Dharavi III: The Rules of the Game

This is Part Three in a series looking at Dharavi, a mostly informal township in Mumbai often referred to as Asia’s largest slum, and the government’s controversial plans to redevelop it. With billions of dollars on the table, tens of thousands of homes and businesses at stake, and the global spotlight shining bright, this case of contested urban space is worth a deeper look.

“The early residents of Dharavi recall that when they entered the area from Mahim station, they had to build an access path themselves as there was no road. People placed rocks on the marshy ground, covered it with mud, and created a dirt road… Today, that same dirt road has become Dharavi Main Road.”
―Rediscovering Dharavi by Kalpana Sharma, p. 25

"My vision would be that it would be transformed into one of the better suburbs of Mumbai – it will be forgotten as any kind of slum – there will be state of the art modern amenities and a lot of happy people living in Dharavi."
― Mukesh Mehta, “Slum in Way of Mumbai’s Progress,” BBC News, 21 March 2007

***

In my previous post, I brought up what becomes obvious to anyone who’s taken even a cursory stroll through Dharavi: that describing the area as one big “slum,” a term that is officially sanctioned and almost universally accepted, is deeply problematic given the ground reality.

Packaging Dharavi with this label is very convenient, however. Not only does it condemn the area as an unacceptable space, but one that needs emergency rescue ― an idea not-so-subtly reinforced in a slide Mukesh Mehta likes to feature in his presentations that shouts, “Support Our Slums,” emphasis on the “SOS.” Ostensibly, the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan is a “win-win” slum rehabilitation scheme that will provide slum dwellers with adequate housing and amenities subsidized through commercial development.

Up close, it’s clear that calling it a welfare scheme is a dangerous euphamism. In fact, the plan enables the government to repossess a luctrative piece of land occupied by a poorer population in order to efficiently clear and resell it, while affording those in the way the minimum possible space and benefits to make this politically feasible. This not only allows large corporate conglomerates to maximize the land’s commercial value (leaving a hefty profit for the state, of course), but also squeezes the poor out of a central piece of land to make room for middle- and upper-classes and “cleans up” Mumbai to make it attractive for upper classes and investors.

The decision to redevelop Dharavi as a township creates the regulatory and administrative conditions for this to take place efficiently. Although taking a holistic approach to Dharavi is necessary for planning things like infrastructure and transport networks, in this context it allows land appropriation to take place in one fell swoop, sets up an authority to organize the process, and makes economic exploitation maximally convenient by limiting contendors to big multinationals and dividing land into convenient pie slices – a “readymade project with a potential to net in excess of USD 1.5 BN” as Mukesh Mehta put it in his presentation.

Authorities have manipulated the rules and regulations governing the area’s development in order to maximize and facilitate commercial development. They have limited the population eligible for rehabilitation to those who can prove residence prior to 1/1/2000 (previously 1/1/1995) and live on the ground floor (70% of Dharavi homes have more than one floor, which means 35,000 families according to one informed estimate!). They abolished a clause that typically requires the consent of 70% of affected households for slum rehabilitation projects. They modified the Development Control Rules (DCR, 1991) to allow the project to demolish non-slum areas, like government-built housing and private property, in the service of a "public purpose." They declared Dharavi a "difficult area", on which basis they raised the Floor Space Index (Floor Area Ratio) to 4 from 1.33, meaning that developers can build for-sale space at a rate of 4 :1 relative to rehabilitation area. This represents a profit in the billions of dollars, while experts have proven that the project could be subsidized through development at an FSI as low as 0.25.

Dharavi was initially a marshy swamp. Over generations, those who inhabited it acted as land developers by gradually creating landfill, pathways, and residential and commercial space. This incremental development is the only reason that the area is habitable in the first place. Besides physical development, this homegrown growth has been a huge creator of affordable housing and jobs, not to mention cultural capital and social cohesion. Yet, rules and regulations are not amended to recognize this investment and functioning system or to support local economic growth. On the other hand, the rules of the game are happily and briskly changed when it benefits the other players.

Dharavi was ignored when it was on the periphery of the city (The city’s main water lines initially plowed right through Dharavi without serving residents. It was only to prevent nuisance and contamination when people understandably hacked into the line to access water that the government provided this basic service.) Now that the Bandra Kurla Complex has re-oriented Mumbai’s financial compass and land values are high, it’s a convenient time to want to help. It’s the kind of charity that comes with a price tag.

(Dharavi 2014 image from Mehta's presentation at the Urban Age conference, SOS image and sector map from his "Slum Free Dharavi" presentation.)

Dharavi II: Does This Look Like a Slum?

This is Part Two in a series looking at Dharavi, a mostly informal township in Mumbai often referred to as Asia’s largest slum, and the government’s controversial plans to redevelop it. With billions of dollars on the table, tens of thousands of homes and businesses at stake, and the global spotlight shining bright, this case of contested urban space is worth a deeper look.

“Dharavi is a black hole – something we should be ashamed of.”
-Mukesh Mehta, “Slum in the Way of Mumbai’s Progress,” BBC News, 21 March 2007

“Asia’s largest sprawl of squalor – the Dharavi slum – breathed below.”
-Aditya Ghosh, “Final plan for Asia’s largest slum ready,” Hindustan Times, 07 February 2008

“Dharavi has always been a permanent eyesore to foreign travellers flying to India.”
-“Blueprint for a new Dharavi,” The Financial Express, 17 June 2007

Dharavi is almost universally branded as a massive “slum.” This terminology is taken for granted in most mainstream media accounts, government designations and the popular imagination. In fact, the planning authority for Dharavi is the state’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority.

Even in the legal sense, this term is an inaccurate generalization. According to Sharad Mahajan of MASHAL, an NGO that managed GIS mapping and data collection for the government’s official survey of Dharavi, the 59,316 "slum structures" counted in the survey occupy around 396 of 590 acres. The rest of the area includes government-owned properties (including buildings developed under previous upgrading schemes), a Tata power station, a BEST bus station, Mahim Nature Park, a cemetery, railway facilities, private industrial and residential buildings, and streets (many paved by the municipality).

Koliwada, a historical fishing village that existed before Bombay did and has historical documents attesting to that, was never a slum — a fact finally recognized by DRP authorities in early 2009, when they agreed to exempt the area from the redevelopment plan. Kumbharwada, a community of potters who migrated to Mumbai after a drought in their native Gujarat, were afforded "Vacant Land Tenure," a unique tenancy arrangement, in Dharavi by the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1932. There is also the Transit Camp, originally temporary structures built by the government for people displaced by infrastructure projects; decades later, this is a relatively well developed commercial and residential area. Matunga Labor Camp, has housed municipal sweepers for over 50 years. There are also chawls built by the Bombay Municipal Corporation prior to 1940. Many of these areas are now officially labeled slums, which seems legally questionable, even if it is permissible.

When you look beneath the surface at the parts considered "slum areas", the term seems equally problematic. Does the ICICI bank on 90 Feet Road count as a slum structure? What about the Sri Siddhi Vinayakar Temple, the 120-year old Dharavi Mosque or St. Anthony Church? Kala Killa, a fort built by order of the Governor of Bombay in 1737? The three-story Gurudutta Gym, home to one of Mumbai’s champion bodybuilders? The London-trained cosmotologist’s clinic, blood and X-ray labs, cyber cafes, lawyers’ offices? The air-conditioned stores selling gold jewelry and high-end electronics? The schools, the bakeries who stock stores across the city and 13 Compound, Mumbai’s unofficial but main recycling center? The offices of countless NGOs and associations of every creed and culture? The streets that look like the old city of Jodpur or any small town in India or Tokyo minus a few decades? With more than 80 distinct neighborhoods, over 600,000 people, and a "GDP" of USD 500 million, by all measures this slum looks suspicously like a city of its own.

This is not to say that Dharavi is without serious problems. Many parts of Dharavi are overcrowded and suffer the effects of a lack of provision of basic civic services and amenities. Many structures use recycled materials, reflecting owners’ poverty and lack of access to finance. Dharavi needs support to develop. But it should be obvious by now that the label "slum" is inappropriate.

"Slum" is not a neutral descriptive term, but a highly affective one. Sometimes – as in the quotes I introduced with – the biases are clearly spelled out. Even when there are no blatant stereotypes, "slum" is always shorthand for blighted, dirty, dysfunctional, unacceptable. The myth of Dharavi as a uniform slum is reinforced by cliché imagery of sprawling corrugated tin roofs and garbage-choked lanes, repeated on the government’s websites and presentations and most mainstream Indian papers. Rhetoric and images evoking Dharavi’s scale (“largest slum in Asia,” “sprawl of squalor”) further dehumanize it and inflate the “threat.” Middle- and upper-class Mumbaikers have no reason to dispute the term, likely never having set foot in Dharavi.


This is not a neutral misunderstanding — packaging Dharavi as one big slum serves a clear purpose. Although there is no single actor behind it, the PR campaign that brands Dharavi as such is so masterful that the inaccurate and loaded term is assumed to be a fact by most and has provided unquestioned justification for the government’s developer-driven redevelopment plan.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk. Photo collage of Dharavi and Tokyo by Matias Echanove (www.airoots.org/www.dharavi.org).)

Dharavi I: A Tale of Two Cities

You may have heard of Dharavi by now. This vast (largely) informal settlement in central Mumbai, which has seen a media blitz after being featured in Slumdog Millionaire, was already under a brightening international spotlight on account of being the focus of a multi-billion dollar government redevelopment plan and possessing the false moniker of being “Asia’s largest slum”. Adopted in 2004 and in action since 2006, the plan slices Dharavi into five sectors to be awarded to giant developer consortiums through a competitive bidding process. In exchange for re-housing eligible households in 300 square-foot flats and providing some requisite infrastructure, amenities and commercial space, developers win the right to build developments on the rest of the land for sale on the open market.

Architect Mukesh Mehta – who designed the plan and was appointed official consultant by the Government of Maharashtra (his previous experience was in luxury developments in Long Island) – has widely marketed the plan as a win-win solution: a model of slum redevelopment through public-private partnership to be exported around the world. Residents, local activists, and international critics have called it a thinly veiled land grab.

The project is ridiculously lucrative, owing to the high potential commercial value of the land. Once a no-mans-land on a peripheral marsh, 590-acre Dharavi has found itself in the center of globalizing Mumbai, surrounded by three major railway stations, a bus station and the two major east-west link roads. Most importantly, it is flanked by the Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai’s new financial hub, where land values rival those of Manhattan and Tokyo.

It is also home to over half a million people, over 80 neighborhoods, and thousands of businesses of various scales. It recycles the great majority of Mumbai's waste and supplies everything from bread to leather goods to surgical thread across the city and the globe - producing USD 500 million in goods annually, according to The Economist. It continues to be the entry point for many of Mumbai's migrants and has been home to many families for generations. It has provided affordable shelter, economic opportunities and social mobility for countless people. I would venture that there are more languages spoken, festivals celebrated, and local organizations operating here than anywhere else in India in a territory of this size. With the exception of the 1992-93 riots, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists, from all different states, live side by side in peace. Dharavi is home to waste-pickers, leather tanners, computer science students, embroiderers, body-building champions, bakers, potters, lawyers and doctors. There may be a reason Dharavi is shaped like a heart - it makes Mumbai tick in more ways than one.

A recent student presentation I saw called Dharavi a case of “contested urbanism.” It’s a case of contested everything: land, identity, power, aspirations, economics. The conflicts playing out in Dharavi are a microcosm and a test case of whether there will be any space for the poor in tomorrow’s global cities.

I have been lucky enough to have a front-row seat on some of the events related to Dharavi’s redevelopment over the last 1.5 years. I helped draft and field test the official baseline socioeconomic survey for Dharavi. I attended meetings of the now-official expert advisory group on Dharavi. I helped run two participatory design workshops in the area. I facilitated visits for Swedish Parliamentarians, the Governor of Sao Paolo, and a number of journalists and student and professional groups. I published two articles about it. Most importantly, I have walked there, eaten there, played tag, danced, made friends.

Over the next few months, look out for a series about various aspects of this “city within a city” and the visions (and nightmares) it has inspired.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk (not the satellite image - that's from Google).)

Participatory Design in Poor Communities: Beyond the Rhetoric

"Participatory design" seems to be the mantra of the current generation of urban practitioners working with low-income populations. There is growing consensus that local communities should be involved in projects that affect them, both for the sake of their efficacy and with an eye to inclusive cities and governance frameworks. You'd be hard-pressed nowadays to find a development agency pamphlet, municipal government plan, or urban design curriculum that didn't pay homage to "participation."

Although the rhetoric all sounds pretty, the way in which the concept is understood varies widely. In bare-bones cases, it may mean simply keeping users informed about a project. At other times, it may involve getting majority consent. in other situations, designers may study the needs of users and incorporate their interpretations into the project. Going further, there may be processes of community consultation of varying depth. Participation can also involve inclusion of civil society and, less often, grassroots leaders in advisory or decision-making capacities. Much less often, participation means working in-depth with local groups at some or all stages of a project, from design to implementation to post-construction work.

The model of participation employed hinges in part on design professionals' understanding of the role of the architect in such projects. Is it to innovate and present people with what the professional considers a better space? Is to study and interpret local conditions? Is to to balance user needs and desires with considerations of design, engineering, costs, regulations, etc.? Or is to facilitate a bottom-up process of design and implementation? Equally if not more so, the mode of participation possible depends on the ways in which the community itself is organized.

In Pune, India, the ground has been laid for a precedent-setting model of community participation in housing design and slum upgrading. There, a network of poor women's collectives known as Mahila Milan ("Women Together") are planning to mobilize around 700 families in 7 slums to participate in design and construction to upgrade their homes as part of an incremental housing strategy developed in partnership with SPARC, an NGO that supports their work (and which I work for), and an international group of architects led by Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson.

Upgrading is taking place under a scheme administered by the Pune Municipal Corporation that offers subsidies of Rs.300,000 (10% of which comes from a beneficiary contribution) to eligible households living in structures made of recycled materials for rebuilding 265 square-foot homes on roughly the existing footprint. The scheme also provides for improvement of infrastructure, roads and basic amenities. (Using government subsidies to promote incremental upgrading at the settlement level and preservation of well-developed structures is itself a landmark move by the PMC, and came in part out of negotiations and collaborations with SPARC and Mahila Milan over years.)

Housing designs and settlement layouts will emerge out of a participatory process facilitated by Mahila Milan, which has been active in the communities through savings activities and other community work for over a decade, in most cases. The strategy uses house models and other visual aids as tools for participatory design and promotes cluster development to enable consensus on rearrangements that will increase pathways and public space. A major aim is to create structures that will allow families to increment their homes over time and to maintain the existing settlement layout as far as possible to preserve social networks and the urban fabric.

In the project, Mahila Milan will also lead a community mobilization process, complete household and plane table surveys, secure consent letters, and help manage construction, which will be implemented through local labor. The idea is that the pilot project will be a springboard for Mahila Milan to explore this process in other locales that they work in across Pune and India and to manage as many aspects of the process as possible.

How is it that grassroots collectives of poor women can participate in the project to such an extent? To understand that, you need to look back to 1984, to the pavement slums of Mumbai. That was where a group of development professionals that formed an NGO called SPARC mobilized the first Mahila Milan groups organized around credit and savings activities. SPARC was aiming to develop new relationships with the urban poor and increase the participation of women in order to ultimately promote their mission of improving access to shelter, land and basic amenities for the urban poor.

Savings and credit increased financial assets, but more importantly, mobilized women into networks and built their confidence and financial and leadership skills. Savings and credit became the first core activity in a series of rituals that are both ends in themselves and means for building the capacities of the poor to proactively develop strategies and negotiate around issues of housing, land, sanitation and other basic habitat needs (these include slum surveys and mapping, peer exchanges, model housing exhibitions, demonstration construction projects, and more). Pune's Mahila Milan started with savings in 1997 , but gradually built their capacity to take on construction projects, large-scale surveys, and even a city-wide sanitation program in partnership with the government. It is only because of these decades of groundwork that Mahila Milan are poised to take on this project.

The type of involvement here is "empowered participation." Because Mahila Milan have a vast organizational base; skills in financial management, data collection, construction, and collaboration with government authorities; and staying power, they are able to lead a process in which communities are genuine partners rather than survey respondents or focus group members. Most importantly, Mahila Milan has the capacity to institutionalize and build on their learning from the partnership with design professionals to take work forward.

In the absence of a group like Mahila Milan, designers would likely be limited to talking with men, particularly those with local power, who would co-opt the process when a question of money was at stake. It would not be possible for designers to organize the community in a way that enables deep participation, and local people would not have the skills or systems for completing maps and surveys, collecting beneficiary contributions, and managing construction. Once the architect left at the end of the project, the process would end rather than being scaled up.

Because obstacles are the rule rather than the exception with housing projects in slums, it is not guaranteed that the project will unfold as planned. However, the conceptual groundwork has laid and partnerships formed give us a hint about how participation can genuinely become a reality rather than remaining a cute catch phrase.

Note: The third partner besides SPARC and Mahila Milan in what is known as the Indian Alliance is the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF). The Alliance works in 72 cities in 9 states across India and is an affiliate of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a network in over 30 countries.

(Images by the team of Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson.)

In Jane's Footsteps

Get your walking shoes out. This weekend (May 2 and 3) is the annual Jane's Walk, dedicated to everyone's favorite grassroots urbanist. Inspired by Jane Jacobs' close attention to the everyday experience of urban life as it unfolds on the ground as a basis for understanding and acting upon the city, volunteers will lead free walking tours in over 200 neighborhoods in North America, and for the first time, in India (where PUKAR will lead the way). Organized by the Centre for City Ecology in Canada and by the Center for the Living City in the US, Jane's Walk included over 6000 participants last year, its second in existence. Many tours focus on the built environment, but others touch on local culture, history or crucial planning issues. It's not too late to lead your own...

The walks celebrate Jacobs' simple and groundbreaking idea that in order to figure out what will work for cities, one has to look at how people actually experience the city at ground level and plan with people at the center, rather than on the basis of car traffic, utopian models or scientific formulas. Not a formally trained planner herself, Jacobs' principles (higher densities, mixed uses, short blocks) are now the ABC's of the field. More importantly, her promotion of community-based planning as a counterpoint to top-down master-planning was responsible for a vast paradigm shift. It's no accident that Where readers voted her seminal treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, into the top position of our list of best books for the novice urbanist.

To what extent have Jane's footsteps left a lasting imprint? According to Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian at NYU quoted in the NY Times' City Room blog, this is a "'golden moment for the rebirth of city planning... after a long period of tremendous suspicion about the viability and value of a master plan' — suspicions fueled by a perception of 'evil top-down planners who didn't understand what neighborhoods needed.'" She was introducing a talk on April 15 by Daniel L. Doctoroff, deputy mayor until early 2008, on PlaNYC, what he called '"one of the most sweeping, most comprehensive blueprints for New York ever undertaken."

Based on the premise that New York's population is expanding rapidly, its infrastructure is aging, and its environment is at increasing risk from climate change, PlaNYC lays out a detailed framework for meeting goals in the arenas of land, water, transportation, energy, air and climate change. The plan was created after a four-month public outreach process, including consultation with advocacy groups and town hall meetings in all five boroughs. With characteristic NYC bravado, the plan claims to be a model for city planning in the 21st century.

Are we indeed witnessing the rebirth of far-reaching master-planning, but with new features? Is this a happy medium: planning for tomorrow while making residents' needs and voices central? Or are Jane Jacobs' views on the importance of keeping our feet on the ground and involving communities being diluted to token community outreach meetings?

(Flyer from the Center for the Living City. Photo of Jane by Maggie Steber, Planning Magazine, 1986, sampled here.)

Forbidden City

As if urbanists needed another reason to heart New York, I recently came across Access Restricted, a free mobile lecture series that brings prominent speakers to rarely frequented or normally exclusive spaces in Lower Manhattan for site-specific lectures on architecture, planning and related topics. This year's theme, Capital of the World, explores the "temples" of Wall Street, from penthouses to private social clubs to corporate skyscrapers. The next event on April 28 focuses on possibilities for grassroots urban planning in the real estate capital.

This type of series is so appealing because it gives the average Joe (well, more likely the not-so-average urbanist Joe) the chance to penetrate spaces in the city that are typically shut off from view. As Where noted in a post on the role of gender and class in determining geographic access in Chicago, people who live in the same city — even those who work in the same building — actually inhabit separate, insulated paths and bubbles within that city. Depending on the degree of spatial segregation, two people on opposite sides of the spectrum may never even have occasion to cross paths.

When you think about it, "Access Restricted" is a term that applies to the city at large. Very little urban space — land and what's built upon it — is actually accessible to the general public. Even that which is technically open is usually restricted in some other way: a park closes at dusk, a coffee shop requires that you purchase something, a nightclub requires you to wear heels. And then there are tacit barriers of social pressure and stigma. We all seem to be living in a forbidden city.


Some don't wait to be invited to cross prohibited urban borders. A subculture of urban explorers, linked mainly through online networks, intentionally trespass in off-limits urban sites, typically abandoned structures or the inards of the city infrastructure. Abandoned factories, sewer drains, subway tunnels (incidentally, Rochester's subway system is the only abandoned, formerly used system in the U.S.) — all are ripe terrain for expeditions by explorers who, armed with tools and cameras, don construction uniforms, pick locks or climb fences to gain access to closed-off sites.

Urban exploration (sometimes called urbex or UE) is a form of adventurism, but for those in the fold, it is also a science and an art. As covered in this scintillating piece of investigative journalism by an author of great repute, urban explorers are careful to distinguish themselves from ordinary trespassers rebelling against authority or defacing property. Rather, like historians at a ruins site, they consider themselves investigators and documentors of the landscapes that surround us but remain hidden from view. Most explorers write down what they see, take photos and share their findings through self-published magazines or online.

The empiricism of the urban explorer, sharpened by the edge of terror, is a rich, focused record of the forbidden city.
-Psychopathology and the Hidden City, Jinx, magazine dedicated to UE

The first magazine on the subject was Infiltration, published by the explorer Ninjalicious, which launched a worldwide movement. Since then, other groups like Jinx, Cave Clan, and Dark Passage have started up. One website has an FAQ list dedicated entirely to supporting young adventurers to access utility tunnels underneath their university campuses, a popular exploration site (under "tips for finding entrances": "when there is a light covering of snow, look for swaths of bare grass running across campus"). There are now books on the subject (quite a few about New York). (For a brief history of UE check out this timeline).


Most of us won't risk arrest or asphyxiation to break into closed-down plants or underground tunnels. Even if we were willing to don head gear, unless we happen to get on the Access Restricted guest list, we still couldn't invade the off-limits spaces that surround us. So when we speak of the city, how much have we really seen?

(Images from Access Restricted and Dark Passage.)

Squatting in America

Tent cities under an overpass. Wooden shanties invading vacant lots. Squatters illegally occupying empty houses. This is not Rio, Dhaka or Nairobi. Rather, scenes like this have begun to appear in Fresno, Seattle, Miami and other American cities, where thousands of people are resorting to illegal means to find shelter.

Illegal settlements of homeless people have recently sprung up in around a dozen American cities as people have lost their jobs and homes and run out of options. As Where noted in a previous post on creative residential responses to the economic crisis, many families have refused to vacate or have illegally occupied foreclosed homes – which makes sense when 1 in 9 (14 million) homes fall in that category. In Miami, Take Back the Land is one of several groups either openly or covertly moving homeless families into empty foreclosed homes. In 2006, the group responded to a deepening housing shortage in Liberty City, Miami, by erecting a shantytown on a vacant lot that had held low-income housing, until the city demolished it 8 years earlier. Known as Umoja Village, the shantytown housed up to 50 homeless people until it burned down in 2007.


What does it mean when one of the world’s richest nations starts squatting? Although the economic recession has made houselessness jarringly visible, it’s really the tipping point of a much older affordable housing crisis. Homelessness is nothing new in America, and low and middle-income Americans have increasingly been priced out of the nation’s cities, even in the best of economic times. But when large numbers of working class, and even middle-class people, resort to the tactics of slum dwellers to find shelter in the city, it makes front-page news.


At the root of the issue is a subjective question: Is shelter a commodity or a right? As a society, we have treated it as both. We let the real estate market do most of the distribution. We agree that those who have more money are entitled to purchase larger homes in better locations.

On the other hand, we don’t think the built environment should be left entirely to the whims of developers. We enact zoning laws and building regulations to make sure that we live in structurally safe, well-ventilated buildings in quiet, unpolluted neighborhoods with enough open space. We agree to provide housing at below-market rates to certain people, like the elderly, disabled and very poor. In some places, we have rent control to keep housing affordable. Most of us echo President Obama’s conviction that it is "not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.” This is affirmed by the fact that illegal squatting has in many cases either been tacitly permitted (policemen not evicting squatters) or openly accepted or encouraged (cities placing portable toilets and security guards near encampments, a Congresswoman encouraging squatting in foreclosed homes) by the powers that be. We sign on to the idea that there is a "right to adequate housing," which the UN promotes (but obviously can’t enforce).

Most societies consider housing to be both a commodity and a basic necessity, but they draw the line in different places. In the U.S., we lean very much to the side of the market in comparison with our European counterparts.

Markets are an efficient way to distribute many types of goods — like the classic example of the ice cream stand we learn about in microeconomics. However, we agree that, even with willing buyers and sellers, some goods cannot be commodities for moral reasons (organs, sex). Other goods can be sold in the market, but must be made available for free or at subsidized rates to those who can’t afford them because they are basic necessities and rights (education, health care – again, to a lesser extent in the U.S. than in Europe). We haven’t tended to think of housing in this way.

Markets are great distributional tools, but they are only tools. What happens when our existing distribution system is not delivering basically adequate housing at affordable rates to all citizens?

The reason that slums crowd developing world cities is the same reason they are emerging in the U.S. It’s more obvious when 60% of the population have to access shelter outside of formal mechanisms, and policies and planning have as much to do with slum formation as markets, but the fact remains: if the system isn’t providing housing at affordable rates for a significant amount of people, there’s something wrong with the system.

(Photos from New York Times and Yes Magazine.)

Slumchitecture

While policymakers — backed by real estate developers, the development industry, and the pressures of global capitalism — are pushing slum redevelopment models that replace informal settlements with high-rise blocks, some urban practitioners are using slums as models for redeveloping decaying neighborhoods in the West.

Architect Teddy Cruz drew on design elements he observed in the shantytowns of Tijuana to inform a redevelopment plan aimed at reintegrating poor immigrants into the fabric of a gentrifying town in Hudson River Valley. He previously incorporated Tijuana's lessons into a design for a residential complex for Latino immigrants near San Diego.

Cruz is one of a growing number of architects and other professionals looking to informal settlements for lessons on good urban design. These practitioners point out that, for all their deprivations, slums exemplify many of the textbook qualities that make up strong urban environments: low-rise, high-density, mixed use. They are home to well-functioning public spaces, heterogeneous communities and aesthetically interesting spaces. They promote safety by channeling "eyes on the street."

In an age where sustainability is the keyword, slums are "green" in their efficient use and reuse of materials for construction and livelihood activities. They are highly walkable, often represent optimal utilization of space and are easily adaptable to changing user needs.

Some have also argued that the decentralized, informal production processes and blending of live-work spaces that slum typologies allow represent a restructuring in line with the demands of a post-industrial economy.

In February, no less than Prince Charles lauded Dharavi — a vast slum in central Mumbai that he visited in 2003 and has since become the focus of a multi-billion dollar redevelopment plan — as a healthy antidote to built environments created through a "brutal and insensitive process of globalisation." He suggested that "it may be the case that in a few years’ time such communities [as Dharavi] will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living.”

It seems that slums are the new utopian landscapes — and they couldn't be more different than the neat segmentation and uniformity of the previous generation's suburban and modernist dreams.

While the West is trying to recapture something lost, many slum inhabitants can't wait to get out. Slum residents who are relatively wealthy, better educated and young and who live in well-developed slums in cities where building-living is the norm (which are also the ones that designers are emulating) often strive for the privacy, social mobility and security that high-rise buildings connote. On one hand, you can argue that their face-value aspirations are unreliable because they have not been presented with another version of what it means to be modern, middle-class and legal. But all of our preferences and judgments are similarly socially conditioned. Is this a case of "you don't miss it 'till it's gone"? Or is the grass always greener?

Equally eager to leave slum settlements are those on the other side of the spectrum from Dharavi, where there is no public space to speak of, no more than half of the family fits in the house at a time, and you risk getting hit by a train or falling off a water pipe when you go outside. Although such places remind us of people's capacity for ingenuity and survival and can be aesthetically interesting, no one actually wants to live here.

There are many places in between, and overall, I would guess most inhabitants of slums would prefer to preserve their current settlements and stay in ground-floor structures that they can increment over time. And there's a lot to learn from these well-functioning, organic neighborhoods.

Those who use "slum" as a blanket term to connote blight and justify self-serving solutions ignore the diversity among slums and the strengths that many already possess. However, those admiring the forms of certain types of slums should also not glaze over the diversity of slum environments — as well as the people who live in them — to make their point. Let's hope that this wave of excitement about "slumchitecture" does not lead to superficial conclusions, but rather that it energizes debates and generates perspectives that can create better cities in both proverbial hemispheres.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk. Image of Teddy Cruz's model from the New York Times.)

Rickshaws and Good City Form

There is no more recognizable symbol of urban India than the rickshaws that crowd and crawl through the city like yellow-and-black insects. Although the vehicles themselves are ubiquitous and uniform, each rickshaw has a small hand-painted sign on the back that says "Stop," and this comes in endless flavors — from Retro Bollywood to Arabic Chic to American Graffiti Besides the amusing redundancy (would anyone really not stop?), for me these signs represent diversity within order, surprise within standardization, the organic within organization. Within the regulated urban system that rickshaws conform to, these signs are an element of the unpredictable, something that doesn't quite make sense. Against the uniform structure of the rickshaws, they are individualized and reveal a human hand.

It seems to me these signs say something about good city form: about the need for a well-functioning, utilitarian system to make room for difference within the order, a touch of color and a human scale.

My delight at these signs reminds me of the fascination that many from the heavily ordered environments of the West have with habitats that emerged out of more informal, decentralized processes, of which slums are the most obvious expression in an urban context. It's simplistic to write this off as romanticism. Without minimizing the deprivations that most slum residents suffer, I think it's a natural attraction to places that are designed at a human scale, reveal individual creativity and give a sense of the distinctly local. Although there is clear, tacit order that any inhabitant would be attuned to, this is more organized chaos than top-down regulation. Just like rickshaws squeeze their way through the crevices of Mumbai traffic, space is tight but there's room for maneuvering — and you'd never get anywhere if you followed the rules.

On the other end of the spectrum are environments manufactured at a grand scale, driven by the heavy hands of impatient capital or grandiose master-planning. These are sterile places with assembly-line fixtures and repeating forms, where the human hand is invisible and every movement is predicted by a sign.

Of course, this is an extreme, and the other extreme — anarchy — is equally undesirable. Although they may not carry out their ostensible role in directing traffic, rickshaw signs do give a clue about how to strike a balance in terms of what makes an efficient but rich urban element.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk.)

A Planner's Fetish

What do tourism and slums have in common? Besides the recent "Reality Tours" trend, not much! That's not what the Government of India thinks, though. This year, its national survey department has apparently decided to combine data collection on domestic tourism with that on housing conditions and slums. This means a surveyor "may be visiting you to collect data on your various travels," and "you may be also asked about housing conditions and slums."

So, are they going to ask a middle-class Indian about his last trip to Goa and the condition of his spacious flat in a Mumbai suburb, and then about the needs of slums (in which he's never set foot)? Or are they going to approach a slum household and ask them about their next weekend getaway destination? According to the notice announcing the survey, the government will use this data for planning. I can only imagine the enlightened policy India is in for.

My Indian colleague thinks that this comical combo was the result of a misguided cost-cutting measure, but I think it also says something about the relationship between statistics and planning more generally.

Like most of us in the mainstream, which rational thought has steadily colonized since Descartes, planners have a fetish for numbers. They're easily digestible. They sound important. And supposedly they don't lie. Except that statistics are not neutral, and what you ask determines what you get. If you only ask middle-class Indians about slums, you're going to get a very skewed picture. In fact, even asking about "slums" implies that such a characterization is accurate, even though the term is problematic because, among other reasons, it has strong connotations and imposes a false dichotomy on what is really a complex map of spaces and levels of informality.

Statisticians don't really measure truths, so much as create them by deciding what to ask and of whom. Although the questionable assumptions behind surveys are rarely as egregiously obvious as in this case, surveys are never just a technical exercise — and planning shouldn't be either.

(Thanks to Indu Agarwal, who made my morning when she showed me the notice.)

(Incredible India image from www.indian-tourism.us.)

Housing Post-Disasters

In 1999, the state of Orissa in eastern India was hit by a “super-cyclone” that devastated its cities and villages. Millions were left homeless. Poor and marginalized populations, who make up a disproportionate part of Orissa's population, were particularly affected. In the wake of the storm, relief agencies appeared on the scene to offer much-needed post-disaster aid. For emergency needs like food, clothing, medication and basic provisions, the welfare model employed by these organizations worked well. However, for all its good intentions, this model — in which outside agencies are providers and the poor are beneficiaries — needs re-evaluation when it comes to housing.


The difference between housing built for people and by people is clear in Mundasahi in Cuttack and Chandrabhaga in Konark - two "urban villages" that suffered in the cyclone. In each of these settlements, the Lion’s Club International Foundation, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, built around 20 uniform, ground-floor, one-room structures under their Orissa Cyclone Rehabilitation Programme. These were among 360 rehabilitation housing units for which the club donated US$500,000 in 2000.

These are essentially boxes with cookie-cutter designs that appear to have been air-dropped in the settlements. Designs lack provisions for a toilet or kitchen area. They are totally out of touch with local lifestyles and livelihoods: In the fishing village of Chandrabhaga, there is no room for storing or processing fish. In Mundasahi, a tribal settlement, there is provision for a traditional outdoor earthen stove. The houses are small compared to area standards. In Chandrabhaga, two families must split a house no bigger than 150 square feet, at least half the size of typical huts. Based on community norms, sharing a house undermines the status of these households. In Mundasahi, the structures are nine-feet short of the size of the plot that households hold — a terrible waste when every inch counts. Inside, the NGO erected a simple partition that does not use space well. Taken as a whole, the standardized structures give an impression of lifelessness compared to the rich atmosphere of the organic villages. As a result, many of the houses lie vacant. In Mundasahi, where they are somewhat better integrated, households have done their best to adapt the structures by building extensions.

In the same sites, homes that residents themselves designed and built after the disaster stand as a vibrant counterpoint. Some of these houses were built with the support of loans from the Orissa Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, grassroots group of the poor who, with the support of an NGO, manage savings groups and slum surveys, take on precedent-setting housing and infrastructure projects and negotiate with the government about evictions, basic services and other shelter and planning issues. In this case, households took out loans against their own savings, designed their homes (many learned affordable construction techniques through exchanges with peers in other cities and a few worked through a participatory process with a volunteer architect) and hired local labor for construction — contributing plenty of sweat equity of their own.

By any standard, these are better homes. The families use space in a way that maximizes its efficiency according to the family's structure, activities and culture. A home in Mundasahi includes a covered stoop used for storage and traditional cooking. There is also a kitchen, a toilet area and a courtyard at the back. The interior is also organized in a way that considers the sleeping arrangements, privacy and storage needs of the family. It connects onto a communal roof terrace used for drying laundry, storage, livelihood activities and festivals. These homes become an important asset for the family.

They can be extended over time, as the household grows and more finance becomes available. Because the family helped pay for and design the home themselves, it's a marker of pride and status. Individualized, crafted with attention to aesthetics and in tune with the local typologies, these houses make for better maintained, more interesting, and thereby better functioning neighborhoods. They adapt better to the climate and use money well, as people know what materials are available at what prices.


Post-disaster situations, in which large amounts of relief funding must be spent quickly and affected populations are viewed as victims, accelerates the tendency to build from the top. This will become a bigger issue as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of large-scale calamities. However, the model of addressing shelter deprivations by treating the urban poor as beneficiaries is not limited to post-disaster situations. Many government schemes and development programs are oriented around this paradigm.

One can argue that beggars can't be choosers, but that's missing the point. Poor people aren't beggars, and they have the skills and knowledge to produce the housing solutions that work best for them; in fact, self-construction has always been the primary way of producing affordable housing, despite lack of access to housing finance and rights to land.

Although the cyclone left people in a terribly difficult situation, a crisis is often the perfect opportunity to build or strengthen community-led efforts. The available pools of money are the perfect chance to invest in sustainable and affordable housing — which was an issue before the disaster ever hit. Money is wasted if houses are left vacant or will be obsolete tomorrow. Orienting funding and systems towards supporting local construction processes — before or after the storm — is a more cost-effective investment, creates better homes and neighborhoods and does more to create sustainable shelter and lift families out of poverty.

Photos by Katia Savchuk