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DESIGN RESEARCH PROJECTCOURSE CODE: ARCH11015

Credit Points: 60Programme Director: Dr. Dorian Wiszniewski

Supervisors: Kevin Adams and Chris French, with critical visits from Paul Pattinson

Essay

Author:

George Papagkikas

Title:

Emerging PARA-City

Subtitle:

Towards an architecture of resistance against Mumbai’s social and spatial inequalities

Word count: 5.994Full (including quotations, titles and references): 8.555

Abstract: 130

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ContentsAbstract

Introduction

Approaching Mumbai

Two different points of view Two different spacial behaviors Inside Mumbai’s slums

An analytic attempt

Foucault and De Certeau in Mumbai Breaking dipoles

Housing problem origins and solution attempts

Historical background Current situation Conclusions

Emerging PARA-City

Bibliography

Images

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AbstractThe aim of this essay is the composition of a theoretical framework for the creation of an architectural proposal that would try to put itself against the great social and spacial inequalities of the city of Mumbai. At first it attempts to approach and describe the city through a record of its image and experience. After that it tries to analyze the specific condition putting it against the theories of Michel Foucault and Michael De Certeau and also a series of conceptual dipoles. Then it makes a presentation of the origins and the dominant methods of tackling with Mumbai’s spacial inequalities as they appear through its housing problem. Finally, it uses the extracted conclusions and inspiration from the work of the artist Alberto Giacometti in order to form architectural strategy.

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Mumbai can be characterised as a chaotic, dense environment of various juxtaposed realities, a palimpsest of different stories, cultures, religions, ideologies and lives. A look at the multitude of types of production processes taking place in Mumbai can support this view. Being the industrial and commercial centre of India, the city hosts many tertiary services like the National Stock Exchange, corporate headquarters’, the centre of Bollywood etc. in numerous office buildings. It is also the field of function of million small enterprises housed inside shacks, open laundries, beaches or even in the roads. While it is not as powerful as it used to be before the deindustrialisation and the closure of the vast number of the city’s mills, the industrial sector of Mumbai still employs many workers in a series of infrastructures throughout the whole city.

Apart from a manifold productive impetus, the city contains a plumed mosaic of different religions, nationalities and cul-tures (Muslims, Hindus, Parsis, Christians etc.). They are constantly displayed in various forms, giving to Mumbai a ‘multi-cultural’ character, or a unified chaotic form, rendering the city an intensely ‘intercultural’ environment. All these elements produce a peculiar urban space of great density and intense character of mixed uses, close to what has been described as a, “soft”1, a “collage”2 or a “post-modern”3 city. At the same time, Mumbai consists a space of extreme contrasts and unim-aginable inequalities. It is a city that hosts together absurd wealth and indescribable poverty. It is a space for the exercise of extreme continuous violence, not so much in physical terms, as in the sense of feral exploitation, forcing millions of people to live in sordid conditions and constantly consuming vast numbers of lives. For Mumbai is the city where thousands of people consider themselves lucky to spend their whole life in exhausting work for poor wages in the large open laundries, doing what could be automatically done with the pressing of a button, and where more than one in two live in conditions that reduce the average life span to 55 years. It is a city where the largest and most expensive single-family house on the planet can be found,4 while 50 to 70% of the inhabitants live in slums or in the streets.

Being the theatre of so many different and parallel stories, multiple needs and points of view gives a chaotic nature to Mumbai, making it easy to elude categorisations, canonisations and generalisations, and a complete understanding seems impossible. On the other hand, the intensity and the urgency of the problems demand a certain political thought in order to confront them, and that, first of all, means the attempt to understand and arrange in a hierarchy the relevant data, the problems, their origins and the reasons which give birth to them. Such an attempt seems doomed to fail from the begin-ning, to the extent that it tries to be total, complete and absolutely definite. On the other hand, it is a sine qua non not only for an effective intervention and complete subversion of the existing reality, but also for the designation of targets and the composition of everything new that aspires to bring a progressive social effect, like, e.g. an architectural proposal.5 Based on all of these ideas, we will try to approach Mumbai.

1 Raban, Jonathan (1974), Soft City, The Harvill Press.2 Rowe, Colin/ Koetter, Fred (1978), Collage City, The MIT Press3 Harvey, David (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell4 The skyscraper called, “Antilla house”.5 For the purpose of this essay we will use as a postulate the notion of architecture not as a political act per se, but also the idea that, to the extent architectural thought renounces its political and social character, it renders itself impoverished. There is the danger then of becoming, rather than non-political, not progressive and, even worse, a mere servant of the needs of the dominant authority.Lazaridis, Pantelis (1979), The impoverishment of architecture, Nea sinora

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hun-dred million; but our shudders are all for the “horrors of the... momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak?

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

Introduction

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A first visual contact that one might have with the city is from above, through the satellite view. This aspect can give us many different kinds of information. Someone looking at the metropolitan region of Mumbai might first observe that it constitutes a very densely inhabited place. Indeed, Mumbai is the most heavily populated city in India. It has a landmass of 350km2 and a population of 20.5 million people in its broad metropolitan area. This image from above is dominated by large-scale transport infrastructures: the railroads and the huge car highways that cross the city (but also its surrounding landscape at many points), or the ports’ and airports’ vast areas (the two most important entrances of to the country). What we can see with a more careful look is a lack of public space. Indeed, free open public space seems almost inexistent and when it appears it does so extremely fragmented. It is also important to note that the initial image of the area, before it became a metropolis, differs greatly to the how it is now, due to the fact that most of the inhabitable area was land re-claimed from the sea, giving a peculiar meaning to the distinction between natural and manmade environment. What is also clear, especially from our perspective of a birds’ eye view, is the dominance of the numerous skyscrapers. Indeed, the city hosts more than 2,500 high-rise buildings, to which is added the world’s largest number of skyscrapers in the construc-tion of a single city.1

What may attract a more experienced eye, however, is a constellation of spots of a special urban morphology, very differ-ent from the dominant urban fabric. Almost over the whole area of the city, in very different densities, sizes and locations, in tiny interstices or vast open areas, the slums of Mumbai make their appearance like scattered stains of the flat colour of zinc roofs. These stains make the city, “the global capital of slum-dwelling”,2 hosting over than half of its population while occupying only 9% of its area.

However useful Mumbai’s view from above might be, the reality, nature and special character of the city can be sensed only from inside. It is important, therefore, to follow Michael De Certeau’s urge3 and descend to walk on the level of its ground. The experience of a walk in Mumbai is dominated by three different types of spectacles. The noisiest element is the car traffic. Although cars are a very less common way of transportation than other public means, like trains (only 15% of daily journeys are made with car),4 the roads of the city are heavily congested almost during the whole day, creating a nightmarish condition for commuters. The traffic density transforms city into a loud orchestra of vehicles and horns, and makes breathing in Mumbai the equivalent of smoking two-and-a-half packs of cigarettes per day.5

1 Dezeen magazine (15/1/2014), Life on a New High: Mumbai skyscrapers photographed by Alicja Dobrucka2 Davis, Michael (2006), Planet of Slums, Verso3 De Certeau, Michael (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley4 Mehta, Suketu (2006), “Mumbai” in Cities Architecture and Society: 10. Mostra internazionale di architettura, la Biennale di Venecia (2006)5 Ibid.

Approaching Mumbai

The second dominant aspect of the Mumbai’s experience is its buildings. The city displays a broad spectrum of construc-tions of different functions, types, sizes and forms. High rises surrounded with fences, slums, old and derelict apartment blocks for the working class (they are called “chawls” and represent 75% of the city’s formal housing stock6), large colonial public buildings, spectacular temples and mosques, remaining industrial infrastructures, art deco, colonial and modern houses are placed together. The density is such that combined with the lack of public space it creates a feeling of asphyxia. Of course the most powerful element is the skyscrapers that dominate in the city’s skyline and seem to hang above the head of a walker almost everywhere.

What gives Mumbai its intense, dynamic and special character, however, is not its buildings or its traffic, but what is happening between the two. Indeed, between the walls and the cars, on the sidewalks or in the roads is an enormous multitude of everyday procedures and practices that cannot be easily found in other cities. Millions of homeless people create constructions of different types, which every night make the streets look like dormitories. Permanent or temporary makeshift structures of religious character make frequently their appearance in relation to rituals like festivities, as well as leisure activities like cricket or kite-flying. Most importantly (and evidently), a vast number of different market forms flow constantly almost everywhere. Such functions and everyday practices in public space, which one could expect to find only inside slums, fuse into the other two aspects through the whole city’s environment, rendering it unique and making the experience of Mumbai a constant ‘attack on the senses’.

Based on these two different points of view, we can extract some conclusions about Mumbai’s slums and their relation to the rest of the city. We realise that they are not as much a series of clearly circumscribed islands inside an estranged envi-ronment, but resemble more vessels, hubs of a rhizomatic7 networks of flows of everyday spatial activities, which cover the whole city in different densities and, when it finds free space, fills it acquiring a more stable character. The satellite view of slum clusters has its importance because it shows such settlements continue to have a level of distinction from the rest of the city, and its not easy for everyone to enter and traverse them. At the same time, the satellite view remains the single most effective way to perceive and understand the size and the extent of this mostly uncharted spatial phenomenon.

6 O’Hare, Greg/ Abbott, Dina/ Barke, Michael (1998), “A review of slum housing policies in Mumbai” in Cities, Vol. 15, No. 47 For the idea of the rhizome: Deleuze, Gilles/ Guattari Félix (1980), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press

Two different points of view

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Two different spatial behaviorsTwo references to different events that happened in Mumbai can help us understand more about the emerging conflicting characters and behaviors of its inhabitants. In the article, “City of a million islands”1, Sidharth Bhatia talks about one of the rape events that convulse Indian society that happened in Mumbai on 22nd August 2013. The article shows how central places of the city, like derelict industrial complexes, are transformed in points of nefarious activities under the sovereignty of lumpen groups. The dominant trend in the production of space, ignoring the enormous need for public places, is a con-centration on the creation of private Xanandu-like properties of luxurious apartment blocks, swanky clubs, theaters, offices or Dubai-like tourist resorts. These consume the greatest part of the law and order machinery for its defense, leaving the rest of the city unprotected and driving the priced-out middle class further and further from the centre. Thus, a fragmented ‘city of million islands’ is created, many of which have a dangerous and aggressive nature towards inhabitants and visitors.

On the other hand, Suketu Mehta, trying to summarise Mumbai in a few paragraphs for the catalogue of the Venice Bien-nale of 2006, starts his text by describing the reaction of the city’s inhabitants to the floods of 2005:

(...) But unlike the situation after Katrina hit New Orleans, there was no widespread breakdown of civic order; even though the police were absent, the crime rate did not go up. That was because Mumbaiites were busy helping each other. Slum dwellers went to the highway and took stranded motorists into their homes and made room for one more person in shacks where the average occupancy is seven adults to a room. Volunteers waded though waist-deep water to bring food to the 150000 people stranded in train stations. Human chains were formed to get people out of the floods. Most of the government machinery was absent, but nobody expected otherwise. (...)2

These two types of behaviour, the violent occupation and fortification and a wave of solidarity that permeates through the whole city, show that, despite the bleakness, the many and different stages and levels between them and their imbalance, in this city of enormous inequalities there are two extreme trends that dominate the production and usage of space. If we could place on one side the process of privatisation and construction of spaces of power, wealth and spectacle3, the other would be occupied by the poor and the weak, the homeless and the slum dwellers who constitute the main receivers of the violence that is produced in and produces the city.

In order to try to conceive a strategy for a possible subversion of this violence, it is important to observe and produce a perceptional framework for the space that mostly hosts and creates the character and the nature of these behaviors. We could do that by focusing in on the slum settlements, which, as we have seen, constitute the denser and more intense points of this reality that envelopes the city.

1 Bhatia, Sidharth (5/9/2013), “City of million islands” in Hindustrian Times2 Mehta, Suketu (2006), “Mumbai” in Cities Architecture and Society: 10. Mostra internazionale di architettura, la Biennale di Venecia (2006)3 Debord, Guy (1994), The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books

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Inside Mumbai’s slumsAn analysis of Mumbai’s slums firstly faces the problem of their definition. The classical definition of slums comes from the Victorian era of the British industrial centres. According to this, a slum is a space, “characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure”.1 In Mumbai, the city’s authori-ties give such areas ‘official slum’ status and this designation means that the area is officially recognised as unfit for human habitation.2 Of course there are lots of squatters’ settlements that are not found in municipal land. At the same time, the many old and dilapidated chawls that host many of Mumbai’s inhabitants offer living conditions sometimes very similar to those of the slums. Also, there are in the city many other types of settlements of different level of consolidation, like fishing villages etc., whose categorisation is a very hard task.3 Finally we should not forget that pavements, spaces along railway tracks, beside pipelines, under bridges, ill-drained marchland and other vacant points available, house a vast number of city’s poor in very different, temporary (or even inexistent) makeshift constructions.

In general terms, slums consist of dense aggregations of small constructions that are used for housing but they also host many different types of production processes. They are usually located in highly polluted and very unhealthy areas. They are mostly extremely dense environments of abject poverty, squalor and deprivation. Death rates inside slums are 50% higher than the adjoining rural districts and 40% of total mortality is attributed to diseases from water contamination and poor sanitation.4 The usual lack of basic amenities and infrastructures like drainage, sewers, (clear) water, toilets and gar-bage collection makes living there extremely hard and the atmosphere particularly unpleasant for those not accustomed to it. Slum dwellers have been making, literally, what Slavoj Žižek suggests by showing a pile of garbage and asking us to ‘feel at home’.5 Far away from living in an artificial reality deprived from humanity’s unpleasant byproducts, they are forced to inhabit the spaces left for the waste of the dominant production processes, experiencing in full extend and absolute realism today’s human-made world.

On the maps of the city, slum settlements appear as empty areas, and they are indeed beyond official mapping, planning and design. Being, to a great extent, far from supervision by the state or any other official authority, the open spaces of those settlements (whose labyrinthine form makes it difficult to allocate them to categories like, “roads”, “squares” etc.) is constantly shaped, maintained and used by the people living alongside them, therefore obtaining a character of pure common ground.6

1 Davis, Michael (2006), Planet of Slums, Verso2 O’Hare, Greg/ Abbott, Dina/ Barke, Michael (1998), “A review of slum housing policies in Mumbai” in Cities, Vol. 15, No. 43 Sir JJ College of Architecture (7/2010), Typologies and beyond: Slum settlements studies in Mumbai, Collective Research Initiatives Trust4 Davis, Michael (2006), Planet of Slums, Verso5 Žižek, Slavoj in Taylor, Astra, (1/6/2009), Examined Life: Excursions with contemporary thinkers, New Press The New York6 Negri, Antonio/ Hardt, Michael (2000), Empire, Harvard University PressHarvey, David (2012), Rebel Cities (2012), Verso books

An interesting spatial characteristic of slums is the intense vagueness in the distinction between public and private space. The small size of shacks related with the big number of their inhabitants force them to use the space around the buildings in many ways, filling them with functions which under ‘normal’ conditions someone would expect to be completely pri-vate.7 (Those procedures give and intense threshold identity to these spaces.) Often the public corridors between buildings seem internal, making whole neighborhoods look like big communes. This situation finds its inverse at the architecture of security and the large walls and fences surrounding private properties in the rest of Mumbai, which are usually loaded with cameras and barbed or/and concertina wires, making at many points the city look like a military zone.

Spaces within slums frequently appear decorated and are filled with many ornamental elements. They also host religious ceremonies, festivities and games. The latter are very common in India and resemble a lot the carnivals or other occasions that Barbara Ehrenreich calls expressions of, “collective joy” that are rarely found today in the western world.8

All these elements create an intense character and ambience in the space of slums, making them sometimes function like clusters/rural villages inside the flows that permeate a global metropolis.9 Many of their inhabitants seem immune to what Georg Simmel considers a main characteristic of the metropolitan behaviour, “blasé attitude”.10 Indeed, a phenomenon, which seems estranged from the environment, like a wandering tourist, quickly attracts the gaze of curious locals, and after a while he is most probably followed by a continuously growing flock of impressed children.11

Although outside proper official mapping and intense surveillance, Mumbai’s slum settlements are not completely, “out of the panopticon”.12 Being scattered and in different sizes through the whole city, without having close relations between each other as much as with the rest of the city, they differ from slum settlements found in other places of the world.13 They are thus interwoven in a net of local police departments, representatives, non-governmental organisations, municipal and other authorities, usually enfolded at every level with intense corruption, clientelism, political patronage and dependence. Also, the extreme conditions of poverty, in relation to the existence of class relations, exploitation and religious, national and cast differences, often creates aggressive behaviour and conflict, mostly on a personal level.14

7 The most extreme example of that are the spaces which function as open air toilets and that are usually visited by many persons at the same time. This applies mostly for men, and thus the big problem of the lack of such infrastructures gains an intensely gendered character.8 Ehrenreich, Barbara (2007), Dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy, Granta9 Castells, Manuel (2004), “Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age”, in Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, William W. Braham and Jonathan A. Hale (eds). London: Routledge10 Simmel, Georg (1903), The Metropolis and Mental Life11 This does not usually happen in Dharavi, Mumbai’s oldest and most known slum, which due to its fame has sometimes started to look like a ‘slum theme park’ full of outside visitors.12 Foucault, Michel (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Pantheon Books13 E.g. the large slum concentrations of the cities of Southern America, which usually forms vast unities in the city’s suburbs.14 Catherine Boo’s description of the life inside a Mumbai slum and her presentation of such events and situations is enlightening.Boo, Katherine (2012), Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Penguin books

(...) One should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealise slum-dwellers into a new revolutionary class. It is nonetheless surprising how far they conform to the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the classical proletariat (‘free’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life. (...)

Žižek, Slavoj (2/9/2004), Knee-Deep, London Review of Books, Vol. 26, No.17

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An analytic attemptThe manifold reality of Mumbai and its slums show a great ability to elude simplistic explanations, totalising analyses or clear shapes and categorisations. The projection and testing of some spatial theories in this specific case study could, how-ever, help us understand more about its situation and imagine the possibilities of conception and emergence of a subject for its subversion.

A trial of inscribing Mumbai to a certain socio-psychological theory could start with the Michel Foucault’s idea of, “heterotopia”.1 For Foucault, the irreducible element of the social scheme, the body, is in punishment, repression, socialisa-tion and discipline in and through a space organised by authority (e.g. through incarceration or surveillance), but it can also produce spaces of resistance and freedom in difference with the surrounding repressive world. Seeing Mumbai from above and observing the dense, “leftovers of official space”2 that slum dwellers are using for inhabiting, one could find many obvi-ous connotations to what Foucault is referring to. On the other hand, slum islands in the official Mumbai archipelago can be easily attributed the characterisation of heterotopias, that is to say, small fragments of spaces easily distinguished from their surrounding areas, which the formal city planning has left intact, free to the impulsive, incremental production of space of its inhabitants. Although this description might seem useful, the truth is that there are important differentiations found in situ on a political and phenomenological level. As mentioned above, Mumbai’s slums are really far from character-isable as the, “non-hegemonic” spaces of resistance to official repression that Foucault is talking about. Indeed, hierarchical structures exist too inside slums, while the conditions of living themselves can be called repression. On the other hand, as we have already seen, the atmosphere, the qualities of space and the character of place someone would expect only in slums are not confined to them but are diffused throughout the whole city via a vast series of everyday practices.

The latter seems very close to what Michael de Certeau calls, “perruque”, that is to say a diversionary practice of using an employer’s resources for personal use.3 It is about a use of the city-product completely different than the one that its formal producers had planned and designed, outside their abilities of mapping and representing with statistics or other

1 Foucault, Michel (1984), “Of Other Spaces”, in Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité2 Davis, Michael (2006), Planet of Slums, Verso3 Indeed, all those activities are found in the large productive space of the city, which was never officially formed to host them. It is about the con-sumption of city’s commons, and more specifically its unclaimed waste materials not only metaphorically (space and time) but also literally (waste scavenging, collection and recycling is one of the most common activities of Mumbai’s poorest inhabitants).

mainstream computations. Thus, such activities can easily be inscribed to what De Certeau calls, “tactics”,4 which with their opposite extreme, “strategies”,5 seem to form another interesting framework for theorising the anthropogeography of Mumbai.

If we put at the place of the subject of power institutions like municipal authorities, Mumbai’s capital and property owners etc, we can have a very descriptive spectrum of strategic forces that try to dominate space and make it ‘proper’, who also master a series of methods and tools to represent and see Mumbai, but also the knowledge to reproduce it in their will according to their needs. On the other hand, the everyday tactical practices that are found in the streets of Mumbai, even in the form of slum dwelling, have no space ‘proper’ to them and are in a constant effort of day-by-day survival.

4 “[A tactic] is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of and exteriority, then, provides it with the condi-tion necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must place on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self collection: it is a maneuver “within the enemy’s field of vision,” as von Billow put it, and within enemy territory It does not therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a district, visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactical mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment. It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse. In short, a tactic is an art of the weak”.De Certeau, Michael (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley

5 “[Strategy is] the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a busi-ness, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitions, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. As in management, every “strategic” rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its “own” place, that is, the place of its own power and will, from an “environment”. A Cartesian attitude, if you wish: it is an effort o delimits one’s own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other. It is also the typical attitude of modern science, politics, and military strategy”.Ibid.

Foucault and De Certeau in Mumbai

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In order to understand more about the social and spatial reality that exists in Mumbai and in particular its slums, we can put into a test a series of theoretical dipoles that are usually used for describing such inequalities.

The first dipole that could be applied is ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. The problem with this terminology (in this context) is the fact that, inside slum settlements there are many levels of consolidation, official recognition and approval, and many other types of settlements that are not considered to be slums also have many things in common with them. The same applies to ‘legal-illegal’ or ‘property-squat’, because there are many different statuses of settlement legalisation and authorisation. There are also many land titles for slum areas that belong to dwellers or others than those in the municipalities.

This condition obfuscates every effort of clear distinction between exploiters and the exploited. Indeed, there are many slum residents who are the holders of land titles that they rent to others. Of course, exploitation inside slums is not only economic, but takes also other forms like political patronage, gender inequality and class differences. Indeed, slums are areas of intense capitalistic production with surplus value, employers and employees.1 This process has many differences compared with the economies of scale and the great industrial units of Fordism-Taylorism, but the exploitation exists and is accompanied with problematic authority relations of family, gender, religion, and a lack of trade unions.2 This predicament leads to inhuman working hours and conditions, lack of labour rights and child labour.3

These observations bring us to the most obvious dipole, the distinction between poor and rich. Here we have to remember that slum inhabitants are only a part of the urban poor and not even the poorest when compared with the homeless. Also, the residents of the dilapidated chawls of the city are to a great extent very poor too. Finally, we have to note that there are vast wealth differences between slum dwellers too.4

1 Slums constitute exemplary fields of an economic production of small-scale informal units characteristic of a global type of capitalistic reproduc-tion that emerged after the crisis of 1973 and has been described as “flexible accumulation”( Harvey, David (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell). Being models of this form of unregulated, feral capitalism they are many times presented with applauding comments from partisans of neoliberalism or dominant economic institutions like the World Bank.2 Harvey, David (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell3 “Politically, the informal sector, in the absence of enforced labor rights, is a semi feudal realm of kickbacks, bribes, tribal loyalties, and ethnic exclusion (...) Whereas traditional formal industries such as textiles in India or oil in the Middle East tended to foster interethnic solidarity through unions and radical political parties, the rise of the unprotected informal sector has too frequently gone hand in hand with exacerbated ethnoreli-gious differentiation and sectarian violence”.Davis, Michael (2006), Planet of Slums, Verso4 It is characteristic that a part of Dharavi hosts inhabitants far richer than others. Their residences differ significantly from those around them and are equipped with cameras and other security systems.

Considering the morphology of space, one could say that the dominant difference between slums and the rest of the city is a matter of design. Slums are not designed but are produced irregularly and incrementally. But here we could also add that in many of the slums the constructions are made also from professionals through a level of empirical design5. On the other hand, it is a fact that now, the dominance of the neoliberal model and the ‘invisible hand of the market’, in relation to the diachronic lack of a serious general metropolitan design and planning for the city of Mumbai, render it, to a great extent, equally incremental and unplanned, urging many to call it the, “unintended city”6.

From those observations, we can see that such distinctions are inadequate to describe the many sides of the dominant inequalities and the violence that happen in Mumbai. Despite their weaknesses, functioning together they can give us a general view. We cannot talk in terms of clear edges and plain sides, but the inequalities in the field of exploitation, living conditions etc. are of very different quality for slums compared to the ones between them and the upper class areas of the city.

Finally, we have seen that the differences between capital and labour are not clear amongst poor and wealthy parts of so-ciety. It is, however, a fact that the whole issue of inequalities is, to a great extent and in the final analysis, a real economic reality.7 The form of space constitutes, primarily, a superstructure standing on top of an economical base and, to the extent that the latter is ruled by capitalistic modes of production, the dominant bourgeois class usually transforms it according to its needs for profit and power. At the same time, the opposition between capital and labour continues to be a very effective theoretical tool8 for the analysis and understanding of today’s situation. Also, the working class, being the one operating the means of production and the producer of value, is still a sine qua non factor for the subversion of this reality.

On the other hand, we cannot deny that geography, and spatial and architectural forms, can have an impact at the eco-nomic base. At the same time, city plays a central role at the process of capitalistic production, and urban movements at the creation of resistance.9 This is of significance for the city of Mumbai where extreme inequalities have a particularly spatial character, therefore making the quest for a spatial, political and architectural proposal an interesting task. Before we undertake such an effort, it is important to view the reasons that create the problem and have look at ways used to confront it up to now.

5 Srivastava, Rahul/ Echanove, Matias (2013), “The dweller and the slum-dweller” in Mumbai Reader 2013, Urban Design Research Institute6 Da Cunha, Gerson (1996), “Bombay and the international experience” in Cities and Structural Adjustment, ed. N. Harris, and I. Fabricus, UCL Press, London7 Marx, Karl (1859), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy8 Compared to many others like, for example, the well founded but in a way vague and politically ineffective terms, “empire” and, “multitude” introduced by Negri & Hardt.Negri, Antonio/ Hardt, Michael (2000), Empire, Harvard University Press9 Harvey, David (2012), Rebel Cities (2012), Verso books

Breaking dipoles

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Housing problem origins and solution attempts

Historical backgroundTo a great extent, British authorities forcibly implemented policies to keep peasants outside colonies’ cities.1 This factor, related to the unstable economical development of the area, led to the slow population growth of Bombay until 1941. After that the situation changed dramatically, mostly due to political instability that created large waves of poor incoming refuges who, combined with the growth of the textile industry led to an almost doubling of the city’s population until the early 50s (something that has continued exponentially almost until today). Despite the liberation, inequalities continued to exist and indeed thrive as the colonialists were replaced by corrupted governments, private capital, the IMF and the World Bank and more recently a multitude of NGO and other institutions.

This steep and intense growth is the central reason for Mumbai’s housing problem. All of these people are forced to live in limited area where there is an enormous distribution inequality: 90% of the land belongs to wealthy parts of society who live comfortably. This situation is confronted diachronically with insufficient public investment (only a small part is not al-located for beautifying already well-endowed parts of the city2) and a series of failed policies.

Up until 1976, the common policy of tackling the issue was the eradication of slums and the relocation of their inhabitants to new settlements. It was essentially about implementing Western design models that were mostly inappropriate for the specific environment. It was an expensive procedure, which also faced increasing political opposition and moral outrage. At the same time, many new settlements proved too expensive for the dwellers. As a result, they were forced to resell them and move to other slums, thus relocating and worsening the problem. The most characteristic and spectacular example of that was the creation of ‘Navi Mumbai’, the city’s eastern expansion.3 Despite the fact that slum eradication declined after the 1970s, it continued to happen in smaller scale until its recent reappearance.

1 The British can be called, “arguably the greatest slum-builders of all time”, because their policies were forcing local populations to live in precari-ous shantytowns outside restricted cities, denying at the same time to improve sanitation or even providing the most minimal infrastructures to native neighborhoods.Davis, Michael (2006), Planet of Slums, Verso 2 Ibid.3 “The urban poor where promised new homes and jobs in glittering New Bombay (now Navi Mumbai), but instead local people in the mainland were displaced with loss of land and livelihood, while the bulk of the new housing went to civil servants and the middle classes.”Ibid.

After 1976, with the emergence of a new global economical model and new view towards cities, Mumbai became a labora-tory for the World Bank’s housing policies. Under the concepts of ‘affordability’, ‘cost-recovery’ and ‘replicability’ this policy consisted of in situ improvement of slum settlements; providing infrastructures like water, pavements, latrines, electricity, lighting or the lease of land to slum dwellers, and providing them with loans in order to improve their housing. The first strategy was extremely poorly implemented due to lack of funds and interest, while the second faced important bureau-cratic obstacles and the refusal of the owners of private land (43% of the total) to support it.

After 1971, another housing policy that was implemented was the repair and rehabilitation of the chawls that were built during 1920-1940, that have been seriously deteriorating (mostly due to the rent freeze imposed by the government that led private landlords to stop maintaining their properties).

Since 1991 and India’s new economic liberalisation policies for market-led growth, the Slum Redevelopment and Rehabili-tation Programme appeared as a new proposal that could transform Mumbai to a slum-free environment through private capital. The idea was to give city land free of charge to private developers in order to build high rise apartment blocks for slum dwellers, while a percentage of this land would be used for gaining profit through the construction of duildings for high-income groups. The program did not take into account the real population figures and their needs and, therefore, was never a real answer to the problem. It also faced a series of bureaucratic obstacles. Although it seems to be a win-win strategy, in practice it often has devastating effects for slum dwellers. Its implementation usually means their relocation to temporary camps of doubtful conditions, far away from their previous social and economic environment. Also, the new buildings that replace the former residences are usually very poor quality and dangerous constructions4 (intensely dense with lack of open public space and other amenities).5 In addition, the size, form and structure of the new apartments makes them completely insufficient to host the slums’ economic and productive activities, thus, sentencing their inhabitants to extreme poverty. It is, therefore, essentially, a process of destroying the lives of the people, plucking and privatising public space for individual profit and encouraging the deterioration of the urban environment.

4 Many collapse events have happened e.g. the one that occurred in the September of 2013. (BBC News India, (27/9/2013), India building collapse: Six killed and dozens trapped in Mumbai- www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-2429437)5 Sheth, Alpa (2013), “The slum and the high-rise” in Mumbai Reader 2013, Urban Design Research Institute

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Current situationThe economical growth of India makes it one of the few success stories for the World Bank’s global policies of the 1980s. This claim obfuscates the even greater growth of its (urban) poverty. The latter provides an extremely cheap and massive labour force that makes India one of the few countries whose development seems to defy the current financial crisis. In this national situation, in order to cope with, maintain and intensify the high rates of development, the target for Mumbai is to become a, “Global Financial Centre”, a, “world class city”,1 competing against Shanghai. This actually means the ac-celeration of India’s deregulating, liberalising and globalising financial system. In order to do this, large amounts of money are provided for the development of Mumbai’s metropolitan area. In 2001 the reduction of housing’s interest rates and the allowing of foreign direct investment triggered a boast for the city’s real estate sector, and gathered huge amounts of capital investment from many different parts. For all these, the land covered with slums is just a development opportunity. This approach towards the housing problem has led to a staggering number of more than 400,000 family displacements since 2004. This type of, “accumulation by dispossession” comes alongside with enormous privatisations and the creation of economical parasites like five urban Special Economic Zones that will occupy 700 acres of Mumbai’s precious space2. At the same time investments and subsidies are used to city branding, improvements of the city’s transport system or the production of architecture of spectacle (mostly luxurious buildings for upper classes from foreign design firms). The culture of commodification, consumerism and individualism prevails.

No matter how difficult life in urban slums may be, reality in the rural areas of India seems even harsher. There, big cor-porations pluck large areas and exploit them for industrial purposes, destroying the environment and whole villages. The choices for local people are either to commit suicide,3 to take up arms and join the Maoist rebel groups that are continuing a guerilla warfare in a large part of India4, or to continue the internal migration to cities, thus intensifying the latter’s hous-ing problem.

ConclusionsAs we can see Mumbai is dominated by a series of contradictions, its social and spatial inequalities - like the fact that almost 70% of its inhabitants are forced to live in only 9% of its land - are the most obvious. Another is that an enormous number of poor people are those who produce the largest part of the city’s wealth through their extremely cheap labour, however, this wealth does not belong to them but to an inversely proportionally sized minority. The slum dwellers, the homeless, the street merchants and the hawkers are, arguably, those who produce what David Harvey calls the, “common of the city”, that is to say, its special character, ambience and identity that makes it different from others. Although these people have barely any material share of its space and infrastructures, and, more importantly, almost no control as how it develops, changes and reproduces itself. In a nutshell, these people lack what Henri Lefebvre calls, “right to the city”.5 Indeed, the vast spatial procedures happening in Mumbai, like the building of skyscrapers, the exploitation of space, the creation of Special Economic Zones, but also the changes in slum dwellers lives, either intense and violent like evictions, eradication of neighborhoods and displacements or even smaller and better, like the more rare upgrading of infrastructures of their areas, seem to be decided and enforced by a god-like subject, far away and completely outside of them. An architectural proposal that tries to address Mumbai’s social and spatial problems should start by approaching this issue.

1 Singh, Simpreet (2013), “Development, dispossession and accumulation: Mumbai in contemporary times” in Mumbai Reader 2013, Urban Design Research Institute2 Ibid.3 Death rates from suicides in rural India are staggering and the Maharashtra area is no exception.Davis, Michael (2006), Planet of Slums, Verso4 Kak, Sanjay (2013), Red Ant Dream, film5 Lefebvre, Henry (1996), “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell

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Emerging PARA-City (...) In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves (…). Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories. (...)

Jameson, Frefric (1984), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press Durham

(...)The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘free world’...

Žižek, Slavoj (2/9/2004), Knee-Deep, London Review of Books, Vol. 26, No.17

In order to tackle such problems and inequalities, a spatial proposal should at first refer to and act for those who suffer from them1. Due to the nature of the slums - the density, the size and their relation to the rest of the urban environment - a proposal in those specific areas could have multiple effects which, like slums’ ambience and character, could diffuse throughout the whole city. It is obvious that a proposal inside such a place should avoid large-scale interventions, like those used until now, with the devastating effects they can cause. On the contrary, it should try to respect and protect the envi-ronment and use its important spatial elements in order to intensify the social and consciousness results of symbiosis and collectivity they create.2 Thus, it is about a gentle, subtle intervention, which, with the minimum change, will try to trigger the maximum effects.

Based on the nature of the problem, we understand that a new proposal for its approach should avoid being just an ex-ternal effort of the immediate amelioration of slum dwellers’ lives, like simply providing an additional amenity.3 Not only might such an approach recycle or even aggravate the problem,4 but it will also reproduce a ‘saviour’ model; the idea of a

1 We should always keep in mind that a complete solution of such problems cannot be reached as long as it doesn’t radically address their true origins found in the social base of the economy, which are the inevitable economic exploitation and inequalities of a capitalistic way of production.2 An example of that is the complicated and gradual relation between private and public space, against the dominant architectural practice of clear divide and closure.La Cecla, Franco (2008), Against Architecture, PM Press3 Something that many of urban think tank projects seem unable to escape from.4 Providing an answer to a specific need, a certain amenity, in the existing economic reality, is sure to have the following results. Either it will be an attraction to more housing units intensifying the density and aggravating again the living conditions, or it will provoke gentrification chain events raising the land value and resulting to the eviction of current inhabitants. But even if this is not the case and a specific improvement of some dwell-ers’ quality of life is accomplished, it will only mean that there can be ‘better” slums, and not actually address the main issue which is the existence of the difference between them and the rest of the city and society. It would also function like a safety valve, inactivating revolutionary potentials from the slum dwellers (acting in the same way of the working class housing in the beginning of the industrial era according to Friedrich Engels).Engels, Friedrich (1872), The housing question

messianic subject that will try to change the life conditions of an object that it is outside of, a model that has been proven not only very limited and unsustainable, but also ineffective. It should not be about an engineering answer to pure material needs but an architectural proposal centered on the change of experience and consciousness through spatial and sense relations. The work of Julia King, Rahul Mehrotra or Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove5 are some examples of such at-tempts from gentle architectural interventions inside slum settlements6.

What a proposal should try to do is to urge slum dwellers to change the situation themselves. For, not only they know their needs better than anyone else, but they are also the only ones who can actually produce fundamental change, being the majority but also Mumbai’s main energy provider. What is needed to effect progress is a collective apprehension of them-selves: awareness of their exploitation, their power and capabilities, that is to say, a unifying consciousness of collectivity, the ability to see themselves as a united entity who can obtain voice and power. It is a political identity that is missing, a citizen status as a member of a certain social structure, the composition of a type of polis, a new city within and alongside or ‘para’ the current one.

5 Providing toilets and sewer systems for slum settlements, like in Julia King’s projects, has also an important effect in the relation between men and women and the mentality of the latter. On the other hand, Rahul Mehrotra’s proposal for toilets that can also function like community centers could work for intensifying collectivity. Finally, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove’s work with groups of slum dwellers for designing and upgrad-ing their communities makes the latter function in a collective way and act in a political level in order to defend their rights, although, some could say, still in an incoherent fragmented and partial way.Quirk, Vanessa (24/7/2014), “Introducing “Potty-Girl,” The Architect of the Future?” in Arch DailyMehrotra, Rahul (7/2/2013), Working In Mumbai, Architectural Association, lecture Srivastava, Rahul/ Echanove, Matias (2013), “The dweller and the slum-dweller” in Mumbai Reader 2013, Urban Design Research Institute6 Such a task is very similar to the will of the urbanists and architects of the Russian Avant Garde of the ‘20s. Their work can be described as the design and reconstruction of space at almost every possible scale in an effort to intervene in social behavior through answering specific needs, trying to produce the “new type human” of the newborn socialist society.Kopp, Anatole (1970), Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917-1935

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In order to approach this task in architectural terms, input from the field of the arts could be proven useful. More specifi-cally, we could be inspired by the method of the painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Giacometti when talking about his artistic production has said that his basic effort was always to, “render his vision”.1 What he was trying through his sculpting was not the creation of a mere object, a perfect autonomous form, but the research, examination, representation and understanding of the process of viewing. What he was attempting to do was not the forming of an item itself, but the construction of a specific experience, a proposal for the relation between the spectator and the object-sculpture. Taking a similar approach when considering designing for Mumbai could shift the importance and interest from the form of the buildings and the architectural objects themselves, to the intention and effort of constructing a spatial awareness that would create a social equivalent. This could be the product of an architecture, which offers visual experiences to its users-slum dwellers, such as broader horizons and the ability to see themselves from above, helping them to cognitively map2 and understand their position in relation with the rest of the city. It could also envelop and help simple everyday activities like walking, thus intensifying relations, or provide collective landmarks and places of encounter and meeting which would act like social condensers that urge and strengthen the sense of living together.

In this way Alberto Giacometti’s artistic approach offers a method for architectural and urban design to initially think of, approach and even confront the extreme and violent inequalities of this manifold and chaotic city.

1 Klemm, Christian (2001), Alberto Giacometti, New York : Museum of Modern Art, Zürich : Kunsthaus Zürich2 Jameson, Fredric (1990), “Cognitive Mapping” in: Nelson, C./Grossberg, L. [ed]. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, University of Illinois PressLynch, Kevin, (1960), The Image of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge MA

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Images Mumbai - satelite view

Slums - satellite view

Traffic

Buildings

Barbered wire fences

Street practices

housing religion markets other activities

Slums form above

Inside slums

Makeshift decorations

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