designer. Optimizing the production process is itself a creative activity, which can be valued for its own sake. Of course, Dharavi is not one homogenous space or system. It is perfectly feasible for some industries and activities to establish leadership in the larger market and start initiating more orders. In fact, this has been happening for a long time in some industries. For instance, the potters sell products that they have designed themselves. Lots of leatherwork is designed locally as well. However, to mark that out as a joint aspiration for the whole neighborhood does not really make sense. Nothing can be pushed onto the neighbourhood. Its strength is its ability to reinvent itself constantly. To appreciate its logic we need to accept its existing specializations as well as its multi-zonal mind-set. Dharavi is deeply connected to the wider economic systems at large, not as one consolidated neighborhood, but through its own very diverse and adaptable systems. To visualize it as a distinct, holistic sub-system and then imagine its transformation through taking a position of leadership, falls back in the trap of thinking of neighborhoods as planned, zoned spaces in their most ideal form.

AJ: The likes of Harvard, Droog, The Economist, Domus and many others study Dharavi. It is a goldmine for case studies in business, urban planning, architecture, design, recycling, (etc.), becoming a central point of reference for research across disciplines. Why is the world looking at Dharavi and what does it hope to learn?

ME&RS: Actually if we come here looking for case studies that are framed in conventional practices then we will be disappointed. What is commendable about Dharavi is certainly linked to its ability of creating a functioning vibrant economic environment from very little support and capital. It managed to do this by relying on community networks that are deeply connected to native homes. At the same time native histories for most communities were connected to feudal oppressive relations and caste prejudice. Migrating to the city meant freeing oneself from those older histories. The desperation, freedom, and liberation, along with making the most of very little in a new environment – often by accepting very poorly serviced conditions – are all aspects of Dharavi’s ‘success’ story, but cannot be put in a business case-study. One can hardly turn those histories into economic models! However, what one can do is look carefully at what aspects of its functioning can inform contemporary urban environments, so we respect it when we see it elsewhere. Our studies indicate that its spatial logic, collapse of live-work functions, low-rise high-density structures that incrementally grow over time, the presence of community-based support structures are parts of a larger functioning system, that may help us understand how urban neighborhoods in different parts of the world can stimulate a similar local economic dynamism. This is definitely worth a study. These conditions allow for a collective upward social and urban mobility of neighborhoods in a manner that builds on internal resources of the residing communities and allows them to respond to economic needs in an efficient manner and with lower risks involved. Having multiple sources of incomes, creating value through spatial development, renting and sub-letting, manufacturing and trading, creating creative co-dependencies between individuals, groups and families, keeping alive connections with native histories, and also investing in new opportunities through education, are all factors that have helped Dharavi and neighborhoods like Dharavi transform themselves in a manner that is worth understanding and then emulating. Besides this, its ability of providing highly skilled labor services relying on community skills connected to artisanal histories, but which now adapt to industrial and post-industrial activities, is another special feature that needs to be documented and understood.

AJ: Has all the attention and admiration from the formal world changed the way Dalits – a marginalized group of people in India traditionally regarded as ‘untouchable’ – are perceived and their role in society? Does the economic success story translate into a social success story?

ME&RS: The fact that Dharavi has the largest presence of Dalit communities in the city is hardly ever foregrounded in discussions about the neighborhood, at least in the mainstream media. As it is, positive discrimination and affirmative action are touchy topics for dominant classes in the city. In fact, the temporary subsidies or rights of use of government land by poor migrant communities is resented much in the same way as reservation for jobs and educational opportunities for Dalit and other marginal communities.

However, it is also true that the Dalit identity is not something that many residents actively use in their daily lives. In many ways, neighborhoods like Dharavi allow for reinvention of identities which try and erase marginality connected to older names and histories. Yet, this is a complex game. Political parties use caste as an active principle at times and as subordinate at others.

The role of caste in Dharavi’s economic and social success is not often understood or appreciated enough, except by some enthusiastic scholars and activists. It is true though that today the global attention to the special economic history of Dharavi has made the media more aware. But this does not often translate into a deeper appreciation that transforms into productive policies. For most of the time the fact that economic success is not reflected in civic infrastructure only reinforces the idea that the ‘slum’ needs to be erased. When this happens, off goes its economic dynamism. What it needs really is better provision of services and improvement of its environment without destroying its existing built-environment, allowing for a gradual incremental logic to unfold in a manner that foregrounds its economic functions. For this some deep-rooted prejudice against some of the communities that make the human fabric of Dharavi must be overcome.

AJ: Dharavi attracts people from across India, attaining a certain kind of density and diversity. When people converge in one place, they usually reinvent their identity. Is that happening in Dharavi?

ME&RS: Yes, certainly. We have documented hundreds of religious shrines in the locality. These reveal the regional affiliations and traditional background of different residents and communities of Dharavi residents. Each shrine is a story of reinvention and transformation, a play of remembering and forgetting caste and ethnic identities and celebrating new freedoms.

India’s most definitive leaders, Gandhi and Ambedkar did not see eye to eye as far as stories of caste histories went. Gandhi glorified an imagined Indian village and its functional division of labor as the fulcrum for Indian society. Ambedkar was firm that erasing the past, leaving the village and moving to the city was a more reliable means to genuine liberation from caste. In a paradoxical way, Gandhi’s imagined, hardworking, productive, artisanal village was actualized in urban settlements like Dharavi, which also became a site for Ambedkar’s dreams to be actualized in terms of transcending caste and achieving freedoms. At a symbolic level, a nod of acknowledgment towards each other, by Gandhi and Ambedkar, can only be visualized in a place like Dharavi. It would never have happened in reality during their lifetimes.

However even at a symbolic level, such an acknowledgment can only happen if Dharavi is respected and transformed in a manner that can continue to host and provide opportunities for waves of new migrant communities of different backgrounds to keep creating opportunities. Unfortunately the present urban imagination in terms of policies everywhere in the world is not in a position to facilitate this.

AJ: Is Dharavi sustainable? What is the future of Dharavi?

ME&RS: In many ways, Dharavi is a manifestation of a set of urban processes that we believe belong to the trajectory of a ‘natural’ city. This oxymoron is our way of saying that positing the city as a hard-wired counterpoint to ‘nature’ and thus seeing it solely as a variable of human intervention and control is ultimately what makes them become totalized, over-controlled, sterilized spaces. That only encourages landscapes that are speculatively financed, producing miles of built forms and real estate development, neatly segregated into zones of recreation, residences, and livelihood. In the process of constructing ideal cities, so much investment is made that no one sees how economic vitality is often leeched out of human lives and put into buildings and boulevards, creating brittle and vulnerable cities in the long run.

As a natural city, the historical development of Dharavi has been a testimony to the ability of residents to create dynamic environments. However physically impoverished, they are nevertheless indicative of possibilities of a better urban future for all. In our minds, the future of Dharavi can be a better one, reflected in the concrete reality of some Tokyo neighborhoods, which often share a template of urban development with Dharavi, but in a much more developed way. Or even in the confidently transforming streets of ‘favela’ neighborhoods in Sao Paulo.

Of course, the hard reality is that urban visions for all are now trapped in rather limited designs and projections. It is highly unlikely that Dharavi will be able to challenge those easily, and be allowed to follow its own trajectory.

The ongoing process of urbanization in Mumbai and the world at large is one that erases as much as it builds. Guy Debord said that urbanization negates the city because it deprives neighborhoods of the chance of reproducing and reinventing themselves.

The idea that development must follow a linear trajectory from the slum to the formal city is plainly wrong. Particularly if by formal we mean a certain form of urbanization characterized by high-rise buildings and large motorways. This formal city is a false kind of urbanization. What makes a city a city is the people that inhabit it and the way they interact with each other and their environment, making it their own, constantly balancing between their history, present needs, and aspirations, individually and collectively.

The city is reproduced everyday through the million social or commercial interactions that knit people together. The city should therefore not be understood as a counterpoint to the slum or the village. These are enmeshed in the city’s economy, fabric, and ethos.

Construction in Utkarsh Nagar, a predominantly Kokan neighbourhood in Mumbai.

Presentation at the World Bank in New Delhi on Monday June 18th, 2012.

This presentation seeks to offer alternatives to apocalyptic visions of over-crowded cities, rural wastelands and endless slumscapes, which may well become self-fulfilling prophecies. Our practice and engagement with neighbourhoods in Mumbai and its hinterland has lead us to question taken-for-granted categories such as the slum and city. We will make a case for policy recognitions of existing practices and urban patterns, and for moving towards a more realistic and pragmatic approach to urban development in India.

One of the forgotten memories of Mumbai is that of the nearly 190 villages that compose its historical fabric. Lost somewhere in between the ‘slum’ and the ‘high-rise’, villages may be out of the city’s mental map, but they are still very much present in its culture and urban dynamics. The vernacular urbanism of Mumbai is as much a reflection of the city’s history as of its post-industrial makeup. The “tool-house” combining living and working functions is at the heart of the spatial, social and economic organization of Mumbai’s “homegrown” neighbourhoods.

These neighbourhoods, where more than 70% of Mumbai’s population are said to be living, are incrementally developed and improved by an army of contractors, masons, plumbers, electricians, painters and material providers, who typically live in the same neighbourhoods where they work. This makes for a vibrant local construction industry responsible for the production of hundreds of thousands of affordable houses all over the city. This process is however not recognized by the authorities, which either look the other way or actively repress it.

Our engagement with residents and constructors living and working in neighbourhoods notified as slums comes both in the form of collaborative projects and discursive output. Our practice and writing steams from the conviction that the involvement of local actors is the only way that the government’s affordable housing targets can be met. Between 1997 and 2002, the government and the builders built 500 000 houses in urban India, when in the same time, the people built 8.5 million units in so-called “slums”.

There is another the way the village continues to haunt Mumbai, and nearly all other cities in India. Migrant communities rarely disconnect from their native points of origin. Deep ties to the land, hearth and family create loops of interconnectedness that sustain the life of residents on both sides of their habitat spectrum. People draw from either side for self-reliant insurance and security. Even when people dig deep roots in the city, they often relive their village life in its architecture and cultural life.

Urbanization in India is not the one-way street that one normally associates with the phenomenon. The communities that keep the connections most going are often the service, working class communities who occupy the kind of spaces often referred to as slums, gaothans, urban villages. Not only are the connections between big cities and villages forged by migrant communities an important characteristic of urban life in India, but almost all small towns and villages are networked and connected to each other through different forms of mobility.

Rather than see the vast regions of the country as a rural hinterland punctuated by towns and cities, our research shows us how most districts function as urban systems in which people from villages and towns travel to and fro all the time, function as markets and circulate objects, finance and people. One of the important consequences of looking at networks of towns and villages as a valid urban form is an acceptance of a diversity of habitats, that includes villages and towns, and in some cases forests and other landscapes within one fold.

Recognizing the existence of urban systems spanning over large regions can help us think of alternative models of urban development and help promote more sustainable habitats across the sub-continent. It may also help us revise our approach to the big metropolises and the large-scale presence of so-called slums. By turning around the idea of villages and their connections to cities, we may be able to address issues of affordable housing in a more creative and effective way.

Our presentation will touch upon both these themes. We believe that a policy which recognises the ability of homegrown cities to contribute to better and inclusive cities is vital for urban policy. It will help evolve more realistic infrastructure policies that adapt to the needs of the maximum populations that reside in cities.

1. Sticky feet on rails

Ratnagiri Station on the Kokan Coast.

Because of the price of real-estate in Indian metros people living in neighbourhoods notified as slums often have no option but to move out to better places. As a result, residents with “sticky feet” often reinvest their earnings in their house. When reinvestment in their city homes is made difficult by hostile policies, they prefer to invest in their native places. India’s well-developed railway network means that urban migrants can keep good connections with their native town. Even over several generations, the link between the village of origin and the city is maintained. These flows benefit the village economically, since it captures a large share of the savings of the urban migrants. Whenever dwellers feel that investing in their urban dwellings is safe enough, they often prefer to do so, since the return on investment is higher. The desire to grow roots in the city, as well as keep deep connections with the village is often facilitated by the family structure where members divide their loyalty. This contributes to the incremental improvement of their neighbourhood as well as allows for the benefits of support structures from back home, to remain active. This dynamic relationship across city and village/town is something that needs to qualify the misplaced faith that authorities in India now have in one-way urbanization trends.

2. Homegrown Homes

Construction site in Dharavi, opposite the URBZ/Urbanology office (photo taken by Ben Parry).

Investment in homes happens when there is some sense of security. Local builders make hundreds of thousands of affordable homes all over the city, improving, reconstructing or building afresh. They are socially networked in neighbourhoods where they live and work. Their success rests on the reputation they establish over time in the localities where they operate. Their physical and cultural proximity to their client means that a relationship of trust replaces contractual arrangements. They understand local politics and regulations very well since their work entirely depends on it. They often have evolved working relations with local bureaucrats and corporators. Flexible and adaptable in their approach, they are typically open to collaborations with outside agents who can enhance their profile locally. They are private actors of development that institutions, organizations and corporations can partner with.

3. Tool-house

The structure that dominates these home-grown neighbourhoods is the Tool-house. They combine living and economic functions, where the houses themselves are often used as income generating spaces. Along with living spaces for families or workers, a “tool-house” combines retailing, manufacturing or servicing functions. Such post-industrial habitats define the typology of many neighbourhoods. They are also central to their economic development. Even in cases where people predominantly work outside the neighbourhood, the house is often an economic unit for supplementary incomes in some way or the other. Inter-linked clusters of such homes make up distinct settlements, shaped by different factors – community, caste or just history

4. Connected neighbourhoods

Study in process on mobility patterns in Dharavi.

Far from being self-sufficient and autonomous “cities in the city”, unplanned neighbourhoods are extremely connected to the rest of the city. Many of their residents often work in shops and offices outside.  Some send their children to private schools in other neighbourhoods. Those who live and work in the neighbourhood (for instance in a tool-house) have suppliers and clients from all over the metropolitan region, from elsewhere in the country or from abroad. These connections are vital to the neighbourhood as much as to the city, which benefits from the proximity of production centres and service workers.

5. Public streets

Street in Dharavi (photo by Lasse Bak Mejlvang).

The lack of formally defined “public spaces” such as squares and playgrounds in many unplanned settlements is made up for by the use of streets as multipurpose spaces. The narrow streets, typical of unplanned settlements, makes them hard to access for cars. The result is that most unplanned settlements are largely pedestrian. Streets are relatively free to be used for public purposes such as temporary markets, socializing, playgrounds for children (whose parents can keep an eye on them from their homes), and ritual functions (prayers and festivals). Recognizing these aspects as valid, will help evolve sensible plans for transportation and public spaces.

6. Walk2Work

MG Road in Dharavi.

More than half the population of Mumbai walks to work. If we add the human and animal powered vehicles (bicycles, carts)– which are very common in many localities, we have a spontaneous constituency already practicing sustainable transport practices. These practices are well connected to existing mass transportation systems like trains and buses. What the city needs is less car-centric development and instead an increased attention to the interconnections between sustainable modes of transportation. Many cities today are trying hard to create the walk to work kind of environment, which is both prevalent and threatened in Mumbai and other Indian cities today.

7. Incremental development of habitat

Incremental improvement at the Dharavi Shelter.

Unplanned neighbourhoods systematically improve overtime, unless they are prevented from doing so by local authorities (through demolition drives or overly restrictive control on construction). Incremental development encompasses urban, economic and social aspects of the neighbourhood. This is particularly so when the house also serves as income generators (tool-house), since reinvestment in the house translates into higher productivity. Incremental development may be driven by individual house occupants but favourably affects the neighbourhood as a whole. Collectively, incrementally improving homes add value to the entire neighbourhood and to the city. Through incremental development, neighbourhoods become upwardly mobile.

8. Incremental development of infrastructure

Community toilet in Dharavi.

Infrastructure improves over time thanks to internal and external mobilization of resources by community leaders and through the participation of inhabitants. Electoral politics, strengthen the links between residents and civic authorities. The more politically stable a neighbourhood is, the better its civic infrastructure will be. In Mumbai, through a combination of local intervention by private contractors, civic involvement and public interventions, the large majority of unplanned settlements have access to water and basic sewage and roads. Coordination between different actors does happen, but it would benefit from being institutionalized.

9. Community economics

Mosque in Baiganwadi, Deonar, Govandi.

Caste, ethnicity and religion play an important role in the provision of employment opportunities. Neighbourhood boundaries are often defined along ethnic lines, and the same logic structures the neighbourhoods internally. Clusters of specialized activities relying on economic cooperation produce economies of scale. Agents connect these clusters to spaces of trade. Economic interdependency and trade networks consolidate neighbourhoods and create bridges between different communities, promoting social peace. Within neighbourhoods, community ties help raise capital and resources for individuals and families and help provide social security to tide over bad times.

10. Institutional roots

Construction of Sai Baba temple in Bhandup.

Public institutions and non-governmental organizations have deep roots in neighbourhoods notified as slums. Residents and activists spend much time lobbying political representatives for schools, hospitals, temples, public baths, gyms, resident associations and youth clubs. These institutions enrich the life of the neighbourhood and also become important actors in mobilizing communities and external resources for ongoing development projects, in particular infrastructure development. They are also a strong assertion of mobility aspirations.

11. Political right to use land vs. than legal right to sell it

Tool-houses in Dharavi (photo by Sytse de Maat).

Occupancy right is a political rather than a legal right. Elected representatives often seem to act against the interests of municipal authorities, and recognize the political right of inhabitants to remain on government or vacant land. This is what has kept many neighbourhoods going for so long in Mumbai – but in a half-hearted and conflicting way since residents are not legally owners of the land. The bureaucracy and the middle-class usually perceive unplanned neighbourhoods as encroachments, regardless of their history. The wisdom of the day is to turn occupants of neighbourhoods notified as slums into property owners. In the speculative context of India today, land titles will quickly swap hands and be used to develop new property for another kind of constituency. In Mumbai, the supply of new housing has been not responding to demand of house buyers/tenants as much as that of real estate investors (whether they are large funds or middle-class investors). Recognizing the right of using land over that of selling it would go a long way into protecting neighbourhoods in formation from speculative redevelopment.

12. Informal construction tax

Destruction of illegal floor by BMC in Dharavi.

Far from being remote and disconnected from the process of development described above, the municipal authorities are actively involved with local actors. Rigid regulations and the lack of accountability for institutions such as the BMC in Mumbai have provided many opportunities for the imposition of “special taxes”. The reconstruction or extension of houses in neighbourhoods notified as slums typically happens through un-receipted administrative procedures in which the Municipal authorities validate the moves made by inhabitants and local agents. Sometimes, this system adds up to 40% to the cost of construction and forces builders to work at extreme speed. Non-adapted regulations, low wages for municipal workers and corruption are all to blame. Yet, this informal system could inspire a new model of public financing through taxation of local construction that could be extended to other parts of the city.

13. Interdependence of communities & diversity of habitats

Diversity of habitat in Kemps corner, South Mumbai.

The idea that an entire neighbourhood must be homogenous in terms of class goes against the way in which urban India operates. Middle-class and upper middle-class homes often prefer to have service-oriented people living around them or in their vicinity. The current restructuring of Indian metros that is pushing low income residents to the suburbs is particularly unsustainable in view of the existing strains on public transportation. While mixed income neighbourhoods are still the norm in older city centres, new housing developments in the suburbs are leaving no space for the working class to stay. Due to the loss of a mixed income crowd in central neighbourhoods, India may loose one of its most democratic urban dimensions.

14.  Slums as urban villages

Worli Koliwada in Mumbai. Often mistaken as a slum. In fact one of the most interesting urban village in the city.

In Mumbai, like in several Indian cities, many old urban villages have become the nuclei around which unplanned neighbourhoods have sprawled. Villages have a different typology (low-rise, high-density), land use (mixed use) and value structure for historical reasons. This has produced cheaper tenancy and sub-tenancy systems in various pockets of the city. About 189 goathans in Mumbai have evolved into larger settlements, which are often mistaken to be slums. The Chawl system and the Rent Control Act have also played a major role in allowing certain (non-native) groups to stay in central locations over generations. This historical and cultural fabric, which predates British colonization needs to be recognized and validated.

15. Urban systems

North Goa: Below the trees a dense urban system.

Gandhian inspired rural development strategies, which focused on the self-sustainability of villages and the post-liberalization urban centric policies that believe that city are the engines of economic growth – are ignoring much more complex historical patterns of communication between towns and villages that promoted cultural and economic exchanges. To date many Indian regions are organized in a network of towns and villages that form an integrated economic and cultural system. This is clearly visible in Goa, a state composed of hundreds of villages and small town with a capital city of 100, 000 residents. Far from being an impoverished economy Goa provides some of the highest standard of living to its residents, many of who work in urban sectors while living in villages. This pattern is repeated in several parts of India, in the form of districts. However, these units are rarely treated or administered as urban systems, even though they are networked spaces with people and goods moving within them all the time, interspersed with a variety of economies and habitats, ranging from forests, villages, fields, industries and cities. These urban systems are loosing out from the current focus on “cities” because they get ruptured and divided by rural/urban specific schemes and policies, which do not factor these deep ongoing connections.

Unstable Foundations of Ownership, Tenancy and Housing in Mumbai.

Position Paper by Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove for “the 21st Century Indian City Conference: Working Towards Being Slum Free?” at University of California, Berkeley – April 27th-28th, 2012.

I – Introduction: An Actor-Centric Approach to Slum Legislation

Few cities are as confusing as Mumbai when it comes to land titles and occupancy rights. An array of legislations, policy ordinance, acts and notifications, customary laws, special programmes and schemes collide with local practices, populist politics and public opinion to create a mangrove-like pattern of ownerships in the city. At once deeply rooted and floating on murky grounds, occupancy rights seem to be, at the end of the day, determined by politics rather than the rule of law.

This is epitomized in the relationship of the state with the so-called ‘slum-dweller’ in Mumbai. One characterized by uncertain emotions – alternatively full of abuse and patronising benevolence. This is most evident in the spate of legal moves made during the 1970s, when the category slum emerged as a genuine threat to the dominant dwellers in the city, entering their visual sphere on an unprecedented scale. The 80s and 90s continued to see nervous ups and downs in moods and responses, with evictions and concessions representing a tug-of-war that has never transcended the state’s ambiguous attitude. The triangularity that developed in the twenty first century, with the entry of the real estate developer, has only complicated the fragile equation.

This paper on “slum legislation” draws on four years of work in various parts of Mumbai and replaces what is essentially an experiential and participant account into a larger historical context. We relook at the equations between the ‘dweller’ (supposedly legitimate urban citizen), the ‘slum-dweller’ (its illegitimate counterpart), the players involved in construction and housing, including local contractors, NGOs, real estate developers and of course the state, in both, its abstract and most concrete, local, manifestations. In the process it explores the unsteady legal foundations on which the whole drama is played out between the concerned actors.

The exposé of different projects that we have been involved with provides an overview of some of the challenges faced by populations, which are settled on land denominated as a slum by the government, the media and the public. This paper discusses the ambiguous status of Goathans (villages) in Mumbai, often amalgamated with poorer, younger neighbouring habitats that have grown around them over the years; the struggle of certain Municipal Chawls to assert their autonomy vis-à-vis the institutions that gave them birth; the importance and unpredictability of social networks upon which local builders rely so much, especially in BMC controlled environments; and the confidence that strong populist political parties can give to a neighbourhood ‘in formation’.

II. Koliwada, Dharavi: The Slum-Village Amalgamation

Photos made by Subhash Mukerjee’s team during the Urban Typhoon workshop in Dharavi-Koliwada in March 2008.

Our work in Mumbai started in 2008 with a series of very particular encounters. Within Dharavi, we were invited by the secretary of the Koli Residents Association in a debate about government designs on the redevelopment of their neighbourhood. Activist groups in Dharavi informed us that the Koli community is a difficult one to work with, mainly because its members are fiercely independent. Moreover, they don’t represent the poorest of the poor in Dharavi.

For us, their active involvement and desire to be part of the discursive space on Dharavi was the main reason we wanted to work with them, even though we respectfully disagreed with some of the members’ approaches and perspectives to their urban future. Secondly, Dharavi is heterogeneous in terms of class and ethnicity, we did not see upward social mobility and aspiration for middle-class status as disqualifying factors, as long as the space for involvement did not exclude anyone on those grounds.

The association with the Koli community that started with the Urban Typhoon workshop continues till date. Koliwada has become a conceptual category that is difficult to dismiss when we talk about Mumbai’s urban issues. The main reason for this is the special place that the community has in the city’s history, contemporary politics and landscape.

The Urban Typhoon Workshop in Dharavi, Koliwada – March 2008. For more info about the workshop visit this page.

Samples of the output produced during the Urban Typhoon workshop. The full output is available as a pdf format here.

The Kolis are essentially the erstwhile fishing communities of Mumbai, living in gaothans or urban villages, that are a legal entity with distinct rules of land use and development rights. In the city’s political space they claim to be the original residents, even though their distinctive voice is diluted by the larger right-wing rhetoric, which often contradicts their affinities. In class terms they occupy a broad spectrum of identities, from the poor to the middle class to the rich, even though their habitats are often perceived to be on the edge of being a slum.

The Urban Typhoon workshop, which took place over a week in March 2008, brought together residents, students, architects, urbanists, artists and activists to brainstorm on the cultural identity and urban future of Dharavi Koliwada. The agenda of the Koli Jaamat which invited us to organize this event was very clear. They wanted to show the government that they had their own plans for redevelopment and didn’t want to be included in the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) initiated by Mumbai’s Slum Redevelopment Authority. Challenging the mainstream notion that Koliwada is part of “Asia’s largest slum” was thus of strategic importance to the Kolis. The visuals and narratives that emerged from the workshop presented Koliwada and Dharavi in a new light, and may have contributed in a small way in the Kolis successful bid to be excluded from the DRP.

It is our contention that such ambiguities and complexities have spilled over into other histories of marginality in the city. The overwhelming official number of slums – over 60% by recent accounts – in fact share the most diverse forms of socio-economic and ethnic labels possible, including the nature of built-forms as well. They have grown alongside the many different forms of citizenship that the city afforded its diverse citizens. Often designated ‘slum dwellers’ share these with the Koli community, mainly because of the location of Koliwadas. Almost all these neighbouroods are on the edge of slums or are mistaken to be slums. By focusing on the Koliwadas and their ambiguous location on the slum-village continuum, we would like to throw open the possibility of looking at officially designated ‘slums’ as sharing a similar ambiguity of identity and seeing where such an exploration takes us.

II. Vishal Cooperative Housing Society, Dharavi:
Human Right to Self-Develop?

Photo collage showing Vishal CHS, Dharavi with projection of Columbia/JJ students for its development.

The Vishal Cooperative Housing Society (CHS) is a municipal chawl located very close to the Hanuman Mandir on Dharavi Main Road. It was built prior to independence by the then Bombay Municipal Corporation. Its residents point out how they are legitimate citizens and not ‘slum-dwellers’ since the chawls were created by the municipality and continue to pay rent to the corporation. It is only because of their physical location in Dharavi that they face an identity crisis.

The representatives of the chawl invited us to help create new designs for their homes. This was a strategy to help them in their legal battle with the government in which they were arguing that the right to self-develop was a ‘human right’. The chawl residents were claiming a) their chawl was not a slum, since they paid a rent to the corporation. b) Therefore, it could not be included in the DRP that had been envisaged at that time as a major comprehensive juggernaut of a transformation strategy for the whole of Dharavi, in which every eligible resident would be given a small flat. c) The residents of the chawl had a right to develop the structures on their own terms since they were technically co-owners, given the tenancy laws of the city.

Unfortunately, the government was not granting them this right, usually given to all municipal chawls in the city, because the entire area was under a special programme, the DRP, which was de facto depriving all residents of Dharavi of the rights they would have enjoyed if they were living in any other part of the city.

The lawyer and resident, Mr. Trivedi (name changed) who was our main collaborator was fighting this in the form of a public interest litigation in a ‘Human rights’ court, asserting the right to self-develop as an inalienable ‘human right’. We organized a studio in which students from Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) worked with Sir J.J. College of Architecture students on development strategies for the housing society. Mr. Trivedi used them in court.

Students presenting their studies and plans to members of the society.

Unfortunately he lost the case. Though there is a legal provision for chawl residents to form a cooperative society and use the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme to propose their own redevelopment project, it didn’t apply in this case since Dharavi was under a special government programme at that time (and still is), i.e. the DRP. The Human Rights Court recognized the right to self-develop but declared that since that right had not been violated yet no case could be made. Thus the Omkar CHS was left to wait for a possible DRP that has not yet materialized and may never happen.

During our own conversations we had also understood the fragile foundations on which he was fighting the case, unfortunately in the wrong court and using a rhetoric that was more political than legal. His and the entire society’s tenancy was not under threat in the DRP – they would each get a 300 square feet flat, smaller than what they already owned.

Even though the corporation itself had built these structures, they would have to make way for the redevelopment plan as if they were a slum. Their own tenancy could not be compared with other tenants in the city which came under the old rent act for the simple reason that those tenants were not residing in an area that was considered as ‘slum’. Thus there was no distinction to specific histories, typologies and capacities.

This entire discussion provided us with an opportunity to understand how distinctions of any kind are useless when the word ‘slum’ enters the discourse, how strongly it is connected to very specific objectives of urban planning and that certain actors stand very little chance when they express an independent opinion.

Since then Mr Trivedi has rebuilt his house, doubling its size. This was not a legal move, but he used his political muscle as a prominent BJP member to obtain the necessary approval (or indifference) of the BMC.

III. Shivaji Nagar, Deonar:
Political-Social Networks –Status: ‘It’s Complicated’

Contractor Neeraj Agarwal (name changed) on the phone

Construction of Agarwal’s house in process over 45 days

Office destroyed by BMC a few weeks after completion of the work.

This neighbourhood occupies a peripheral part of Mumbai, between two marginal spaces – the abattoir and the largest dumping ground in the city. It is a resettlement colony set up in the 1980s to house evicted slum dwellers from other neighbourhoods in Mumbai.

A walk through Rafique Nagar and Shivaji Nagar gives a good overview of the process of incremental improvement that the entire settlement has been going through for decades. The further one goes from the dumping ground, the more consolidated (pucca) the neighbourhood looks. For its most part, its streets are lined with shops and services. There are many religious establishments and schools of various denominations in the neighbourhood. It has most of the facilities that many Mumbai localities have and almost all of it provided by residents themselves in conjunction with local elected members of the corporation and legislative assembly. Theoretically the residents have to pay a rent of Rs. 50 a month to the local municipal office to validate their status as tenants. In reality the municipality has not systematically collected this rent for years, as many original tenants have moved out and sold their houses to newcomers.

In Shivaji Nagar like in many other ‘homegrown’ neighbourhoods denominated as slums by the authorities, the BMC is successfully tapping into the proverbial ‘fortune at the base of the pyramid’ in other ways than collecting small rents from occupants. According to local contractors, a 40% informal tax is imposed on any new construction in the neighbourhood. Most of these are to do with the 14 feet height restriction that is imposed on the entire neighbourhood. As families grow, the residents want to build more rooms. However, since legal permissions to extend the height cannot be granted, the municipality has designed an elaborate way in which they can collect bribes. They informally encourage the construction to take place. They send in officials to ‘check’ and demolish whatever has been built. The contractor and the official agree to sign the documents showing that the procedure of construction and destruction has taken place and then the contractor is allowed to ‘complete’ his job, with the official turning a blind eye to the process. The last touch on a new house is to make it look old and shabby (superficially) so it doesn’t attract the attention of other BMC officials and independent whistleblowers.

Most of the neighbourhood is now more than 14 feet high – an open evidence of this complicity. Our main work in this neighbourhood is with one of the most successful young contractors Mr. Neeraj Agarwal (name changed) who explained the entire process to us in the course of our exchanges. He too is on the verge of filing a public-interest litigation and evoking the right to information act. His complaint: why do the officials allow legal violations in the first place, when eventually the resident and the contractor are humiliated even after all the payments and bribes are made? This frequently happens when an arbitrary move by a random official turns the equations completely around to destroy years of hard work. Elections are a particularly tense time for contractors and residents. An old enemy in a position of power can mean arbitrary destruction or bribe inflation.

Mr Agarwal, who substantially contributed to the Congress campaign in the last election, recently saw his brand new 10 lakh rupees destroyed shortly after the BJP-Shiv Sena Alliance won the elections. Politics is often the only protection that public figures such as him have against the arbitrariness of the bureaucracy. When these networks break down, the situation becomes even more complicated. Mr Agarwal is currently unable to continue building homes in Shivaji Nagar, in spite of the high number of residents that request his services.

Mr. Agarwal has a clear alternative proposal worked out in which he claims the government could officially collect more than Rs. 100 crore a month as rent from the residents and several times more as legal fees when allowing for valid permission to build up structures on a case by case basis. He cannot understand why the government is losing legal revenue and allowing petty officials to get away with huge amounts of bribes.

Mr. Agarwal started off as a labourer and today heads N.T. Traders, a company that is involved in supplying materials and constructing homes and offices in Shivaji nagar. We have facilitated a tie-up between him and a global cement and concrete producer and also provide architectural designs for his construction projects with a tie-up with an Italian firm.

This story is a classic illumination of the unstable foundations of occupancy and tenancy that most of the city’s citizens are trapped in. The instability is not sought to be addressed by those affected through demand for legal ownership – since everyone knows the speculatively fuelled prices involved – but through working on the provisions of rental schemes and occupancy rights already granted by the state.

IV.   Utkarsh Nagar, Bhandup: The Politics of Homeownership

Utkarsh Nagar, Bhandup

Construction process of a 2.5 lakhs house in Utkarsh Nagar, Bhandup. Click here for more about this house

Utkarsh Nagar is a neighbourhood in formation in the north-eastern suburb of Mumbai. Like many of the so-called ‘slums’ of Mumbai, it was developed incrementally by local residents and contractors over the past 40 to 50 years, with no help whatsoever from the government or professional architects and engineers.

Yet the skills and hands-on experience of the local contractors we met there can easily outmatch the technical knowledge of the best-trained professionals. In peak construction periods of the year, Ajay (name changed) builds up to five houses a month and he has been doing this job for the past 20 years. With him, we studied the construction process of a typical house of about 200 sq ft. on two floors. This house, which costs the owner Rs 2.5 lakhs (about US $5,600) is the most affordable house that he was working on at that time. It was built in 25 days over the debris of the previous house.

The whole locality reveals a security of tenancy that has come about by local political support from MNS and Shiv Sena, two parties that have invested more than any other on developing deep local roots in as many localities as possible. Water supply, electricity and paved roads exist in many parts of the neighbourhood. The quality of homes in many cases reveals the large amounts of expenditure that individual homeowners have given to each structure. The skills of the local contractors, who often work in the same neighbourhood, have been honed and shaped over the years mainly because of the complicity with local political actors and members of the corporation. Interestingly, a large chunk of the neighbourhood comprises of people from the same coastal district of Maharashtra. In some ways they have bought in strong community ties that permeate the local political as well as bureaucratic structures. These provide them with local support that is almost the opposite of what we see in Shivaj Nagar.

Of course, the city around, lined by high-rises, offices and malls, has already reached the doorsteps of the neigbourhood. In this case, builders and developers, more than anyone else are expected to approach the residents of the locality and eventually transform the neighbourhood using the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme provided by the state. However, what is evident for the moment is a version of what legitimate support of the state can do to the quality of life of millions of residents of the city if it chooses to – by providing occupancy rights and streamlining the processes of urban development – without looking at settlements as ‘slums’ or the dwellers as ‘slum dwellers’.

V. The Slippery Road to Affordable Housing.

Our own engagements with these neighbourhoods have been caught in a mesh of arguments in which housing, slums and urban planning have been injected with the neutralizing rhetoric of ‘affordable housing’.

For the most, affordable housing has been seen as the result of state interventions responding to the needs of the urban poor. More recently, non-state actors (both profit driven and charitable) have entered the market for the provision of affordable housing.  The government is now actively encouraging market driven interventions that cross-subsidize the construction of affordable housing stock.

The Slum Rehabilitation Scheme in Mumbai is an example of this approach where land is released from erstwhile occupied lands in officially designated ‘slums’ through relocating residents in vertical structures, while providing valuable “transferable building rights” to developers. In other cities developers are directly purchasing cheap land wherever possible and targeting new buyers from the lower middle-class sector who were so far unable to afford housing at market rates. There housing is made affordable by lowering construction costs, minimizing the footprint of individual units and scaling up the size of housing projects.

Yet, expectations are still far from being met, both in terms of quantity and quality of affordable housing. According to some projections India still needs 27 million more units, while managing to produce hardly 1 million in the past 10 years. This need is likely to grow to 35 million units by 2025. Even more dramatic is the poor quality of stock being produced today.

The logic that consists in making housing affordable by reducing the cost of construction has lead to all kinds of malpractices. After a few years in existence, affordable housing blocks typically start crumbling down, leading to rising maintenance cost and lowering real estate value. Very soon they look and function worse than those they were meant to replace, and ready to be redeveloped themselves.

Between 1997 and 2002, the government and the builders built 500 000 houses in urban India, when in the same time, people built 8.5 million units in so-called “slums”.

The position we take with regard to affordable housing is this: allow, support, assist incrementally developing neighbourhoods to grow without trapping them in the stunted category of slums. Such a position is of course immediately confounded by arguments about ownership of land.

What we are in the process of doing is to reveal how many kinds of supposedly more stable habitats are also dependent on special grants by the state or through more complex legal provisions. These have been seen in terms of ‘ownership’ of mills, port areas, traditional rights – like that of the gaothans – or through straightforward, undetected land scams thanks to the complicity of bureaucracies and other state agencies.

Along with these we would like to argue that some arms of the state, have actually played a positive role by evoking complex legal arrangements that facilitated the occupancy by populations in need of space. By doing this they have, together – the state actors as well as the residents – contributed hugely to the development of the neighbourhood and the city. The residents often want to assert their right to occupy and continue to develop which is very different from what actually happens. When, through ‘slum redevelopment schemes’ official plans bestow ownership rights, these inevitably enter into the cycle of speculation with people buying and selling these rights since the economy of real estate pushes for it. At the end of the day, poorly serviced habitats emerge everywhere, another ‘slum’ pops up on another periphery.

We would like to use this opportunity to discuss the legal frameworks within which our arguments about the neighbourhoods are articulated. As those dialoguing for better and more inclusive urban planning practices, we see the diverse kinds of localities that are pushed under the category ‘slums’ as actually playing a valuable role in addressing issues of urban development. We continue are engagement with them in the fields of architecture, design and urban planning and see few viable alternatives to their immense potential for creating dynamic urban spaces. How can we complement our engagement with a strong argument that takes into account issues of legal arrangements is what we seek to learn from this discussion.