______________________________ Géraud Bablon

______________________________ Lina Fruzzetti

First Reader

______________________________ Elizabeth Dean Hermann

Second Reader

© Géraud Bablon, 2014

Abstract

Over half of the population of Mumbai, India, lives in slums. Outside the

purview of state planning, these neighborhoods suffer from inadequate infrastructure and difficult health conditions. To remedy this, and to liberate valuable real-estate, the municipality has implemented a Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) promising the on-site redevelopment of slums into multi-story apartment towers. Implicit in the scheme is the assumption that these buildings constitute an improvement in living-conditions for their residents. Yet slums are self-designed spaces, and contain valuable social and economic networks as well as patterns of meaning for those who occupy them. In what ways are these networks and meanings preserved or altered through the architectural intervention of slum rehabilitation? And via which processes can rehabilitation be conducted to ensure residents’ satisfaction with the spaces they are to inhabit?

This study aims to answer these two questions based on research conducted

in two slums and in four rehabilitation buildings in Mumbai. Focusing first on infrastructural improvements within the “private” sphere of the home, we establish the manner in which rehabilitation buildings are unequivocally empowering to residents. Turning then to issues of community and of behavior in the “public” sphere, we discuss the different meanings attributed to buildings, on the basis of varied understandings of the place of slums within the city: conceptions of slums either as nodes of exclusion from the city’s modernizing project or as villages featuring strong social support networks inform residents’ understanding of what it means to move into a building. We define the constructs “slum mentality” and “building mentality” as opposing conceptions of the social space of rehabilitation buildings, suggesting a toolbox for understanding these conceptions of space.

This is followed by a discussion of the multi-actor politics that surround the

construction of space (architectural design) and the production of space (behavioral rules) in the process of rehabilitation. In all cases, resident’s capacity to influence these according to their own conceptions determined their satisfaction with the building. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of participatory processes of redevelopment for outcomes featuring high residential satisfaction.

Key words: Slums, Rehabilitation, Mumbai, Slum mentality, Building mentality, Participatory Redevelopment

i

Acknowledgements This work is dedicated to Sreeja Jaiswal (and Rajanya Bose), who discovered the passions and difficulties of the slums and buildings of Bombay with me, and to Vikramaditya Sharma, my better half, for shaping every idea in this thesis with me.

----- I am enormously indebted to Jennifer Costanza, Lina Fruzzetti, Lili Hermann, and Sukriti Issar for giving me hour upon hour of their time and for pulling me through. My thanks also to Ashutosh Varshney for rekindling my love of India three years ago and for making my stay in Bombay an entirely different experience, and to Cornel Ban for inspiring not only this thesis but my entire project in Development Studies. And finally, to Stephanie Abbott-Pandey, for being relentlessly genuine. In Bombay, thank you to Jayashree Balasubramanian, Amita Bhide, and Felix Thomas for welcoming me and pushing me in the right direction. And an infinite thanks to Sachin Kadam, for motorcycle rides, for long conversations about how it all works, and for giving me so much and expecting nothing but passion in return. I’m grateful to Keya Kunte, Jockin Arputham, Sucheta Chogle, George Jerry Jacob, and Neera Adarkar for giving me their time and their ideas, and for sharing with me their passion for making the world a better place – no, a better space. Thank you to my family, friends, roommates, who have likely heard the words “slum” and “building” one time too many but stayed put anyway. And thank you most of all to Revan Madgunde, Hashim Rafique, and to every resident who saw something in this complete firangi knocking on their door, and opened up to tell him their story.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i Prologue iv

I |

Introduction……………………………………………………………...………………………….…………………………………1 Conceptual and Contextual Framework: Slums in Mumbai, Slums in Theory 3 Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Scheme 10 The Value of Slums 14 Analytical Model 17 Limitations 22 Outline of the Present Work 23

II | Overview of

Cases…………………………………………………….……………………………………………………….26 Map of Sites 27 Sathe Nagar Slum 28 Dharavi Slum Lane 30 Rajiv-Indira Housing Cooperative Building 32 Ganesh Nagar D Housing Cooperative Building 34 Akash Darshan 36 Nabi Nagar Cooperative Society Building 38

III | Inside the home: Space as

Freedom……………………………………………………….………………….40 Agency through the Built Environment 41 Sanitation and Hygiene 44 Keeping out the elements 46 What 225 Square Feet Can Do 48 Conclusion 51

IV | The Public Sphere: Space as

Restriction…………………………………………………………….……..53 The Social Space of the Public Sphere 55 Case Study: The Slum Mentality and the Building Mentality in Rajiv-Indira 58 Lefebvre’s Conceptions of Space: Slums in the Context of the World Class City61 Rooting the “Slum Mentality” in the Practices of the Slum 65 Case Study: Akash Darshan 69 Case Study: Nabi Nagar 73 Conclusion 76

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V | The Construction and the Production of Space in Rehabilitation Buildings…78 Case 1: The NGO as Benevolent Developer 81 Case 2: Imposed Conceptions of Space, Fading Community Dynamics 89 Case 3: Community Dynamics as a Negotiation of Space 93 Case 4: Participatory Redevelopment 98 Takeaways 105

VI |

Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…..108 Implications 111 Suggestions for Further Research 113

Bibliography 117 Appendix 1: Resident Interview Outline 124

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Prologue

Every morning, Nanda steps out of her decorated front door with her

mother-in-law, and heads to the market across the road. Halfway across the city,

Gita kisses her son and daughter, in uniform, as they run off to catch a rickshaw

together to the elementary and high school, respectively. Gita then steps down

the lane and turns onto a crowded road just a few meters wide, to pick up rice

and some lentils from the marketplace.

Nanda, mother-in-law leaning on her shoulder, gets home and prepares to

make two cups of chai. The elderly woman steps back out of the modest room

through the door framed in green marble and, supporting herself on the yellow

tiles of the front façade, she sits down on a tarpaulin set on the floor, soon to

be joined by her bahu carrying two cups of cardamom tea. Gita, back from the

market, has also set herself up outside with a black basin full of soapy water,

and a pile of laundry to scrub. She squats on the concrete ground, letting water

spill into the small channel that runs along the center of the lane. Behind, her

home sits proud, its blue façade inlaid with a tile depicting Ambedkar, the dalit

activist and co-author of India’s constitution, and another with a serene-looking

Buddha draped in yellow, sitting in a lotus flower. A small overhang protects the

front door from monsoon drizzle, but on this day it is sunny; an old Hindi tune

drifting out of a house a little further down the lane sets the rhythm for the

slum lane, where Gita’s neighbors have also settled to clean dishes and exchange

v

‘good mornings’. Most of the men have gone to work, and the children to school

for the day, some to university.

Across the city, Nanda and her mother-in-law have settled on a tarp at the

foot of the yellow-tiled wall that fronts her home. The marble entablature is

inlaid with a single image, of a smiling orange Ganesh, Mumbai’s patron elephant

God. The two women take a handful of straw from the nearby stack and expertly

begin to weave it into a brush shape. The aisle has slowly filled up as their

neighbors come out to do the same, earning rupees to complement the

household income. Dramatic music from a television washes out of a home

several doors down, and a gaggle of children, too young for school, add to this

noise with their screams as they chase each other between their mothers. A few

yards away, a young woman prepares to open her small stall for business,

selling paan, cigarettes, and packets of laundry detergent off of a narrow shelf

attached to the wall.

The aisle is lit by electric light, and to get to the street, children, men and

women have to amble down four flights of stairs or wait for a slow but resilient

elevator to greet them. Nanda lives on the fourth floor the Nabi Nagar Housing

Co-operative building, off of 60 Feet Road in Dharavi, with the community of

neighbors that has called this area home for decades before the building was

constructed in 2005. Their neighborhood looked much like the Sathe Nagar slum

in which Gita, above, has made a home for her family; moving into the building,

many successfully held on to the social and professional patterns that had

guided their lives in the slum. “Yeh aachaa hai,” Nanda says, “it’s better here.”

Her neighbors don’t all agree. Pointing to the cluttered hallway space, Shivraj,

down the hall, seems irritated. “They’ve turned it into a slum,” he tells me.

1

I | Introduction

This thesis is about what spaces mean to the people who inhabit them. It

explores the way in which the practices, interactions and expectations of

everyday life are mediated by the meanings infused in the built environment in

which they take place. “Buildings stabilize social life,” says sociologist Thomas

Gieryn; indeed spaces not only contain the activities that take place within them

but structure perceptions about these activities and about the people who

engage in them (Gieryn 2002: 35). For half of the population of Mumbai, India

(formerly Bombay), these residential spaces – home – are slums. (Bhavika 2010).

Globally, the human population recently crossed a threshold of massive

significance to the way in which we interact and produce. There are, for the first

time today, more people living in cities than in rural areas around the world

(Davis, 2006: 6). As global markets continue to value industrial goods of

increasing complexity and in increasing quantity, the shift from rural to urban

areas, from agriculture to industry, has gained speed. The resultant urbanization

puts an increasing strain on housing markets which are demonstrably unable to

cope, particularly in the cities of the developing world where the gap between

property prices and the assets of rural migrants is enormous. Worldwide, it is

estimated that over a billion people live in slums, neighborhoods that exist

outside of the rational and planned city, in a horizontally-built typology

characterized by its extreme density, the ramshackle quality of its physical

2

structures, and its lack of municipal infrastructure including running water and

sanitation. The physical difficulties of living in a slum – frequent disease, the

labor required to access basic services, and a legally insecure sense of place

within the city – characterize the life of the poor in the cities of the Global South.

The World Health Organization (WHO) anticipates urban populations to double by

2050 (World Health Organization, 2014); “no one,” says urban theorist Mike

Davis, “knows whether such gigantic concentrations of poverty are biologically

or ecologically sustainable” (Davis, 2006: 5).

Improving the physical conditions of the urban poor has become a central

concern of the world development apparatus; the United Nations’ Millennium

Development Goals include achieving “significant improvement in the lives of at

least 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2020” (United Nations, 2013). Yet

‘improving the lives’ of a population requires a subtle understanding of social,

professional and physical networks of support that define their place in the city:

far from existing in a void, slumdwellers contribute vibrantly both to the informal

economies and to the sociocultural production of the cities in which they live.

What does it mean, then, to improve residential conditions for slumdwellers, and

in what manner can these best contribute both to bettering their quality of life

and to creating conditions that allow their full social integration into the fabric of

the city?

CONCEPTUAL AND CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK: SLUMS IN MUMBAI, SLUMS IN THEORY

3

Mumbai serves as an interesting case study of slum improvement because of

both the ubiquity and the integration of slum colonies within the city’s urban

fabric, and because of the particular nature of its current approach to slum

rehabilitation. Originally seven islands in a natural harbor and home to the Koli

fishing community, Mumbai was consolidated into a single peninsular city under

British rule in the 18th and 19th century and has grown exponentially since,

becoming an economic and cultural hub for the world’s second most populous

country. Today, Mumbai is the most populous city in India and one of the most

populous globally, yet the limited land area of the central city – bordered on

three sides by the harbor and Arabian Sea – and strict regulations on zoning and

development have combined to make the price of real estate in the city among

the highest in the world (Whitehead and More, 2007: 2429).

In 1961 slums housed only 10% of Mumbai’s population (Singh and Das,

1995: 2477). Heavily unionized large-scale industries, and in particular textile

mills, employed most of Mumbai’s migrant workforce and housed them in chawls,

4-5 story tenement buildings distinguished by their open galleries, shared

latrines and diverse, tight-knit communities (Karandikar, 2010: 3). Yet a number

of factors accelerated the decline of manufacturing in Mumbai throughout the

1980s, including technological advancements, increased competition from

overseas, and decreasing government support as India embarked on a process of

liberalization that culminated in a series of financial reforms in 1991. Freezes on

workers’ rents in the 1940s had kept the return on this vast housing base

artificially low. Facing worker strikes, and presented with the opportunity of

increasing land prices, many industrialists slowly began to lay off workers and to

focus on real estate, converting their estates into upscale commercial and

4

residential complexes. In 1980, 42% of employment in Mumbai was in

manufacturing. This proportion had declined to just over 20% by the mid-1990s

(Whitehead and More, 2007: 2428-30).

It is in this context that Mumbai has seen the proportion of its population

living in slums jump to 62% by 2010. As the city grew north from the tip of its

peninsula over the course of the 20th century, small pockets of migrants from

Maharashtra and around India began to settle on reclaimed land from the city’s

watershed or unused manufacturing and municipal spaces, as well as at an ever-

shifting outskirts, constructing their homes out of available materials and

strengthening, expanding and improving them over time. Dharavi, one of the

city’s largest slums, first began to see its population grow at a time when this

patch of land was a peripheral swamp, it sits today at the center of the city and

on some of its most valuable real estate, just a river away from a commercial

complex housing many of Mumbai’s banks, consulates and multinational branches.

Dharavi’s size and activity make it an exception, but slums exist throughout the

urban fabric of Mumbai, as pockets of informality adjacent even to the most

prosperous of the city’s neighborhoods.

In his landmark 1962 essay A Theory of Slums, Charles Stokes identifies

‘slums of hope’ and ‘slums of despair,’ a dichotomy that characterizes the basic

split in theoretical understandings of slums to this day. Stokes defines the

“intuitive” distinction between the two types, slums of hope being those the

inhabitant of whom “indicates both his intention to ‘better’ himself and his

estimate of the probable outcome of such an effort,” and slums of despair those

with no such intention (Stokes, 1962: 189). That whole slums could be

characterized in this way by an outsider is dubious at best; in the case of

5

Mumbai it is, at any rate, more useful to understand “hope” and “despair” not as

a quality of these spaces but as a manner of viewing them. In the latter camp

falls the view that “sees the settlements and their inhabitants as essentially

problem-creating,” as termed by urbanists Lisa Peattie and Jose Aldrete-Hass

(Peattie and Aldrete-Haas, 1981: 158).

Jacob Riis’ 1912 photographic essay of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, a

“dramatic and forceful indictment of slum conditions,” was among the first

efforts to draw attention to the difficult living conditions of much of the city,

and a call to action for the eradication of slums as the root of the negative traits

(in the popular imagination) of those inhabiting them (Riis, 1890: vii). Over half a

century later, Morris Juppenlatz borrowed Richard Morse’s 1965 definition of the

city as a “citadel of high culture” in his 1970 book on urban squatter

settlements. Slums, he explained, were evidence of “urban sickness” and

“disrespect for property rights,” and were characterized by “human depravity,

deprivation, illiteracy, epidemics and sickness.” In this way they presented a

threat to the city, the “concentration and interchange of intellect” from within

which “knowledge, wealth and experiment over the centuries have provided

mankind with scientific and technological advances” (Juppenlatz, 1970: 3, 169).

This perception of the place of slums within cities remains a key part of

contemporary development debates. The 2003 U.N. Habitat report, which

introduces the concept of slums as having both negative and positive sides,

states: “slums have the most intolerable of urban housing conditions” (UN-

Habitat, 2003: vi).

Infrastructural characteristics

6

Yet understanding what defines slums in Mumbai requires a certain

normalization of the concept; the typology is, first and foremost, a physical form

of housing in which the majority of Mumbaikars reside. What unifies this form is

its existence outside of the formal housing sector: slum neighborhoods arise

outside of the state-rationalized planning. The dominant criteria for identifying

slums, therefore, are its physical and infrastructural characteristics. Slum

developments are rarely more than two stories tall. They are made up of a

multitude of individual constructions rather than of larger buildings regrouping

multiple apartments. Their walls and roofs and are often made of makeshift

materials including recycled wood panels and beams, plastic sheeting and

tarpaulins, and corrugated steel, though many are rebuilt over time out of brick

and concrete: these more solid constructions are termed pukka, and those out

of temporary materials, kutcha. Slum neighborhoods are rarely organized on a

planned grid layout, and lack transportation infrastructure; they rarely include

access ways sufficiently large to make them penetrable by any mode of

transportation other than on foot. Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority, the

body in charge of creating new housing solutions for slumdwellers, emphasizes

the aesthetic characteristic of slums by contrasting images of these

neighborhoods to the tall, planned apartment buildings being constructed in

their place (Slum Rehabilitation Authority). This aesthetic has come to stand in

for urban poverty, and in the world’s popular imagination, it projects onto slums

the conditions imagined thereof – as written in Foreign Policy magazine, “there is

something viscerally repulsive” about seeing life in a slum (Charles, 2012: 29).

Legality and siting

7

The makeshift or organic nature of slum development arises in part due to

their legal stature as encroaching on private or state-owned land. Defining slums

as illegal constructions is inadequate, however, as an important part of

legislation designed to improve living conditions for the poor has included

legalizing tenancy of slum land that a resident can prove to have occupied prior

to a certain cut-off date. Evictions and demolitions to reclaim land for its

commercial development, and to create an image of Mumbai as the “World Class

City” – a term more fully developed in chapter 4 – have made insecurity of

tenure one of the important difficulties of slum life. The term “slum” denotes a

variety of living conditions, and some residents – including pavement dwellers,

who are either homeless or who have built their homes precariously along public

thoroughfares in spaces too narrow to accommodate formal construction, and

people residing in spaces considered ‘at risk’ due to their proximity to

transportation, water and gas pipes, or other infrastructure – are not eligible for

ownership of the land on which they live. In response to popular pressure, the

1995 Slum Rehabilitation Act granted ‘photo passes’ (tenancy cards) to

slumdwellers who have resided on a site since January 1st, 1995 (Mukhija, 2001:

800). For those slumdwellers who occupy space that is not deemed at risk, and

not slated for development by its owner, tenancy may be obtainable.

Subsequent policy shifts continue to update the 1995 cutoff date.

Health

Perhaps more important to the definition of slums as difficult and undesirable

areas are the immediate health risks that arise from living in dense areas with

little municipal infrastructure. As a result of slums’ unplanned and/or illegal

8

status, most lack running water into the home and rely on shared taps, and

sewerage is either very basic or nonexistent. Municipal garbage collection is

sparse, though some slums feature thriving recycling industry. Many buildings

are built close to the ground, and floors may not be isolated from the dirt. When

Mumbai’s summer monsoons cause many areas of the city to flood, these

conditions result in high disease rates. Beyond the empirical difficulty of disease,

the perception thereof is a strong definer of slums in the public imagination.

Scholar Ayona Datta cites the “notions of impurity that are historically

associated with the bodies of lower castes […] usually overlapped with the ‘filth’

associated with bodies of squatters in urban India” (Datta, 2012: 116-117). The

public Slum Rehabilitation Authority also frames its discourse in terms of

cleanliness, explaining that slum rehabilitation “will bring about a marked

improvement in their hygiene and health as well as raise the level of public

hygiene which has fallen to very low ebb” (Slum Rehabilitation Authority).

Economic costs

The economic interests of a growing capitalist class offer another

perspective on slums as bottlenecks in the realization of Mumbai real estate’s

full economic potential. “There can be no doubt,” geographer Jan Nijman states,

describing the city’s municipal politics, “about the powerful emergence of a

neoliberal ideology that avows the free market and self-reliance of the individual”

(Nijman, 2008: 78). The enormous value of the city’s real estate has been

discussed above, and in this context Whitehead and More suggest, in a 2007

paper, that the political economy of Mumbai be examined in terms of rent gaps,

9

or the difference between an investment’s current and potential returns.

Slumdwellers by no means live cheaply; the purchase value of shanties is

commensurate to the quality of its location in the central city, and residents

sometimes pay extortionist rents to slum lords. Still, this horizontal urban

typology stands out amidst increasingly tall buildings, and whatever returns this

housing does generate exist in the city’s extensive informal economy. Thus do

the authors state that “the state government has become more revanchist in its

approach to slums and the poor in Mumbai,” adding:

“The state government has changed to become an organization attracting

off-shore and domestic investment to the island city, while service provision

becomes secondary. It has been reshaped to enable, facilitate and promote

international flows of financial, real estate and productive capital, and the

logic of its policies can be read off almost directly through calculations of

rent gaps emerging at various spots in the city.” (Whitehead and More,

2007: 2433)

In the formal economy of the growing city, slums contribute little to make up

for what they cost in real estate. A Slum Rehabilitation Scheme, then, exists at

least as much to liberate land for new development as to contribute to an

improvement in the quality of life of the city’s poorest.

Mumbai’sSlumRehabilitationScheme

On the basis of the various understandings of slums defined above – as

spaces that are inhibiting both to their residents’ well-being and to the state’s

obligation to promote the rationalization and economic development of the city

– comes Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Scheme, or SRS. This piece of legislation,

10

established in the 1995 by the then-Shiv Sena-BJP dominated Maharashtra

Legislative Assembly to make good on a campaign promise to provide free

houses to the city’s slumdwellers and thereby rid the city of slums, aims to

incentivize market agents (building developers) to take on the costs of

constructing new housing for slumdwellers.

The SRS capitalizes on Mumbai’s high real-estate prices as well as on the

city’s stringent legislation on property development, using both of these to

incentivize developers to take on slum rehabilitation projects. Under the scheme,

slumdwellers who can document that they have occupied a certain site since

January 1st, 1995 (the date has since been moved to 2000) are granted

tenancy rights over their land, on the condition that they organize as a collective

and enter into discussion with a developer about rehabilitating their space.

Developers are granted higher FAR (Floor-Area Ratio) than that for which the

site would be eligible under existing zoning codes: that is to say, they may

develop the site more intensely, building with greater density or to a greater

height. In cases where the site does not present the opportunity for higher-

density development, developers are granted TDR (Transferable Development

Rights), or the ability to develop a site elsewhere in the city to greater density

than otherwise (Nijman, 2008: 77). Using these rights, developers are able to

construct units for sale on the residential real estate market, constituting a “for-

profit” component of projects that covers the cost of construction and allows

profit to be generated on the developer’s investment into the project.

Mumbai’s SRS constitutes a decentralization of what had previously been

recognized as the government’s duty to provide housing to the city’s poor, and

in the liberal environment of post-deregulation India it relies on market forces to

11

remain economically sustainable. These two qualities come out of a series of

failed schemes that preceded the SRS, and which proved either unpopular or

impossible to finance on an impactful scale. Slum clearance programs, in place in

Mumbai since the 1950s, involved the razing of informal housing with either no

compensation or combined with a program of housing construction on the city’s

outskirts, yet rapid immigration and the return of displaced slumdwellers to the

city center, where their livelihoods lay, quickly overwhelmed the schemes’

capacity to keep the city slum-free (Singh and Das, 1995: 2477-78). Policies in

the 1970s and 1980s suggested slum improvement rather than clearance,

including the provision of water and sewerage infrastructure, as well as roads.

The meager budget allocated to these prevented them from having any sizeable

impact on living conditions, while a 1985 World Bank-financed scheme to loan

money to residents so as to enable them to upgrade their own areas proved

unsustainable because of the high interest rates imposed on these loans (Peattie

and Aldrete-Haas, 1981: 160) (Nijman, 2008: 77).

The literature on Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Scheme investigates the topic

from the perspective of policy evaluation, situating its practices in the context

of alternative slum rehabilitation policies and of the liberalization of the Indian

economy since the late 1980s. Oftentimes evaluation is conducted numerically,

comparing the proportion of rehabilitation projects that have been completed to

the number that remain in Mumbai, or to the proportion of residents affected by

previous schemes. A quick survey of mainstream news articles shows a clear

focus on the legislative details of certain rehabilitation projects, while a 2010

Brown University Development Studies thesis on the subject explicitly

investigates developer incentives to understand why more projects have not

12

been undertaken (Ashar, 2011) (Shibu, 2013) (Schanback, 2010). Mukhija,

Singh and Das, and Whitehead and More’s widely-cited treatments of the

Scheme position it within the neoliberal tendencies of the new Indian state and

examine builder incentives vis-à-vis the status of Mumbai’s real-estate and

zoning conditions, as well as the level of state intervention requisite for a

‘market-enabling’ policy to succeed. The common point of this literature is its

reading of ‘success’ as determined by the number of residents rehoused; never

is it called into question whether slums, as such, have a place in the

contemporary city.

The role of NGOs

Two influential investigations of the SRS examine the place of NGOs in the

process. By navigating the space between builders or financers and the

slumdwellers’ cooperative, these organizations aim to bridge opposing incentives,

leveraging their powers of negotiation towards securing benefits for the

population to be rehabilitated. Jan Nijman’s 2008 study presents the case that

took on the role of developer itself, raising funds from slumdwellers to secure an

international loan and hiring a contractor, thereby enabling rehabilitation in a site

that may not otherwise have attracted a developer and eliminating the incentive

of profit from the project. The article concludes that through this violation of

“some of the main tenets of neoliberal policies” the rehabilitation was “a

remarkable success,” but that a purely market-based system as envisioned by

the SRS may not be capable of reproducing such results. A 2001 paper by

13

Bishwapriya Sanyal and Vinit Mukhija looks at another case of NGO-enabled

rehabilitation and recounts the conflict that can arise in such a case of

institutional pluralism. It concludes by listing the lessons learned from this

disagreement, and suggesting that clearer guidelines for the roles and limits to

the authority of each actor be determined at the start of future projects. The

limitation of both of these studies is that they fail to investigate in what ways

NGO-led projects have been a success at the level of residents’ satisfaction with

the outcome, in particular as contrasted to non-NGO-led alternatives. This is

noticeable in light of the fact that both articles’ major contribution to the

discussion of the SRS is their emphasis on resident participation, as enabled by

the presence of the NGO. “NGOs,” write Sanyal and Mukhija, “were to articulate

the needs and preferences of poor communities” (Sanyal and Mukhija, 2001:

2044). “‘Empowerment’ and ‘self-help, ’Nijman adds, are some of the main

tenets of “successful development strategies” that “demand the active

participation of local communities and will otherwise fail for lack of local

knowledge” (Nijman, 2008: 73-4).

TheValueofSlums

This emphasis on resident participation explains an alternative understanding

of slums, in which these spaces are viewed as having been created by their

residents to respond to their need for housing as well as to their particular

economic and cultural practices. In this sense, slums are equipped to respond to

certain needs of their residents precisely because they were built by their

beneficiaries. These are Charles Stokes’ ‘slums of hope,’ the critical hubs of a

14

city’s informal economies and cultural outputs. John F. C. Turner, the major

advocate of this conception of squatting, argued that the most appropriate

forms of housing were provided not by an external agency but by those who

would occupy them. His thesis underlines a present-day consensus on

importance of beneficiary participation in socioeconomic development projects,

which holds “the enormous potential to enfranchise perspectives from below, or

to offer the potential for inclusion, empowerment or leverage” (Mosse, 2005:

239).

Economic power

Slums are, first and foremost, a major driver of the informal economies of the

cities in which they are located. The 2003 U.N. Habitat report explains their role

as nodes in the linkages that allow the city to remain productive:

“they provide the low-cost and only affordable housing that will enable the immigrants to save for their eventual absorption into urban society… The majority of slum dwellers in developing country cities earn their living from informal sector activities located either within or outside slum areas, and many informal entrepreneurs operating from slums have clienteles extending to the rest of the city.” (UN-Habitat, 2003: iv)

Turner, who saw slums as spaces endowed with a “creative energy” that put

them in contrast with the “material diseconomies, social dysfunctions and

general counter-productivity of centrally administered housing systems,” noted

their economic importance (Peattie and Aldrete-Haas, 1981: 159) (Turner,

1976). In some cases, slums are structured and architecturalized to become

15

important industrial and commercial powerhouses; a decade-old rough estimate

places the turnover just in Dharavi, the most famous of these, at Rs.50 million

(about $0.85 million) per day (Sharma, 2000: 79) (Polak, 2008: 162). Dharavi is

home to a number of thriving industries, many of these local specialties of the

villages from which immigrants brought them into the city. These include

leatherwork, textiles and tailoring, food production, pottery, and the recycling of

plastics, metals, and other materials; many of these are grueling tasks carried

out in difficult conditions but they offer a livelihood to tens of thousands of

residents (SPARC and KRVIA, 2010: 14). The enterprise of Dharavi’s industrial

and commercial areas is so well-known that in recent years the new and much-

debated commerce of slum tourism has arisen, giving tourists and locals the

chance to see how this township-within-the-city runs. Dharavi is organized into

enclaves that combine certain profitable activities with apartments and

commerces, and its architecture evolves over time to reflect the origins of its

inhabitants and their changing spatial needs.

Adaptable space

While all slums do not incorporate the industrial energy of Dharavi – many of

them are principally residential spaces, whose breadwinners, frequently husbands,

are employed nearby – their architecture reflects residential needs, including

home-based profitable activities engaged in oftentimes by the neighborhoods’

women. Many slums feature structures that are two-stories tall, with an outdoor

staircase leading to the second floor: families build this additional space either to

generate income by renting it out as a separate apartment, or to house a

growing extended family when their children are married. It is on this basis that

16

Turner, whose work focused especially on Latin America, found these spaces

“more appropriately described as self-improving suburbs than as slums” (Turner,

1965). And houses are frequently arranged around either a courtyard or open

lane, which space becomes both a social meeting-ground during various points

of the day and the area in which residents earn income by taking on manual jobs:

this thesis explores the practices of sewing, of broom-making, and of packaging

food items as examples of home-based work.

Creative energy

Finally, slums are sites of cultural production. Anthropologist William Mangin,

another important figurehead in the literature that points to the value of slums

as sites of city-making, defines the roles of various stereotyped or nodal

individuals in the common imagination of residents of Peruvian barriadas in a

1970 article; here the grandmother, the orphan, the poor and humble all stand in

as characters in the vibrant depiction of community in the slum (Mangin, 1970).

In Mumbai, squatter settlements often include a common hall to be used for

weddings and religious celebrations, when the entire community – regardless of

caste of religion – together invades the common spaces of the slum. The U.N.

report alludes to this, describing slums as “places in which the vibrant mixing of

different cultures frequently results in new forms of artistic expression. Out of

unhealthy, crowded and often dangerous environments can emerge cultural

movements and levels of solidarity unknown in the suburbs of the rich” (UN-

Habitat, 2003: iv).

17

AnalyticalModel

In the dialectic of slums as areas of both adversity and opportunity, buildings

emerge to free residents from the constraints of poor infrastructure, but what

do they make of the economic, social and cultural networks that play out

spatially in informal settlements? As laid out above, the literature on slums,

much of it from an anthropological perspective, attempts a holistic

understanding of the ways in which residents generate and occupy their

neighborhoods. Yet evaluations of slum rehabilitation, conducted through the

lens of public policy, ignore the fundamental issue of residents’ satisfaction with

the physical spaces which they come to inhabit. This study aims to fill this gap,

by examining slum rehabilitation buildings from an ethnographic perspective to

determine how meaning and networks are re-projected by residents on these

spaces.

The topic is inherently comparative, and the terms “slum” and “building” (or

“rehabilitation project”) are used to denote two alternative conditions

experienced by the same or a similar population. Mumbai’s scheme provides for a

certain intervention to be carried out for all residents living in slums within the

city limits that are deemed eligible due to their age and location. While this

excludes certain segments of the city’s informal residents, it is sufficiently broad

to mean that the ideal type of the ‘slum’ can be compared to the ideal type of

the ‘building’ on the basis only of this intervention. Most residents of slum

rehabilitation buildings, excluding the very young and those who have recently

purchased or rented a space within the edifice, were residents of slums prior to

18

rehabilitation. And most residents of slums, provided the space on which they

live is sufficiently large and clear of major urban infrastructure, are eligible for

eventual rehabilitation; even if they have not occupied a settlement since the

now January 1st, 2000 deadline, that date is set to move forward as time goes

by, as it has in the past. As Mumbai’s population is now stabilizing, with a growth

rate less than 60% of what it was a decade ago, it is fair to conceptualize slum

rehabilitation as a system, including the pre-rehabilitation set of neighborhoods

and people, living in “slums,” and the post-rehabilitation equivalent as those

living in “buildings” (Cox, 2011). It is in this way that the terms are used

throughout this study.

Slum rehabilitation is, at its core, an architectural intervention. Mumbai’s SRS

prioritizes that settlements be rehabilitated on-site wherever possible, and

provides developers with Transferable Development Rights if the remaining

space or permitted density makes it impossible for for-profit units to be built on

the site of the intervention. Thus residents’ geographic relation to the city does

not change in this process, and neither does the make-up of the community

being rehabilitated (with the exception of those who chose to sell their flat). An

evaluation of rehabilitation buildings can thus be understood as an evaluation of

the process and of the product of this architectural intervention.

On a first level, this study is therefore a comparison of the meanings and

uses that residents project on slums and on rehabilitation buildings. Are slums,

as self-created and organic spaces, able to respond to their residents’ social,

economic and personal needs? And do slum rehabilitation buildings, this new

architectural typology, enable or impede the fulfilling of these needs? In other

words, how does the physical change in residents’ built environment affect their

19

everyday lives and experiences of space? If the intervention is merely

architectural, do residents attribute certain meanings to it beyond the physical?

These questions can be answered through narrative analysis of residents’

explanations of their daily activities and of the meanings that spaces hold for

them, both in slums and in buildings. Using a Lefebvrian understanding of space

as both a geographic fact and a social construct that carries with it traditions

and power-structures, these two architectural typologies can be examined in

terms of whether they empower or disempower residents, both through their

physical infrastructure and through the meanings that are projected onto them.

From the perspective of resident agency it could be expected that the more

participatory of these typologies, slums, would allow greater liberty to their

residents to engage in self-determined patterns of behavior. In fact, as this

study goes on to show, residents differ in their conceptions of slums and

buildings, and construct the alternate concepts of a “slum mentality” and of a

“building mentality” to encapsulate both the empowering and disempowering

qualities of both architectural typologies. In this light, whether residents of

either type of space are satisfied with their situation depends very much both

on their individual aspirations or conceptions of what slums and buildings mean,

and on the capacity of the space that they inhabit to allow them the freedom to

project their expectations and resultant behavior onto it. There is no absolute

hierarchy between slums and buildings in terms of freedom of behavior, only a

hierarchy between certain sites.

There is, however, an absolute improvement in the quality of life permitted

by the infrastructure of rehabilitation buildings. While the 2003 U.N. Habitat

report on slums acknowledges the economic and social creative potential of self-

20

enabled squatter settlements, it goes on to clarify that “these few positive

attributes do not in any way justify the continued existence of slums and should

not be an excuse for the slow progress towards the goal of adequate shelter for

all” (UN-Habitat, 2003: iv). Similarly, while this thesis investigates the value of

slums in terms of their meaning for residents and as a source of inspiration for

empowering rehabilitation projects, by no means does it ignore or grant worth to

the extraordinary difficult conditions that the lack of infrastructure in slums

engenders. While rehabilitation projects may have lessons to learn from the

slums, their value is not called into question.

As a result this study is, on a second level, an evaluation of processes of

slum rehabilitation. These processes include the creation of physical space and

the production of dominant conceptions of space and of behavioral rules that

either do or do not allow residents to project their own conceptions and

expectations onto the building. Theorizing this from the framework of

participatory development, one would expect that the higher the level of

resident participation both in the design of rehabilitation buildings and in the

implementation of behavioral expectations within these, the higher the level of

resident satisfaction with the building. And indeed, the findings of this study

corroborate this hypothesis, demonstrating that residents are more likely to

identify ‘dominant’ conceptions of space that are in line with their own, rather

than subjugating their own, when they have been active in helping to shape

these. We conclude, then, that slum rehabilitation buildings only truly satisfy the

needs of their beneficiaries when constructed in a participatory way and when

inclusive structures are put in place for community governance and conflict-

resolution.

21

This study is based on research conducted in Mumbai in June and July 2013.

The research combined ethnographic and architectural observation with semi-

formal interviews in six sites across the city, including two slums eligible for

rehabilitation and four buildings rehabilitated within the previous decade (two of

them with the involvement of an NGO). Site descriptions below are based on

observations and on photos taken by the author. Sites were selected based on

their rehabilitation status, and buildings based on the process via which they

were constructed. In each site, four interviews were conducted with randomly

selected residents. The interviews were semi-structured, following the basic

pattern of questions listed in in Appendix A but allowing residents to move into

more thorough discussions of space, behavior and expectations along whatever

lines interested them. All interviews were conducted with the translation help of

a graduate student in Development Studies at the Tata Institute of Social

Sciences; only her transcriptions of residents’ answers were recorded, and the

quotations in English throughout this study are of her translations.

Limitations

The research in this thesis takes a definition of “slums” and of “buildings”

that, while broad, is explicitly exclusive of certain segments of Mumbai’s

squatter population, whose neighborhoods are not eligible for on-site

redevelopment. These include pavement dwellers and residents of slums built

across certain pieces of infrastructure, such as around gas or water pipes or

near railway tracks. Moreover, the perspective on slums of most interviewees

(including those in buildings) do not capture the misery evoked in other studies,

22

such as sociologist Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. As a result,

the conclusions that this study draws on the social space of Mumbai’s slums may

not reflect all realities. This is more descriptive than instrumental, however, as

the specifics of what constitutes the “slum mentality” and the “building

mentality” are less important than the indisputable fact that there exist different

manners of conceptualizing space. Thus, while this study’s depiction of slums

may not be universal even within Mumbai, the broader conclusions on

participatory redevelopment stand.

It is also important to acknowledge that while this thesis recognizes

antagonistic incentives among actors in slum rehabilitation, it is limited in its

approach to institutional conflict. Sanyal and Mukhija explain that “the issue of

institutional conflict has very rarely received any serious attention, partly

because conflict is usually considered an aberration which emerges only under

the unique condition of personal hostility between noncooperating individuals.”

In this thesis, issues of corruption are considered as rent-seeking at the

individual level, and dismissed as a case-specific fluke; the call for participatory

redevelopment ignores the oftentimes difficult reality of navigating between the

interests of all actors involved. With that said, participatory processes can and

should remain the goal of all development institutions involved in housing

provision.

OutlineofthePresentWork

Chapter Two provides an overview of the six sites used as case studies in

this thesis. Salient features of the three categories of sites compared (slums,

23

NGO-led redevelopments, and private redevelopment projects) are described,

and each site is situated on a map of Mumbai. Each is then described in terms of

its physical characteristics, and buildings are designated as an ‘ideal type’ of the

different processes through which they are constructed and conceived by

residents. This chapter is purely descriptive and serves as a reference point,

anchoring the features of each case to the site’s name so that subsequent

mention thereof throughout the thesis evoke certain details.

Chapter Three serves as a counterargument to the idea that slums and

rehabilitation buildings can be compared on equal footing in terms of their value

to residents. It establishes a comparison between the two typologies that takes

place in the private or intimate sphere, inside of the home, and ascertains the

ways in which the physical infrastructure of the building serves as a significant

source of empowerment for residents, and in particular for women. In doing so,

this chapter sets up the more nuanced subsequent discussion of agency and

meaning in the public areas of slums and of buildings, and allows for an

unapologetic discussion of the values of both.

It is in Chapter Four that the challenges of slum rehabilitation buildings are

discussed. The chapter presents a discussion, rooted in the sociology of space

and in Lefebvre’s concept of social space, of the varying and opposing

conceptions held by different residents of their place in the city, as mediated by

building and slum. Two concepts, the “slum mentality” and the “building

mentality,” as posited as describing both the positive and negative

characteristics that are universally ascribed to life in each of the two typologies.

The chapter concludes with two case studies that illustrate the ways in which

24

these mentalities result in conflict over behavioral expectations and over

community governance in slum rehabilitation buildings.

Finally, Chapter Five examines the actual process of slum rehabilitation in the

four building case studies, to understand how different processes of

construction of space (the design of the building) and of production of space

(the institutions of community governance and conflict-resolution within the

building) can create buildings that fulfill the needs and expectations of their main

constituents – residents. The chapter looks at the role of three actors across

each case study (the builder or NGO, the residents’ cooperative leader, and the

residents themselves) to understand how they contribute to creating spaces

that either mediate different expectations or escalate the conflict that results.

Only processes that involve heavy resident participation allow for either

harmonious expectations or for the mediation of existing conflict, the chapter

argues. It is this that determines whether or not residents are satisfied with slum

rehabilitation.

Findings are reiterated in the Conclusion, and followed by a brief discussion

of the implications of these as well as of avenues for further research.