Dharavi and Mankhurd

I've had a chance to go a couple of times now to Dharavi and Mankhurd and get a feel for slums and slum redevelopment. Dharavi is one of the most populous slums in the world. It has been heavily covered in the media, to the point of being almost romanticized and glorified. Mankhurd is the site of slums as well, but also of massive resettlement projects. I'm still getting a feel for slum redevelopment politics. Most inhabitants of Mankhurd are actually relocated from housing that was demolished for freeway construction. In other housing projects, however, the development is built on converted slum land and the previous slum dwellers get more formal housing in return for giving up most of their land to other development purposes (think high end malls).

My first impression of Dharavi was really that it is just like many other neighborhoods in the city. There are slums all over, just as there are super ritzy condos all over. There is no rich or poor part of the city per se. Dharavi has been the subject of much attention because of its size, but really there is nothing that special aside from that. I spent quite a bit of time poking around in the alleyways and passages between the shanty houses. I walked around for a few hours until I started to feel uncomfortable about doing so. What started as an exercise in seeing and knowing had started to feel too voyeuristic. I think the architecture leads one to those feelings if you don't actually live there. The homes are constructed so close together and there are never any doors, so it is tough not to feel like you are walking through people's front hallways.

Most people there have electric and water connections, though as I have been reading, the connection frequently does not mean service. The connections have been installed in an ad hoc manner, as has the housing itself. Wastewater and stormwater leave through the same open air conduits, that run along the base of all of the housing. Its completely unsanitary, but on the other hand, given the number of puddles of standing water in other parts of the city, its not necessarily that much more of a health risk. Trash pickup is completely lacking. In fact, much of the slums are built on dumps that are being reclaimed as land.

I didn't take too many photos of Dharavi - it just felt too invasive. Here are a few shots though, that give you a sense of how closely the buildings are packed together, and how informal all of the provision of services is.









Mankhurd was truly a trip. It is difficult to wrap one's mind around just how many housing units have been built in so little space. I would actually recommend looking at an aerial photograph on google maps (just search for Mankhurd, Mumbai, India and click on satellite view...the major redevelopment projects are right near the train station). From the air the new developments look a bit like computer chips (anyone seen Koyanisquatsi?). If you zoom in you can get some interesting shots of the juxtaposition of new affordable housing and still hanging on slums. I went with my coworkers and walked around the buildings near DP Road. Apparently, just the buildings in that complex house 65,000 people. Its just astonishing. I think my high school probably had a footprint of about half of that area and I thought it was packed with 2,500 students.

The buildings are a standard 7 stories plus ground floor and rooms are a standard 225 square feet. We got luck and met a couple of guys who are on a waiting list for units in a nearby building and showed us around. One fascinating thing that they mentioned is that many of the people who live in the adjacent slum actually own houses in Navi Mumbai (the smaller, less crowded and more affordable city across the harbor) that they rent out and continue to live in the slum. Apparently many of them work at the atomic research institute that is in Mankhurd. They choose to do this because they do not find slum living unbearable, enjoy the short commute, and are saving money by being landlords. They also mentioned that some of the new redevelopment buildings lack elevators and remain vacant above the 3rd floor. It is incumbent upon the residents to install their own elevators. The residents on lower floors won't pay in, but prospective upper floor residents can't afford it without them.











The slums may seem miserable. To be sure, the lack of basic services is a violation of every notion of human rights conceivable. I don't want to sound too removed from
the injustice and moral reprehensiveness of the fact that so many people live in such conditions, but I think it is interesting to note two quite redeeming aspects of the slum. One is the social network of the slums, and in particular the way this network can offer protection. During a lunch conversation a few weeks back one of my coworkers noted that the incidence of spousal abuse and domestic violence (a serious problem here) is actually highest among middle class families. Lower class women actually suffer less than middle class women because there are more watchful eyes in the community and there is less privacy in the home.

Another redeeming quality is the fascinating economic activity that grows up in the slums. Out of dire conditions come incredible ingenuity. The recycling activity in Dharavi is a great example. Millions of dollars a year of waste is brought to Dharavi to be sorted, broken down into different components, and sent back out as raw materials. While walking around the recycling district of Dharavi I saw literally everything being recycled. Plastic containers of all types, glass, bottle caps, copper and rubber from wires, boxes, paper, burlap, vinyl (probably being reused right there in the slum as a building material), lime, brick, other building materials, the list goes on. We could learn a lot from the thoroughness of their reclamation efforts. At the same time, it is a shame that it must be so informal and the work conditions so hazardous.

Mounds of recyclables ready for sorting or export:





It turns out that many slum dwellers do not want to leave. There is a process by which a slum can incorporate, elect a governing body, and enter deals with developers in which they trade land for formal housing. Many slum dwellers are skeptical, fearing the isolation of a high rise redevelopment building. The slum redevelopment projects have also struggled to recreate the organic economy of the slum where home and work are so close together. A fellow tenant at my hotel/home is working with an NGO that helps slum dwellers negotiate with developers. He put it well: the slum is a living organism.