mumbai slums 2010

A STUDY OF SPACE IN MUMBAI’S SLUMStesg_576 1..14

JAN NIJMAN

Department of Geography & Regional Studies, Urban Studies Program, University of Miami, USA.E-mail: [email protected]

Received: March 2009; revised June 2009

ABSTRACTThe urban slum in the less developed world has an overwhelming significance of place for itsdwellers: it determines who they are, what they do, where they go, and whom they know. Unlikemost Western cities where the different realms of life (residential, work, religious, public, etc.) arespatially segregated, here they are all functionally and spatially integrated. A close examination ofslum spaces in Dharavi, Mumbai, reveals such overlapping spatial patterns and raises somefundamental questions. Is there a proper definition of the slum? How should we conceive of theslum community and its spatial features? How useful or problematic are Western concepts ofresidential segregation, ghettos and enclaves? It is argued that the historical persistence of urbanslums points to their indispensability, with the tacit (if inconsistent) approval of the state. Slumsnot only provide shelter to a large urban labour force but also a milieu that is conducive to intensesocial organisation and economic production.

Key words: Slum, space, urban, India, Mumbai, Dharavi

URBAN SLUMS AND THE CONGRUENCEOF ECONOMIC AND SOCIALGEOGRAPHY

A close examination of the nature of spacein urban slums reveals the congruence of econ-omic and social geography. Generally speak-ing, the urban slum has an overwhelming sig-nificance of place for its dwellers: it determineswho they are, what they do, where they go,and whom they know. Unlike most West-ern cities where the different realms of life(residential, work, religious, public, etc.) arespatially segregated, here they all seem func-tionally and spatially integrated. To be sure,this is the case in Dharavi, a large contiguousslum area in the centre of Mumbai, India.

It is the geographical perspective, therefore,that has particular potential in understandinghow slums work, whence they come, and whythey persist. And, I will argue, it is this spatialperspective that can guide us to a better theo-retical understanding of urbanity in the global

‘South’. Western concepts of the modern cityand of modern urban spaces have been difficultto reconcile with empirical observations of theSouth Asian city, in particular. As Rao (2006,p. 225) puts it: ‘As a social and cultural form,the modern South Asian city has been a site oftheoretical anxiety and ambiguity’.

Nonetheless, geographical studies of urbanslums are quite sparse.1 In 1985, Gilbert andWard (1985) lamented that ‘no writer hastraced the geography of low-income settle-ments in any third world city over the wholepostwar period’. And in a review essay earlierthis year, Grant (2009, p. 218) noted that theAnnals of the AAG ‘published only two articlescontaining the words slums, squatters, or infor-mal settlements in their title since 1976’.

One of the reasons for this scarcity lies inthe unfortunate balkanisation of the discipline.Our understanding of slums is hampered bythe separations between economic geographyand cultural geography on the one hand, andbetween urban geography and development

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2009, Vol. ••, No. ••, pp. ••–••.© 2009 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAGPublished by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

geography on the other. ‘Hampered’ may bean understatement since the separation of sub-disciplines has basically inhibited geographersfrom studying slums altogether: urban geogra-phers ‘don’t do’ slums because they pertain toquestions of development while developmentgeographers ‘don’t do’ slums because theyhave traditionally maintained a rural focus.2

There is no question that the topic of slumshas recently come to the forefront in the newsmedia, popular books and academic writings(e.g. Davis 2004, 2006; Mitlin & Satterthwaite2004; Neuwirth 2004). The path-breaking UNHabitat report of 2003 was one of numerouspublications in the past few years that alert us tothe gravity of the challenge. With rapid andcontinued urbanisation in the less-developedworld and in the absence, thus far, of effectivepolicies, it is likely that precarious living condi-tions in cities will become the main challengeto human development in future decades.

Slums represent a spatiality that is often atonce cultural and economic. Certainly, this isso in a number of areas in Mumbai, India, andDharavi is a particularly striking example.Mumbai is a city with many different faces thatis, in fact, hard to know, not least because ofthe enormous diversity of its populations andthe extremely wide gap between rich and poor(Grant & Nijman 2004), It is useful, therefore,to start with a brief overview of the historicalgeography of Mumbai’s slums.

MUMBAI’S SLUMS AND THE BIRTHOF DHARAVI

Greater Mumbai comprises the peninsulabound by the Arabian Sea to the West, ThaneCreek to the East, and Vasai Creek and UlhasRiver to the north. It is connected to the main-land in the north and northwest. The area’sdimensions are about fifty kilometres fromNorth to South and an average of ten kilo-metres from West to East. The current popu-lation is around twelve million people andthe average population density is 24,000people per square kilometre. The city grewspectacularly in the decades following Inde-pendence and its geography became increas-ingly dense. Recent decades witnessed a shiftof population from the South to the Northernsuburbs.

The geographical constraints of the IslandCity put a premium on space and have histori-cally influenced land values and land use inthe city. There has been a steep gradientin land values from the South to the North.In the mid-1990s, the unprecedented influxof foreign corporations contributed to anextreme escalation of land values, makingMumbai for some time the most expensive cityin the world (Nijman 2000).

The city’s housing problems have been onrecord for over 150 years, ever since it turnedinto an urban centre of significance. At themiddle of the nineteenth century, after acouple of decades of rapid growth, the city’spopulation reached half a million. The urbanarea then was, of course, much smaller than itis now and covered only the southern extensionof the peninsula. Most parts of Mumbai had apopulation density thirteen times higher thanLondon at the time. The city’s waxing popula-tion led to an acute shortage of housing andserious problems with the provision of water,sanitation and drainage.

There was a big difference between Euro-pean and ‘native’ residential quarters with theslums heavily concentrated in the latter. TheNative Town grew virtually unplanned andwithout any consideration of the quality oflife of its inhabitants. Despite the fact thatthe housing problems in the Indian quarterwere common knowledge, no substantialmeasures were taken by colonial govern-ments and ‘nothing of consequence was everachieved’ (Dossal 1991, pp. 196–197), The1872 Census reported that: ‘The houses ofBombay [Mumbai] are far too few in numberto afford proper accommodation for its inhab-itants’ (Sundaram 1989, p. 56) and this becamea mantra to be repeated in every Census tofollow to this day.3

Until about 1900, Mumbai did not extendbeyond Mahim Creek and was confined to whatis known as the ‘Island City’ (the southern partof the peninsula), Dharavi was then referred toas one of the Koliwadas, an area belonging tothe tribal Koli fishermen who are Mumbai’soriginal inhabitants. In 1864 the estimatedpopulation in the area was 992 (Dossal 1991,p. 197).

Around the turn of the twentieth cen-tury, unsanitary conditions plagued the city,

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© 2009 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG

Figure 1. Overview of Greater Mumbai.

A STUDY OF SPACE IN MUMBAI’S SLUMS 3


Source : Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection of the University of Texas at Austin.

Figure 2. The geographic extent of Bombay in the early twentieth century.

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especially the so-called Native Town, the segre-gated section where Indians lived in very highpopulation densities. It was from there, fromMandvi to be precise, in 1869, that the bubonicplague spread outwards to the rest of the cityand then across most of the subcontinent. Theepidemic killed nearly 200,000 in Mumbai andeight million in all of India. It was decided thatthe gradual expansion of polluting industriesin Native Town had to be halted and movedto a distant tannery town in the north (Dossal1991, p. 202). That town was Dharavi.

Dharavi was born as a result of expulsion ofnoxious activities from the city to the periphery.The first tannery arrived in 1887 and by theend of 1890 a number of Muslim tanners fromTamil had settled in the area as well. Whilethere was considerable resistance by manyfirms (including foreign multinationals who forsome time continued to operate in the south)eventually the result was a concentration ofthese polluting activities in what was then theurban fringe.

Other early settlers included the Kumbars,a large Gujarati community of potters (anotherheavily polluting industry), who were given a99-year land-lease fromthecolonialgovernmentin 1895. In the following years they gradually leftsouth Mumbai to settle in the southwest cornerof Dharavi, where they are still today. From thebeginning, then, Dharavi was a place that com-bined livingandworking.Thefirstmosque,BadiMasjid, dates from 1887 and the oldest Hindutemple, Ganesh Mandir, was built in 1913.

At Independence, on the eve of rapidincreases in urbanisation across India, most ofDharavi was built up but it also still countedvarious empty spaces and it was a favouritedumping ground for companies operatingacross the city. As rural-urban migration esca-lated and as Dharavi continued to be a majordestination for overflow migration from theIsland City, the area very quickly becameextremely dense during the 1950s and after.

By the 1970s, as Dharavi had become increas-ingly central to the growing metropolis, moreand more industries considered unfit for acentral urban location were driven further outof the city. The abattoir (in Bandra) was foldedin 1980 and the large tanneries were ordered toleave the area – today, only the smaller ones areleft. In recent years, the manufacturing of

finished leather products took over from firststage processing. Some of the areas vacated bythe big tanneries became the sites of (residen-tial) redevelopment projects, mostly along thesouth-eastern edge of Dharavi.

Despite a range of successive policies (sinceIndependence) to ‘fight’ the slums, they havesteadily grown and now house at least half ofthe total population of Greater Mumbai (Das2003, p. 210). Slums are scattered across thecity and have very high densities – yet theyoccupy only about 12 per cent of the land. Themost recent Slum Redevelopment Schemedates from 1995 and is closely related to theliberalisation of the urban land market andrapidly increasing real estate values. But whileprivate developers have brought large numbersof new expensive homes on the market that areout of reach of most Mumbaikars, slum rede-velopment has stalled (Nijman 2006, 2008).

Due to the city’s expansion to the north andnortheast, Dharavi now finds itself right in thecentre of Greater Mumbai, strategically locatedwith connections to all three of the city’s com-muter rail corridors (Western, Central andHarbour lines). It has fast connections tothe main business districts in the south; it isadjacent to the new Bandra-Kurla commer-cial complex (across Mahim Creek); it is veryclose to the new industrial/back-office centrearound Andhere-East, and it is two miles fromthe airport.

INSIDE DHARAVI

Dharavi occupies about 432 acres and has anastounding population density of more than1,200/acre. The area is clearly bounded by therailroads to the southwest and southeast and byMahim Creek to the north. There is some rede-velopment (high rise) along the edges, espe-cially in the south, but most of it is untouchedby direct government intervention, especiallythe inner parts of the slum.

Dharavi houses an estimated 67 slum com-munities, though much of this depends ondefinitions (Graber et al. 2005). About one-third were (descendents of) immigrants fromTamil Nadu (mostly Muslims from Tirunelvellidistrict), another third were Maharashtrians,and the rest came (originally) from Gujarat,Karnataka, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. The



Source : Nijman (2008).

Figure 3. Mumbai’s slums.

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survey also counted 27 temples, 11 mosques,6 churches and 1,044 manufacturing units(Sharma 2000, p. 80). As far as populationand manufacturing is concerned, estimatesvary notably. A recent count arrived at 550,000people and 1,230 manufacturing units (MMConsultants 2006). It is estimated that about 70per cent of Dharavi’s residents work there(Graber et al. 2005, p. 16).

The overwhelming majority of Dharavi resi-dents are Dalits (formerly known as Untouch-ables) who combine material poverty withsocial stigma as soon as they move outside oftheir circles. They reside in tight communityclusters within the slum generally based onregional origin and professional status – livinganywhere else is virtually unthinkable. Theresult is a social and cultural residential mosaicin which people are very much identified interms of where they belong. Venturing out-side of that designated territory can be accom-panied with apprehension, stress and feelingsof insecurity (Pendse 1995).

The internal spatial patterns of Dharavi aremainly a function of immigration dynamics(cultural origins), industrial/commercial clus-

tering and external access. The main arteriescut through the area and provide access tobuses, trucks and lots of other traffic. These arethe arteries that keep Dharavi connected withthe rest of the city. These streets are quite wide(60 ft and 90 ft, supposedly, but not really) andthey are lined with retailing, food stands,kiosks, taxis, small restaurants, some hotels,etc. Lots of people are moving through thesestreets and many are actually not from Dharavi.Indeed, a visitor might not realise he is actuallyinside a slum area.

Off the main streets, all that changes, espe-cially if one enters into the core areas that are(part) residential: the streets are narrower anddo not allow heavy traffic. There is shade, lessexhaust fumes, usually less dirt, less noise, andthe environs are much more intimate. It is likestepping inside, and in many ways it a relieffrom the urban overdrive that characterised themain roads. But social control is immediatelyapparent, behaviours are routinised and codi-fied, and outsiders are immediately noticed.Moving into the core of Dharavi, it gets harderto distinguish exterior from interior, publicfrom private, and accessible from inaccessible.

Getting off the main arteries one may also beentering a part of the slum that is more exclu-sively industrial, especially if it is highly pollut-ing industry. These areas are almost all pushedto the edges of Dharavi and to enter themfrom the main arteries one would be movingaway from the core. For example, the southwestcorner of Dharavi has a major cluster of plasticrecycling factories, with some estimates of wellover 500 units. Other major clusters includesmall tanneries further to the north and thepotteries in the southeast corner of Dharavi.The main streets are wide enough to allow fortrucks bringing and getting materials, but oftenthey are not paved. These areas are intimate inthe sense that nobody is passing through unlessthey have business there. These areas are alsoextremely dirty, reeking, and one has to becareful where to step and to avoid collisionswith vehicles and human carriers.

Most of Dharavi combines a whole rangeof functions of living, retailing, wholesaling,manufacturing, consumer services, producerservices, public functions like schools, housesof worship, civic organisations and so on.Economic activities are often inseparable from

Source : photograph by Zach Woodward.

Figure 4. Dharavi: a view from above.



ethnic identities and from the highly localisedcultural milieux of the slum. The tannersare Tamils and often Muslims, the embroi-dery workers hail from UP, the potters fromGujarat.4 The smaller firms in a particularindustry are often subcontractors to the biggerfirms in that industry so there is a powerfuloverlap of ethnic ties, kinship ties and econ-omic interdependence. Civil society operates ata fine scale in Dharavi.

Seen from the sky above, it may be hard to seeany clear spatial organisation, apart from themain arteries, but on the ground the lines arevery clear and very well known. The use of spacehere is more deliberate and intense than in anyother urban environment imaginable. Every bitof space is allocated and this is known exactly bythe locals: they know who belong where, whatbelongs to whom, what is private and who hasthe rights to it, and what is public (and forwhich public). There is a great deal of tolerancein terms of human density and movement, butat the same time a powerful realisation thatterritorial control is fundamental to long-termsurvival and identity.

In Dharavi, the use value of land and space isextremely high while exchange values are oftenhard to determine because much of the occu-pation is extra-legal. But the potential marketvalues are tremendous if Dharavi were re-developed and became part of the urban landmarket. It explains the keen interest of manydevelopers. This matter will be discussed later.First, we must scrutinise and discuss the notionof slum itself.

THE CONCEPT OF THE SLUM

What is a slum? Even if we concentrate ex-clusively on the quality of housing, it is by nomeans easy to identify slum dwellings or slumareas on the ground. UN Habitat’s (2003, p.12) official operational definition of a slum is:

an area that combines, to varying extents,the following characteristics (restricted tothe physical and legal characteristics of thesettlement): inadequate access to safe water,inadequate access to sanitation and otherinfrastructures; poor structural quality ofhousing, over-crowding and insecure resi-dential status.

It is a broad ranging definition yet the focusis strictly on housing and living conditions –namely, it does not consider non-residentialfunctions of the slum. This is the commonview of slums. Similarly, the Government ofIndia (1988, p. 5) defines slums as ‘housingthat is unfit for human habitation or detri-mental to safety, health and morals of theinhabitants’.

Slums also vary in degrees of legality (formalvs informal settlements), size, area, configura-tion and perceptions of boundaries. This isnot just academic: where government does notrecognise the legality of slums, there are nogovernment services (water, rubbish collec-tion, etc.) and so slum dwellers must organisethemselves; where government does recogniseslums, they may qualify for redevelopmentschemes. On the other hand, the designation of‘slum’ can foreshadow eradication.

Appadurai suggested a full spectrum of‘housing conditions’ from the multi-milliondollar apartments on Malabar Hill down to thehomeless: ‘Public sleeping is a technique ofnecessity for those who can be at home onlyin their bodies’. (Appadurai 2000, p. 638). Inbetween are, for example, the chawls (single-room dwellings originally built for the textileworkers, the more permanent slums such asDharavi, and the highly transient make-shift‘homes’ along main streets, rail roads anddeserted back alleys known as jopad-pattis.

Should a slum and its territorial extent bedefined on the basis of community? To outsid-ers, slums tend to appear as more or less con-tiguous areas of decrepit housing, withoutmuch consideration for possible internal differ-ences. But to those inside the slums, territo-riality is often hugely important in terms ofbelonging, identity, safety, community, statusand political organisation (Pendse 1995; Vora& Palshikar 2003). But the definition of suchcommunities, at sometimes a very fine scale, is amomentous task and can be highly contested.When Davis (2004, p. 14) postulates that ‘thefive great metropolises of South Asia alonecontain about 15,000 distinct slum communi-ties’ he must resort to the crudest of guessinggames, or repeat the guesses of others. The factis that nobody knows and that most estimatesare based on a jumble of conceptions, defini-tions and counts. Comprehensive and accurate

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maps of many slum areas and slum communi-ties often do not exist.

What is and what is not considered a slum inlocal parlance is by definition contextual andcan be deeply political.5 Most Mumbaikars (andthey rarely if ever visit Dharavi) routinely refer toall of Dharavi as a slum. Some who reside thereactually object to the term, keenly aware as theyare of the political ramifications: the Kumbarsrefuse to accept the term slum for their neigh-bourhoods and they are strongly opposed toany notion of redevelopment of the area.

When trying to understand the spatiality ofurban slums such as Dharavi, we find that exist-ing conceptual frameworks, derived from urbanstudies in the West, are not much of a help – buttheir consideration is useful for our purpose asit suggests the need for a new way of ‘seeing’slums and urbanity altogether. There are twomatters, in particular, that need some discus-sion. The first concerns the relevance or irrel-evance of the notions of ‘segregation’, ‘ghetto’and ‘enclave’. The second pertains to the perva-sive separation, in western urban contexts, ofresidential and economic urban functions.

In his discussion of segregation in Americancities, Marcuse (2001, pp. 3–4) uses the follow-ing definitions of ghettos, enclaves, and exclu-sionary enclaves:

A ghetto is an area of spatial concentrationused by forces within the dominant societyto separate and to limit a particular popula-tion group, externally defined as racial orethnic or foreign, held to be, and treated as,inferior by the dominant society.

An enclave is an area of spatial concen-tration in which members of a particularpopulation group, self-defined by ethnicityor religion or otherwise, congregate as ameans of protecting and enhancing theireconomic, social, political and/or culturaldevelopment.

An exclusionary enclave is an area of spatialconcentration in which members of a par-ticular population group, defined by its posi-tion of superiority in power, wealth, or statusin relation to its neighbors, cluster as ameans of protecting that position.

Marcuse’s aim is really to distinguish betweenvoluntary and involuntary segregation and todetermine whether ‘segregation that is socially

acceptable may be differentiated from thatwhich is undesirable’. In short, voluntary segre-gation that does not exclude ‘others’ is accept-able and of a different nature than forcedsegregation (which typically involves peopledeemed ‘inferior’),

Even in the US context, these distinctionsare not always straightforward.6 In Mumbai’sslums, the entire conceptual scheme is out ofplace. First, while arguably slums at the level ofcommunities are formed voluntarily becausethey provide comfort, security and econ-omic networks (enclaves), more generallyslums emerge because the poor are for allpractical purposes excluded from the formalhousing market. In other words, they are oftencompelled to erect slums (ghettos),

Second, if slum communities are best viewedas enclaves, then they are very often exclusion-ary, namely, they do not normally includepeople of other religions, other castes or otherregions. But this is hardly a function of their‘superiority’ – it is a necessary and basic survivalstrategy in what is otherwise a hostile urbanjungle.

Third, segregation processes in the Westtend to be about the desirability or undesira-bility of congregation of groups with differentidentities. In India’s slums, on the other hand,the formation of spatial communities is a func-tion of space itself: those 67 communities or soinside Dharavi have formed not because peopledecided they did not want to live among othersbut because it is the only way to secure andmaintain a space! This is illustrated with theslum version of the ‘gated community:’ smallercommunities within large, dense, slum areasare sometimes gated in the sense that theirterritory is clearly marked and that trafficis controlled with one or more designatedentrances. This reflects intense competition forspace as well as high ethnic concentration andsegregation. Social control within these com-munities tends to be very strong. Clearly, theseare quite different from the affluent gated com-munities in American cities – but they are gatednonetheless.

The second problem with Western conceptsof urban studies concerns the spatial separa-tion, in the West, of different urban functions.Marcuse makes the point that segregation ofurban functions in American cities follows



a logic that is either cultural, economic, or(power) political: ‘they fall into three quiteseparate and distinguishable . . . divisions byculture, by functional economic role, and byposition in the hierarchy of power’. Thisperspective does not apply in Mumbai. First,India’s caste system is far from dissolved in thelower echelons of society, even in urban areas.In as far as it is based on jati, positions in thecaste hierarchy are closely associated withprofessional status. For example, the Kumbars(potters), are a ‘caste’, a neatly defined culturalethnic group, and an industry all at once. So arethe Charmakars (leather makers), the TamilMuslims (tanners), or the Kolis (fishermen),Hence, we see a complex blending of culture,economics and hierarchical position. Mar-cuse’s argument that economic functionalsegregation is ‘essentially independent of cul-tural differences’ simply does not apply in thiscontext.

Without an economic function, the slumwould lose an essential part of its rationale. Thisis why a slum is emphatically not an urbanghetto in the modern American sense.7 Inthe US, urban ghettos are typically inner-cityneighbourhoods where as a result of economicrestructuring employment opportunities havedisappeared and where, precisely because ofthe lack of jobs and economic activity, decayprevails. Dharavi, in contrast, is buzzing witheconomic activity. Seventy per cent of its resi-dents are said to be working inside Dharavi(Graber et al. 2005, p. 31), and entrepre-neurship is all around. Dharavi is better char-acterised as a densely packed working classresidential area mixed with (light) manufactur-ing, retailing and a whole range of other func-tions. In 2002, Dharavi’s ‘GDP’ was estimatedat 1500–2000 crores or about US$ 360million (Sharma 2000, p. 79). An American-style ghetto, it surely is not.

This also means that the urban slum is morethan a ‘reserve army of labor’ (Breman 1996;2006) or ‘a stealth workforce for the formaleconomy’ (Davis 2006), Certainly, slums dohouse such labour but it is entrepreneur-ship and production in the slums themselvesthat have been systematically overlooked. Manyslum dwellers are employed in firms thatoperate from within the slum, whether theirwork takes place from home or on the company

work floor. Home-based entrepreneurship isan essential element of the informal economyand confirms the importance of housing (inthe slum) as a productive asset and its rolein promoting economic activity (Gordon &Nell 2006).

The significance of social networks seemshard to overstate. This dimension of the localcultural milieu can be thought of in terms ofsocial capital. In Bourdieu’s words, ‘socialcapital is formed in the context of a “durablenetwork” and provides each of its memberswith the backing of the collectivity-ownedcapital, a “credential” that entitles them tocredit in the various senses of the word’ (Bour-dieu 1985, p. 55), The vital importance of thissocial capital is not lost on slum entrepreneursand recent immigrants: one of the reasonsfor the steady population growth of Dharavi inpast decades is that workers were consistentlyrecruited from the same ethnic/religious/geographic/caste origins, as these communi-ties provide themselves with a self-created‘protective coat’ (Graber et al. 2005, p. 34),

THE UNINTENDED CITY

Generally, cities in the less-developed worldhave a long history of spatial fragmentation interms of planned and unplanned areas, illegalsettlement, slum developments, etc. (Harris1978; Balbo 1993; Balbo & Navez-Bouchanine1995). In the case of Mumbai, from the latenineteenth to the early twenty-first century thecity’s economy changed profoundly but slumsremained a constant feature of the landscape.In Mehrotra’s words, it:

was never conceived or built in a singularimage. Instead, the city’s evolution con-sistently makes evident a series of duali-ties [such as] lifestyles, cultural attitudes,planned intervention versus kinetic or incre-mental growth, big moves versus small ges-tures, passive versus active interventions,governmental action versus private initia-tive, the pukka versus the kutcha city, etc.(Mehrotra 1991, p. 12)

Today, Mumbai is still two cities, one deemedmodern and desirable, and the other the cityof the slums, unintended and undesirable.The undesirable city in colonial times was

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Native Town, today it is Dharavi. It is a mistake,however, to think that they are truly separate.In fact, the two cities are economically con-nected and in some ways they exist by virtueof each other, as in a symbiotic relationship.

The growth of slums was undesirablebecause it crossed ideals of what the ‘urban’was supposed to represent. Slums in urbanIndia have always exhibited a hybrid socialstructure both urban and rural, allowing theslum dwellers to be part of the city, in termsof work, while continuing social and culturalaffiliations with the village (Sen 1975). Indeed,the maintenance of ancestral traditions, familyties, and cultural identities, including caste,was a condition for successful adaption in thecity. So, for example, in the urban slums theextended family did not break down as mod-ernisation theories would have it but theyrather flourished.

It is hard to imagine this persistence of slumswithout effective facilitation by the state. It has,after all, the power in principle to eradicate, tolegalise, to prohibit, to build roads and provideservices, or to do nothing at all. ‘Dharaviillustrates how the state in fact endorses andencourages illegality with one hand, whiletrying to curb it with the other’ (Sharma 2000,p. xix). For instance, the state funded the build-ing of major access roads and internal arteriesthat are essential to its economic functioning,but it does not provide sufficient sanitation(McFarlane 2008); it rules that certain noxiousactivities are illegal but it does not enforcetheir removal; and, most fundamentally, for allpractical purposes, the state has for 150 yearsneither eradicated the slums nor redevelopedthem – it has, in effect, let them be.

At the same time, the urban elites and policy-makers never accepted the slum as part ofthe formal urban development process.8 Theimaginary of the modern city is closely relatedto our views of London, Paris or New York, withthe emphasis on their global grandeur andachievements while downplaying their ownlocal problems.9 In the mid-1990s, the Bom-bay Chamber of Commerce (2003) initiateda development programme with the title‘Bombay First’ and it was clearly modelled afterthe earlier ‘London First’. Presently, most ofsuch rhetoric has shifted to successful Asian‘world cities’ such as Shanghai and Singapore.

The Bombay First programme and its suc-cessors included vigorous efforts to maintainand improve the Western appearance of thesouthern part of the city with public-privateprogrammes involving road and pavementmaintenance, the removal of hawkers, ‘anti-spitting drives’, and general clean up. In theprocess, this part of the city witnessed the kindof sterilisation and regulation that was longtypical of cities in the West, what Edensor(1998, p. 213) calls ‘the erasure of much social,sensual and rhythmic diversity in urban space’.It only increased the contrasts with the worldof the bazaars and the slums (Grant & Nijman2002; Nijman 2007a),

Prakash (2008, p. 2) argues that we shouldquestion ‘the idea of the European metropolis,defined as a bounded unit by modernist theory,as the paradigmatic modern city’. We need torethink the history of urban modernity andurban change and the first step, says Prakash,involves:

expanding the focus beyond Europe andNorth America to include the experiences ofurban modernity in Asia, Africa, and LatinAmerica. It entails approaching the histor-ical experiences of modern urban forms andtransformations as ineluctably global, spe-cific, diverse, and divergent.

The ‘promise of the modern city’, then, seems afalse promise. The city of the slums may not beintended, but it is likely to be indispensable.

Acknowledgement

This paper is in part based on research funded bythe US National Science Foundation (BCS-0721025),a collaborative project (with Richard Grant) onthe economic geography of slums in Mumbai andJohannesburg. This paper is also based on the text ofa keynote address in a special session commemorat-ing the 100th anniversary of TESG at the AnnualMeeting of the Association of American Geographersin March 2009.

Notes

1. See Gilbert & Ward (1985); Eyre (1990); Oldfield(2002); Olds et al. (2002); Nijman (2008). Muchhas been written, especially since the latter part ofthe 1960s, outside the discipline of geography, inthe fields of anthropology, developments studies,



and urban planning (e.g., Abrams 1964; Clinard1966; Mangin 1967; Turner 1972, 1991)

2. The so-called ‘cultural turn’ in economicgeography reflects recognition of this artificialseparation of social and economic realms. Theo-retically, at least, there is a growing consensusthat the ‘stubborn locational rootedness’ of pro-duction owes much socio-cultural context (Scott2000, p. 31). Thrift referred to the cultural turnas ‘the most important event to impact on thesub-discipline in the last ten or fifteen years’. Soimportant, he went on, that ‘economic geogra-phers have become some of the leading expo-nents of cultural geography’ (Thrift 2000, pp.689, 692). Still, this theoretical awareness hasnot translated in more integrated empiricalapproaches.

3. Useful appraisals of government policies regard-ing slum rehabilitation can be found in Ruiter(1999) and Mukhija (2003).

4. The communities in Dharavi have shown a greatdeal of stability over time. There is some turnoveras young and better educated (second or thirdgeneration immigrants) leave for higher educa-tion or jobs elsewhere. This is the reason that, overtime, there had to be a steady replacement flowof workers from the region of origin.

5. Gilbert (2007, p. 697) speaks of ‘the return of theword “slum” with all of its inglorious associations’and he warns against its colloquial usages andpolitical abuses.

6. Marcuse acknowledges as much. I am using hisconcepts here not so much to critique the originalargument but rather to show that some keynotions in the Anglo-Saxon literature on urbanstudies do not apply to the context of India’surban slums.

7. Some have argued that Dharavi, like Mumbaiat large, has lost some its cosmopolitan flair afterthe riots following Babri Masjid in 1992 led tomore segregation: identity used to be mainlyregion-based but now religion became moreimportant, setting in motion ‘a process of ghettoi-sation.’ (Sharma 2000, p. xxxi).

8. See D’Monte (2002, p. 213) for a description ofthe wide disparities of perceptions between theelites and slum dwellers of Mumbai and its desiredfuture. The assertion of a new middle class withstrong negative views of slum dwellers (Sharma2004) has contributed to Mumbai’s becoming a‘revanchist city’ (Smith 1996), The prevalence ofthis modern urban imaginary is also reflected in

the title of a well-known volume: Bombay: Metaphorfor Modern India (Patel & Thorner 1996).

9. One of the key features of the revival in ‘com-parative urbanism’ in the field of urban studiesis the avoidance of normative (modernist) com-parative schemes (Nijman 2007b; Ward 2008;Smith 2009).

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Documents

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