Whose jobs will they compete for? July 31, , Mumbai: The Times of India. The fact that it emerged incrementally ever since the first economically and culturally marginalized caste groups migrated in the s - from the southern regions of the country - to this unused, marshy, mosquito-infested territory adjoining a centuries old fishing village, means that it became a huge experimental space for urban habitats to grow.
And grow they did, literally creating wealth from nothing, with no basic credit or help from official sources, and eventually created a diverse and dense locality producing billions of dollars worth of goods and services. Bringing in rural memories through the migration histories of different communities, their own skills of construction and ability to improvise with new materials, the built-forms of Dharavi reveal remarkable innovation, adaptability and variety. Factors that have contributed tremendously to its unique mixed-use patterns.
Of course, while Dharavi did also emerge as a space with an acute shortage of basic civic amenities, it showed remarkable capacity to provide services on its own too. A process that is bound to eventually evacuate a good percentage of the erstwhile population and reduce the remaining to a service-based economy looking after the needs of the new middle-class, just waiting to move in.
However this scheme has also generated millions of square feet of housing of the poorest quality that cannot be maintained by its residents over time. Moreover, the rehabs do little to solve infrastructural, amenities and health issues of the concerned population, as was recently demonstrated in an important study by Amita Bhide of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences Past projects have shown that the poor quality of rehab buildings means that within a few years they start to deteriorate, and in many cases become just as bad as the slum from which dwellers were initially rehabilitated.
Finally, it has also been observed that a large percentage of the rehabilitated tenants were quickly forced to sell their new property in exchange for much needed liquidities, and subsequently found themselves with no other option but going back to a slum. This scheme that lets the private sector produce housing for the poor through incentives by the government has sparked the interest of people around the world. However successful these types of public-private partnership can be at providing formal housing to the poor, the economic mantra of development as freedom or otherwise through market liberalism has not yet propelled the masses to the nirvana of high-rise dwelling.
No matter how eager the 14 www. Resettlement or a Silent Displacement? Mumbai Reader Mumbai: UDRI, pp. Moreover this scheme relies completely on an economic context of booming real estate prices, where building rights are highly valuable. The incentive would thus disappear at the first economic downturn. One of the most important problems with the SRS scheme is also one of the least talked about. As the rehab project pretends to improve living conditions, it often disconnects rehabilitated slum-dwellers from their means of subsistence, which in India is often completely dependent on the access to the street.
In Dharavi, for instance, virtually every structure with access to the street doubles up as a storefront or a small manufacturing unit. These activities cannot possibly be maintained at the 6th or 7th floor of a high-rise building. Social capital, which is often leveraged by slum-dwellers for income generation or subsidy strategies, has for long been identified as a collateral damage of rehabilitation schemes The displacement even in-situ from low-rise, high-density dwellings to more impersonal high-rise, high-density housing has a negative impact on social networks.
This can to some extent be mitigated by intelligent design, but design is unfortunately never a priority of low-cost housing. Thus, the move from slum-type structures to high-rise rehab flats comes at a cost, which is both economic and social.
These high-rise buildings mushrooming all round us. People who move in are selling and leaving their flats already. They need money because they cannot continue with their livelihoods in these buildings. The street life and economic activity will be gone. They say this is development, but it looks just the opposite to me. The most obvious reason is that after having lived in a situation of precariousness, where even the most basic infrastructure and intimacy was missing, the shift to a brand new high-rise apartment, with running water and doors and windows that can be shut is a real improvement in their living conditions.
A less obvious but equally important factor is the desire to obtain a legitimate status as a citizen of the city, and of the country. Slum-dwellers are typically called squatters and encroachers by the authorities, indicating that they have no right or status as citizens. Owning a flat means belonging to the city at last. Thus the readiness to move from slum structures to a high-rise often expresses not as much the necessity to fulfil essential needs, as it is motivated by the desire to achieve higher status in relative terms.
Officially though, the argument to move to high-rises is made at a more fundamental level — through the belief that high-rises supposedly absorb more people on a smaller footprint of land, and this tendency is inevitable for a dense, crowded city such as Mumbai. He points out that the mathematics is not as straightforward as it sounds.
The higher you go, the 17 Personal Communication with Dharavi resident and activist Mr. Bhau Korde. The New Landscape. Unless the economy and ecology of the whole city is strong enough, the high-rise structure, if presented as a stand-alone solution to solve the problem of low cost housing is a deceptive affair. It only releases land that is ultimately filled up by more buildings and infrastructure. Moreoever, the higher the building the higher the status and the income of its dwellers, hence the more space they will use.
This results in the same density levels as can be found in low-rise high-density clusters of the urban village or slum. The only reason such disproportionate use of land is acceptable is because it yields more short-term gains.
There is no justification to use them as a standard typology for social housing projects on the common but misguided assumption that they absorb more people per square unit of land.
Shorn of a deeper understanding of complex patterns of spatial use by people of different economic needs and backgrounds, such policies only produce the same dystopic urban forms that have already failed in cities such as Chicago and Paris and many other cities that have attempted to engineer solutions to their own chronic housing crisis.
In Mumbai, there seems to be a necessary trade-off between living in a high-rise and being a legitimate citizen - versus living in a slum and being a squatter. It is our contention that this trade-off is produced by faulty policies, inadequate regulations and vested interests that artificially turn housing into a scarce resource, which create markets for the construction industry and increase real estate value Habitats built outside of any regulatory frameworks may seem like a total utopia to most, but this is how most of Mumbai was produced.
This is also true of Tokyo after the Pacific War which had destroyed most of its neighbourhoods To imagine the possible future of the slum only in terms of mass developed high-rises is terribly limiting, both in respect to the possible urban typologies that can function as healthy habitats, as well as in terms of the activities that they sustain. Even without advocating for a world free of regulation, we can see how a place like Dharavi and many slums throughout Mumbai could benefit from an approach that would first recognize the value of what has been built incrementally over generations, including a fantastic network of ad hoc water pipes and sewerage lines.
The urban form produced by a piecemeal development process of many settlements from Mumbai to Tokyo, should not be dismissed simply because they have not been master-planned or because their forms do not conform to established perceptions of how contemporary urban neighbourhoods should look like. Tools for Conviviality. Heyday Books. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. We believe that somewhere in between master-planned habitats and improvised development lie crucial answers to the housing and economic crisis that so many cities face.
To understand exactly where in between, we need to understand first the economic forces at work in the production of the iconic and somewhat deceptive forms of the slum and the high-rise typologies. Use Value v. Instead, value of space increases with its tradability.
We refer to this use of space as speculative. These two modes of valuation have a deep impact on urban forms and their possible uses. Moreover, they appear to be somewhat in competition, with intensive spaces being aggressively prayed upon by promoters and developers for speculative uses. The typologies of the slum and the high-rise correspond to extreme versions of intensive and speculative spaces.
On the one hand, we have a context where a plot of land in a slum cannot be left empty even for a week before being occupied and used, and on the other hand, we have an industry that can generate enormous speculative value on property by trading it multiple times while leaving it empty.
In the speculative realm, empty space is more valuable than occupied space since it becomes more easily tradable. The value of such space is abstract to the extent that it relies on uncertain notions of what it may be worth in the future. It is determined by the broader economic and financial context rather than intrinsic values or the activities it permits.
Since it is used as a commodity, the value of speculative spaces is thus contingent on the capacity of traders to precisely define its boundaries. This is precisely what Slum Rehabilitation Schemes do: They transform intensive spaces into speculative spaces.
The impact of Slum Rehabilitation Schemes on urban form but also on ground-level economic activity can hardly be overemphasised. They trade the use-value of a means of production for the speculative-value of a real estate asset. This fragmentation is typically presented as social progress. But in real terms it comes down to buying slum-dwellers off their current economic activity and destroying a process of incremental development that has proved its worth by providing employment and housing to hundreds of thousands of migrants to the city.
Unfortunately, the government officials, urban planners and commentators are pre- disposed to certain notion of land use and urban form: high-rise structures with multiple, standardized units that have to absorb a maximum of residents at the lowest cost, on the smallest piece of land possible.
The process is expensive and depends on the government to audit space as well as on the market for subsidising the redevelopment.
This land that can then be used with no apology for actual spatial use. It can occupy huge footprints or remain unutilized. Among other things it called for: i dramatically increasing the supply of low-income housing and ii moving manufacturing to the countryside and turning Mumbai into a consumption centre. Moreover, moving manufacturing out of the city means depriving millions of dependent self-employed workers of their livelihood and therefore making the provision of low-income housing completely redundant since there is no way they could afford it.
Once again, the intensive use of space - typical of live-work conditions of the poorest — comes under attack in the name of providing affordable housing. Interestingly, populist politics came to the rescue of slum dwellers under threat from forced evictions in the most visible and politically active settlements of Mumbai. When the speculative logic prevails, the real estate and construction industries dominate urban development.
This comes at the cost of local economic activities, including neighbourhood-based businesses, retails and services. As Saskia Sassen points out, construction is often mistaken to be a marker of economic health, when in fact the construction industry may be contributing very little to the city.
Vision Mumbai: Transforming Mumbai into a world-class city. Rising costs make it particularly difficult for people who cannot invest but need homes to buy or rent at affordable rates.
At the same time this does not stop the mass construction of housing projects that find their markets in the world of investment or luxury. Locked-up homes and empty high-rises next to over-crowded tenements is a common sight in many cities, especially in South Asia, where the speculative city muscles its way through the corridors of urban power. In fact, the speculative logic is producing empty urban shells around the globe, fed as it is by the same financial markets that collapsed recently under the weight of the bubble they had produced.
The skyline of Mumbai is full of spectral constructions waiting to be inhabited by an illusive Indian middle-class. But this is not only happening in rapidly developing cities. The occupancy of the iconic and ill-fated World Trade Centre twin towers in New York, was in reality around two thirds of its capacity after all these years of existence until the tragedy.
The same is expected of the new Freedom Tower under construction on ground zero. Since speculative value is tightly related to status, which is measured in terms of height, investors and developers do not care much whether or not full occupancy is achieved. More floors add value to the building as a whole, irrespective of actual use. The intensive city, on the other hand, only derives value from actual use. This creates a space that, for better or worse, is optimally occupied round the clock, since it is used as a means of production in a context of economic survival.
It is produced out of sheer need by non- professional, non-legal local actors rather than real-estate developers, planners and architects. This generates an environment that may be lacking in many aspects of modern comfort, but which is free from the imposition of any spatial ideology —even that sacred injunction of contemporary cities which declares that living and working spaces must necessarily be segregated.
It ultimately produces a vivid variety of forms, structures and styles in response to means and needs. It is this flexibility that allows for a higher degree of absorption of populations, especially when they are part of the informal economy or belong to the poorer segments Taking off from the artisanal house that typically housed spaces of production and storage along with living needs, the tool-house is a physical embodiment of the most intensive use of space possible.
Storage and sleeping, cooking and producing, manufacture and consumption often happen within the same footprint of use. Such needs are the main principle through which structures in Dharavi emerge and reveal a collapse of zoning in terms of working and living.
A typical extension of such a logic also spills over into notions of private and public spaces where the streets and the homes also mirror functions and uses of each other. The spirit of exchange connects public and private realms and the bazaar becomes a default principle of space as a whole. In most cases, street-scale structures that are low-rise but can go up to as much as possible — often four storeys high and high-density are fertile contexts for a proliferation of tool-house clusters, being in easy reach of the street as well as each other.
If spaces such as Dharavi are seen through this logic, they are understood better. An alternative way to understand how fairly widespread such a logic is by taking a closer look at such typologies in richer cities with more advanced infrastructure. Several neighbourhoods in Tokyo are an ideal example. The contrasting examples of Mumbai and Tokyo show how these cities are typically a mix of these two principles, and how historical and cultural factors affect the degree to which the intensive and speculative logics merge or break away from each other.
In Mumbai, the legacy of speculative planning ideals has produced a sharply divided cityscape —at least at first sight. In Tokyo on the other hand, a more ambiguous and syncretistic understanding of habitats has allowed a new model to emerge where combinations of the speculative and intensive cities coexist at various scales in what could be described as a harmonious mess.
Between the Intensive and Speculative Types The landscape of the intensive city typically follows a multi-directional logic. It allows for numerous temporalities to co-exist, epitomized in different kinds of economic practices, rural, artisanal, post-industrial or hi-tech.
It can tear itself down and build afresh. It does not have fixed templates or business models to follow and therefore is flexible in its approach to construct and re-build.
Its built-environment combines residential, productive and recreational spaces often compressed in the same space-time. Dharavi is perhaps the best example of a settlement developed through intensive processes. Hundred of thousands of actors over several generations have incrementally developed a fully functioning settlement and a vibrant economy. Yet, careful observation shows that the intensive and speculative are not necessarily working in opposition to each other, even in Dharavi.
In fact, at a micro level, Dharavi is full of speculative investment by its residents, who see in their houses an important asset that can take value over time. Entrepreneurs are also investing in their stock, speculating on upcoming sales. The incremental development of Dharavi is contingent on a certain speculative bet on the future by all of its residents and entrepreneurs.
If anything, the looming redevelopment project backed by the government, for Dharavi, makes it difficult for residents and business owners to invest on their houses and shops.
Given the uncertain future, many residents are renouncing improvement projects, focusing instead on the optimal exploitation of existing resources. Thus, in a twisted way, real estate speculation on Dharavi in the form of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project DRP is slowing down of another sort of ground-level speculation by the residents themselves.
The reverse is also true, as the speculative economy generates its own slums, which often become permanent and relatively autonomous. For example, countless informal settlements have been triggered directly by the formal construction industry. In Mumbai, makeshift structures where construction workers stay accompany every construction site and become the starting point of a slum housing a population that serves the residents of the new buildings.
The development of shelters and spaces, and the presence of services and commerce are conjoined economic activities in their own right. In fact, construction often triggers other economic activity in very direct ways.
It generates services, sales of goods for homes and for domestic needs that then become integral to the locality. This process is typical of construction projects in many developing cities. For instance, in his classic study of the urban development of Brasilia, David Epstein observes how construction workers developed the first favela of this perfectly planned city. They had nowhere else to go and were able to find economic opportunities in the new capital Interestingly, the improvised settlement of Brazila are reportedly much more alive than the master-planned capital can ever hope to be.
Invariably, unplanned settlements appear to be deeply connected to the metropolitan economy around them. Far from being parasites, marginal or self-sustained, they are constantly 29 Epstein, David. This relationship is usually recognized and valued by businesses and private employers since it constitutes an indirect subsidy of their activities.
Such a relationship of mutual dependency between large businesses and the local provider is again not unique to Mumbai nor found only in the context of slums. The speculative city is full of cracks and contradictions within. Saskia Sassen documented how dependent Wall Street firms were on a deep web of local businesses operating in the shadow of the skyscrapers, providing printing, cleaning and food services essential to the good functioning of the financial industry At the street level also, the integration of the informal and the formal is done through trade and services.
In cities with a high level of tolerance to street activity and bazaars, such as Mumbai and Tokyo, local economic operators play a major role to facilitate and support the overlap of these spaces and activities in such neighbourhoods. Tea stalls, fruit vendors, tailors and ironers are a fixture of Indian cities and can be found at every corner of middle-class neighbourhoods in Mumbai. They occupy leftover and in-between spaces and cater to the needs of the residents at discounted slum prices The same relationship exists inside the homes of middle-class households employing illegal immigrants as house-workers, carpenters and cooks The Tokyo Model A conscious acceptance of the type of mixed-use habitat produced by intensive processes of urban development is a rare occurrence in contemporary cities, mainly because the form it generates is typically seen as messy and irrational within a mainstream urban planning perspective.
The case of Tokyo, however, provides an outstanding example of the potential of 30 Sassen, Saskia. Tokyo is possibly the most efficient, urbane and sophisticated city in the world, and definitively the most populated. Yet except for its historical core of Edo, could well be described as one gigantic incrementally developed slum.
The process of literally carving out space, or making it grow bit by bit was crucial in the development of post-war Tokyo, just as it is central to the evolution of habitats in informal settlements all over India.
This shadow actually stretches over kilometres around the city's historical core and largely dominates its landscape just as informal development dominates the landscape of greater Mumbai. After the war, Tokyo was left almost totally flattened Residents had to rebuild their lives from scratch.
In this process neighbourhoods became the fertile grounds from which the Japanese middle- class emerged. They built upon a tradition of self-help that the Ministry of City Planning had produced by default in terms of incomplete urban plans since the s. The pressing needs for economic redevelopment and shelter, the lack of financial resources, and the absence of legal mechanisms for land acquisition by the state, ensured that the urban plans were never implemented.
The government focused instead on industrial and infrastructure development to support the economy, leaving the reconstruction of residential and commercial areas to local actors, who rebuilt the city on its ashes.
Incremental urban and economic development processes are completely interconnected in the history of Tokyo —just as they are in Mumbai. Tokyo and Mumbai are similar in the sense that their suburbs have improved gradually over a period of time and many settlements have emerged through village-like histories. These local activities are facilitated by the typology of housing forms characterized by familial and community inputs in the incremental growth of each structure and its adaptation to specific needs, both social and economic.
Below is a photoshopped montage of Dharavi and Tokyo — which brings to life some of these. In Tokyo, the older and traditional pattern of urban organization too reflected a similar experience. In Tokyo, the intensive processes generating such built forms and street patterns were never seen to be illegitimate, irrational or dysfunctional — quite to the contrary.
This was in line with traditional township management strategies and communal organization. In the post-war redevelopment effort, neighbourhoods relied heavily on traditional construction and habitat management methods. To this day, most neighbourhoods in Tokyo have committees of residents overseeing their internal affairs and communication with the authorities. This explains why Tokyo has both; one of the best infrastructures in the world and a housing stock of great variety.
What emerges are different forms— a cluster of villages, low-rise high density urban settlements connected by transport networks and a combination of diverse housing typologies co-existing including high-rise structures. These settlements contribute hugely to the cities and urban systems of the region as a whole to the globally connected economies of Tokyo and Mumbai. Interestingly, it also prevents the high degree of residential segregation along income lines that one finds in the US.
What distinguishes the urban evolution of these two cities are that in Tokyo the process of incremental evolution of settlements, their contribution to the larger economy and the presence of mixed-used forms was accepted, allowing for these neighbourhoods to become modernized and well equipped civic spaces. In Mumbai, these processes were considered illegitimate and thus were deprived of any support. This becomes very obvious when these typologies are celebrated instead of being rejected.
Narrow pedestrian streets, low-rise structures and lively street activity in village- looking urban contexts are glorified by conservationists and sometimes reproduced artificially and perfected in an urban plan.
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