Gautam Bhatia - Where the two cities meet
The informal organisation of India's slums can inspire new planning norms.
A Delhi farmhouse with four bedrooms, a pool and extensive garden acreage has an average density of two families per hectare; the neighbouring slum has 400 within the same area. The farmhouse consumes 800 times the water, electricity and energy requirements of the slum family.
I live in a small colony in Delhi. Like all south Delhi colonies, it is considered a reasonably elite address. And like other colonies in the area, it is now renowned for its shortcomings: uncollected garbage spilling out of municipal bins, private cars clogging public streets, sand and brick piled on roads for private construction, four storey flats on plots meant for single families, high colony gates against daylight robberies, the occasional murder of an elderly couple. An important address, but only on paper.
A Delhi farmhouse with four bedrooms, a pool and extensive garden acreage has an average density of two families per hectare; the neighbouring slum has 400 within the same area. The farmhouse consumes 800 times the water, electricity and energy requirements of the slum family.
I live in a small colony in Delhi. Like all south Delhi colonies, it is considered a reasonably elite address. And like other colonies in the area, it is now renowned for its shortcomings: uncollected garbage spilling out of municipal bins, private cars clogging public streets, sand and brick piled on roads for private construction, four storey flats on plots meant for single families, high colony gates against daylight robberies, the occasional murder of an elderly couple. An important address, but only on paper.
Down the road lies one of the cities largest slums. Part drain, part storage, part residence, part social club, even part workplace, the settlement buzzes with activity — domestic, mercantile and social. A year earlier, electric poles appeared in the alleys, as did communal taps. But, without drains, the area still floods during the monsoon. Such conditions are, however, easily tolerated. The important thing is to be in the city.
Between the middle-class colony and the slum there are differences that are being constantly eroded. While the slum is regularly upgraded, the colony is in perennial decline. In a few years, the two places will be indistinguishable. The posh colony will be a slum; the slum, an improved neighbourhood. It is happening in Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, and in virtually any Indian city with a growing migratory population of the dispossessed. Among the many desperate urges that mark the Indian city, none is more perverse than the wish to make it slum-free. Slums have been, and will continue to be, the social hubs of India's future urban plans.
According to a recent census report, three out of five people in Indian cities live in slums; the increasing migration will make that four out of five within the decade. Covering over 4,000 towns, the report reveals a figure of 65 million living in unauthorised squalor. Even as ideas of planning stagger under the weight of these new statistics, the government continues to rely on its old schemes, such as the Rajiv Awas Yojana, to free the city of slums. But the slum, sadly for government planners, is here to stay.
The symbiotic relationship between the slum and the planned city can never be threatened as long as one feeds off the other. Slum residents provide cheap labour. Their pay may be pitiful by middle-class standards, but at least it makes survival possible. "Unrecognised" slums have no access to safe drinking water, electricity and sanitation. Despite the appalling conditions, many produce goods and services for the larger benefit of the city. Dharavi is a self-renewing organism that is constantly changing its own peculiar structure of accommodation, work and social norms. Sadly, Dharavi has an unfortunate relationship with a city that is obsessed with real estate and builder lobbies.
Decades ago, unable to control the daily migration, Mumbai put in place rules so stringent that the teeming hordes would be denied living space. .. read more:
