Parth Joshi

UPA 301 – Case Study

Word Count: 2598

Idiom agglomerations - Dharavi

Myriad significant urban transformations of the new century are taking place in the developing world. In
particular, informality, once associated with poor squatter settlements, is now seen as a generalized mode of
metropolitan urbanization (Roy 2005). Informality is back on the agenda of international development and urban
planning. The fast-paced growth of the Indian economy and particularly its cities has produced an urban crisis, one that
is marked by the lack of adequate infrastructure and growth management as well as by sharp social divisions that are
starkly etched in a landscape of bourgeois enclaves and slums (Roy 2009). One of the ambiguous and peculiar aspect of
the global south is informality which can be defined as slums indeed. Particularly concentrating on a physically
constrained and challenging geographic boundary of South Asia – Dharavi, Mumbai sets a quintessential paradigm of
informality and proscribed settlements of inhabitants. The 535 acres of land which serves approximately 700,000 people
is about to endure paradoxical deliriousness (Roy 2013-14). The Dharavi Redevelopment Plan (DRP) articulated by a
notorious architect Mukesh Mehta vivifies the hope for a “Slum free” world, albeit the bourgeois and the subaltern have
already portrayed insurgence regarding concerns towards their informal sector of privately owned industries. This is an
epistemology on informality and its effects on large scale redevelopment plans, where I argue the social and the poor
class of Dharavi shall not be antithetical, but welcome the phenomenon through diverse approaches such as
participatory design.

The 21st century will be an urban century, one where the human condition will also be an urban condition. The
21st century will also be a Southern country and perhaps even an Asian country. Much of the urban growth and
urbanization of this century will take place in the cities of the global south, including those of the newly emergent
economic powerhouses, India and China. (Roy 2006). As these countries and their major cities are emerging as world
class mega-cities, informality is yet to be diminished. According to Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, he states that “informal
survivalism” is “the new primary mode of livelihood in a majority of Third World cities.” (Davis 2006). Connoted from a
renowned and vastly reputable professor of urban studies, Mrs. Ananya Roy uses the term urban informality to indicate
an organizing logic, a system of norms that governs the process of urban transformation itself. Informality must be
understood not as the object of state regulation but rather as produced by the state itself. Informality at first glance
seems to be a land use problem and it is thus often managed through attempts to restore "order" to the urban
landscape. However, borrowing Krueckeberg's important insight, it can be argued that the more fundamental issue at
stake in informality is that of wealth distribution and unequal property ownership, of what sorts of markets are at work
in our cities and how they shape or limit affordability. In this sense, the study of informality provides an important lesson
for planners in the tricky dilemmas of social justice.

Focusing on the urban heralding phenomenon of the 21st century of Global South, particularly on Mumbai, India,
informality is at its verge. Roy describes the term urban informality extensively to explain the workings of the 21 st
century metropolis. She argues that the informal is not a distinct and bounded sector of labor, housing and governance,
but rather is an idiom of urbanization, a logic through which differential spatial value is produced and managed. And it is
the slums, the Third World slum, that is the iconic geography of this urban and human condition. Hernando de Soto
presents the Third World slum as a “people’s economy” populated by “heroic entrepreneurs”. For de Soto such
economies are rich in assets, albeit in the defective form of dead capital. However, Roy argues that it is time to think
beyond the geography of the slum. To world the cities of the global South through the slum means that we remain
bound to the study of spaces of poverty, to essential forms of popular agency, to the habitus of the dispossesses, to the
entrepreneurialism of self-organizing economies. Hence urban informality then is not restricted to the bounded space of
the slum or deproletarianized/entrepreneurial labor; instead, it is a mode of the production of space that connects the
seemingly separated geographies of slums. Roy argues then that if often through informality and illegality that, in India,
the world-class city is produced.

Cities and places are the essential product of urbanization, the process by which a country becomes urbanized.
The developing-country cities are, however, quite distinctive in how they have been altered as urban places in the
striking context of accelerated urbanization and the emergence of cities. The accelerated urbanization seen today in
developing countries is by no means a recent phenomenon (COP 233-234). Bombay, now renamed Mumbai, is the first
Indian city to experience economic, technological, and social change associated with the growth of capitalism in India.
Albeit Bombay is a now a city of extreme contrasts. More than half of the city’s population of fewer than 12 million
inhabitants lives in slums and on pavements or under bridges and near railway tracks. A large number of them do not
have legal tenure over the land that they occupy. In 1971 the slum population was about 1.25 million (Patel). Dharavi,
Asia’s biggest and world’s second largest slum embodies the characteristics of a slum as defined by the United Nations:
inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, poorly built housing, overcrowding, and insecure residential status
(Hanna 2010). It was in island in the 18th century. The area was mostly mangrove swamp inhabited by Koli fishermen.
They disappeared when the swamps were drained and the separate islands became one landmass, leading to the
creation of Mumbai. This caused the creek to dry up, thus depriving Dharavi of fish, its traditional sustenance. The newly
filled in marshes provided space for migrants and the rest is history (Rao 2012).

Present day Dharavi is a slum spread over Sion, Bandra, Kurla, and Kalina suburbs of Mumbai. There is ab
estimated 5000 businesses and 15000 single room factories, most of them small scale or Cottage industries with an
annual turnover of US $665 million. 90% of the commercial units and most of the housing is illegal. Dharavi has severe
problems with Public Health. As per survey in 2006, it was found Dharavi had one toilet for every 1440 residents. There
is one public toilet per 300 person. Dharavi also has inadequate drinking water supply as more than 15 families have to
share one common tap (Rao). The population density reaches 1m people per square mile (Brand 2010). Every day in the
center of Mumbai’s Dharavi Slums, clothes are washed at a community Laundry. Some of the slum’s residents wade
waist deep into waters that are heavily polluted by open sewers.

Dharavi Pulsates with economic activity. Its population, with no outside help, has achieved a uniquely informal
economic system of self-help. Residents, bereft of proper housing, have nevertheless risen from poverty by establishing
thousands of successful businesses. A study by the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT,
Ahmedabad) found some 5,000 industrial units producing garments, pottery, leather goods and steel fabrication; and
services such as recycling and printing. Its recycling industry, which processes waste from Mumbai, is expanding fast.
Many products are distributed worldwide. Its productive activities are extraordinary – they occur in almost every home.
Economic activity is decentralized, human in scale, home-based, low-tech and labor-intensive. The result is a
pedestrianized, organic, low-rise community-centric landscape. According to Dr. Abhijit Roy, Dharavi has a set of unique
characteristics: a great location of high real estate value and a population of hard-working artisans, factory workers, and
small business owners whose annual income contributes significantly to Mumbai’s economy. It is network-based with
mixed use and high density – but unfortunately depicted as a ‘slum’. This is due to lack of basic facilities such as roads,
housing with individual toilets, and public amenities. Dharavi, however, is not a slum but a unique self-contained
township.

Redeveloping Dharavi has been always been hogging the limelight nationally as well as internationally. Plans for
upgrading the squatter settlements have been in talk since 1997. However due to the political economy of urban
development in India which has caused fragmented local and state governments through years, have been an obstacle.
Conflicting interests and crumbling governmental intervention in the redevelopment process has maimed the hope for a
“Slum-free” Mumbai. However, in recent years, the city has experienced an economic boom with developments of high
rises and sky scrapers permeated beyond its city limits. The Maharashtrian government has finally realized the
importance of slum upgrading to maintain the prestige of Mumbai as a Global city. Dharavi is the world’s most written
about slum. The people, the government, developers, city bureaucrats want change and redevelopment. Hence the
government of Maharashtra have articulated a plan.

“Mumbai’s quest to be a world-class city with a globally comparable quality of life had prompted the local, state
and national government to dramatically reengineer the area with a $2.3 billion ten-year program” (Roy 2009). The goal
is to transform Dharavi into a neighborhood offering desirable, market-rate residential and commercial real estate while
providing its longtime residents with free housing and improved services in the same area. “The Dharavi Redevelopment
Plan (DRP) envisages the division of Dharavi into five sectors. Bids were invited from a consortium of international and
national developers to provide free housing and infrastructure for the residents of Dharavi. The Government would earn
substantial revenues, the Developer would make windfall profits and the residents of Dharavi would have more living
space and better amenities than before.” (Rao 2012) Subsequently, the Indian government hired New York base
architect Mukesh Mehta to master the redevelopment project which includes a complete reconstruction of all the
shacks, informal businesses and other structures. Furthermore an entirely new city is to be made up of 2,787,000 meters
squared of housing, schools, parks and roads for 57,000 families and 3,716,000 meters squared of residential and
commercial space for sale (Mehta 2010). The master plan for DRP presents an eco-friendly, self-sustainable, and modern
course of development.

The plan conjured and delineated through different sources of media and the intervention of inhabitants
followed the urban spectrum. Here, we are talking about the homes and livelihoods of a million slum dwellers
threatened by the plan. Millions of people, particularly residing in Dharavi are traumatized and heralded. The demolition
of a city in a city, a metropolis in a metropolis, and a district within a district is abject. The entire area including the
informal sector and illegal housing is to be bull dozed, for its existing residents to be re-housed in modern apartment
buildings which will maim thousands of families residing in Dharavi. The case here is rather skeptical. Jayesh Denk, a
Dharavi resident states, “We are not against the redevelopment. We want redevelopment. And who doesn’t want
redevelopment? Everybody wants good facilities, good amenities, safe water, toilets, all these things, schools and all
types of facilities, but not at the cost of our bread and butter.” (IFILL 2009). The primary concern in this case is that the
residents of Dharavi were not introduced to the plan at all. Subsequently many non-profit organizations and NGO’s
protested to the plan. The most outspoken individuals in this debate are the representatives of the National Slum
Dwellers Federation (NSDF). Their main objection is that the local residents have not been informed about the DRP (Roy
2006). Jayesh further states, “See, most of the people, they are earning a living in their house itself. They’ve got small
home industries. Now, if we are displaced from this place, in buildings, we can’t do all these businesses.” (IFILL 2009). “It
is going to devastate both the life of slum dwellers and is environmentally non-viable and non-sustainable and indirectly
land grab, making a big profit out of it as land is scare in Mumbai” (Rao 2012).

This is where I put in my argument where I shall support the redevelopment section as well, however I
completely disagree with the approach the Indian government has taken into consideration. The notion of hiring an
Indian-American architect is unethical due to the fact that Mr. Mehta has been away from India for over a decade now.
Hence he does not have a crystal clear indication of the socio cultural aspect of present day Dharavi. In order to
redevelop the area, the planner has to get into the neighborhood. Moreover, I argue the development process should
include the slum-dwellers itself. The planning process has to include the residents in the dialogue to alter the urban
phenomenon. Community organizer, Jockin Arputham, also argues, “Slum-dwellers and slum-dweller organizations have
shown how they can be good partners in the design and management of such redevelopments. The involvement is not
just agreeing with what the government wants but a real partnership to produce what works for communities and gives
the government solutions that are sustainable and viable. The government and private companies may see the
participation by communities as delaying the development, as adding costs. But research states that it can reduce costs
and speed up implementation. Another aspect which can be taken into consideration is in-situ development. “This can
include many new commercial developments to help pay for the redevelopment” (Arputham). Hence I upkeep the
connotation by Arputham and Prakash Apte (Urban Development Consultant) for a low rise high density redevelopment
for existing families who are engaged in crafts so that each house with ground + first floor has a terrace and a courtyard
affording proper space for a workplace. Also include marketing facilities for slum dwellers products and other amenities.

In conclusion, the existing plan to redevelop Dharavi is extremely controversial, mainly due to the fact that the
subaltern were not aware and were also not a part of the plan. The government has to adopt the bottoms-up approach
to revitalize the area as intervened by a noted Indian architect Charles Correa. The planners have to work incrementally
with the people themselves in order to expect a widely acceptable plan. This must be done through different phases of
planning and publicizing. Than only the poor density can be defined as a world class urban phenomenon.
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