Daily Times

The Capital Development Authority (CDA) in Islamabad bulldozed more than a dozen slums in some sectors of the city in April 2014. Slum dwellers resisted this clearance but they could not stop the coming of the bulldozers. Unfortunately, this is happening at a time when slums are not considered irksome either for cities or economic growth around the world. However, our policymakers do not want to know this. In order to learn that slums perform important functions, our slum clearance policymakers should watch Lutz Konermann’s 2010 documentary Dharavi-Slum for Sale. The documentary captures the important economic contribution Dharavi makes in Mumbai, in India and the world. It is easy to deduce from the documentary that many other slums around the world are also performing a similar economic function.
The idea and practice of slum clearance has a long genealogy in urban planning theories based on the ideals of modernist urbanism. Though modernist urban theory has largely been criticised in the west, Konnermas’s documentary tells us that it is still strong in our part of the world. Therefore, we need to talk a little about its take on slums to better understand the documentary.
If you have ever heard the word slum, you will know it is a pejorative term used across the globe by powerful bureaucrats, urban planners and real estate businesses to justify the demolition of habitats belonging to the poor. Since many sociologists have been and continue to be aligned with the powerful in present times, they have contributed to justifying the construction of ‘slums’ as pathological places. As a result, when bulldozers are dispatched to clear slums, the dispatchers are hailed.
Slums are not urban problems. Rashmi Bansal and Deepak Gandhi’s Poor Little Rich Slum makes it clear. The book is about the hope Dharavi offers not only to India but also to the world. After reading this book, bulldozer dispatchers might know how ordinary people make big contributions to the world economy. Robert Neuwirth’s books, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World and Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, also tell that the economic contribution of slums is the lifeblood of urban economies in many countries. Dharavi-Slum for Sale also highlights the economic contribution of Dharavi to India. It suggests that slums are part of the solution to the problems our cities are facing. A number of scholars such as Hernando de Soto, John Turner, Stewart Brand, Arif Hasan and Babar Mumtaz have demonstrated that slums can self-transform into adequate physical and social places if supported by the government.
Unfortunately, those in positions of power do not realise this. As a result, clearances are being carried out across the world, the way they happened in Islamabad. In 2005, Mumbai city bulldozed 67,000 homes in slum areas. Where could these people go overnight? As a result, new slums developed. When Delhi was preparing for the 2010 Olympics, it demolished many slums and threw out more than 50,000 people into huts in the peripheries of the city. In these depressing circumstances, some people are trying to highlight the resilience of the people in slums. Andrew Marr’s documentary, Living in the City (2011), tells the story of life in the slums of Bangladesh. Gary Hutswit’s documentary, Urbanized (2011), and the Danish Film Institute’s documentary, Cities on Speed (2009), document the positive contributions of slums to the functioning of cities in the developing world.
Dharavi-Slum for Sale belongs to this genre. It mainly documents the conflict between the neoliberal dream of the city and the realities of the common people. Its story revolves around Architect Mukesh Mehta’s dream of turning Dharavi into multistorey building apartments under the Dharavi Slum Redevelopment Project. Mehta’s project is opposed by local activists because they think it will take their land, build tiny apartments of 225 square feet each for the slum dweller’s family and gentrify the remaining land to make profit. Dharavi is unacceptable as it is and it cannot be upgraded where it is, both by the Maharashtra government and Mukesh Mehta. Therefore, they are trying to lure people into giving their land in exchange for tiny apartments. A new experiment of clearing slums for tiny apartments in high-rise buildings has been planned. And why not? Mehta wants to make Mumbai a slum-free city.
While watching the documentary, one remembers Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). When slums were being cleared in Edinburgh, he became a conservationist arguing to improve them little by little. Later, Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) also intimated that slum clearances would have negative consequences. Dharavi-Slum for Sale is basically about this debate. If the purpose of urban planners is to improve the lives of slum dwellers, why do they not do this in the least harmful way? The only way we can do this with least harm is to conserve slums and help them improve gradually, rather than eradicate them.
While watching Mehta in the documentary, one realises that he is a continuation of the long list of influential technical experts who rebuilt cities on the corpses of slums. Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891), Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris aka Le Corbusier (1887-1950), Jacob August Riis (1849-1914), Charles Forrest Palmer (1892-1973), Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) equaled slums to crimes, drugs, drinking and immorality. These experts not only contributed to the clearance of slums but development of criminology also. Much of criminology would not have developed had settlements of the poor not been constructed as slums. As a result, when technical experts propose slum clearance, they can easily get the cooperation of police and their guns.
The times of imposing pathological prejudices on slums are passing, albeit slowly. Instead, the constructive role of slums is being studied. And the documentary does that by highlighting the lives of Dharavi’s entrepreneurs. Anyone watching it will get an idea about how the informal economy works. Homes, streets and grounds; it is the same land used for social and economic purposes. Without romanticising, the documentary shows small places producing goods worth millions of dollars. Who can use the land more optimally than people in the slums? Entrepreneurs and workers use the same places to work, live and celebrate.
While exposing neoliberal redevelopment ideas, Bhau Korde, a Dharavi activist, regards Mehta’s plans as destructive for the businesses of people living there. He observes that 20 to 25 people employed in an average productive unit in Dharavi will lose work once high-rise buildings replace the slum. Once Mehta builds high-rises by clearing Dharavi, Korde fears the slum dwellers will have no place to live. And businesses will definitely suffer.
In economic terms, Dharavi is so important that architect and urban designer Aneerudha Paul, who is director of Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA), regards Dharavi as a special economic zone for a million people. A number of commentators acknowledge that Dharavi has an economy of $ 700 million to one billion dollars per annum. The experience of Dharavi should be replicated.
The documentary is appreciable given the fact that the Indian film industry, Bollywood, also depicts urban slums as tapori places, infested with poverty, vandalism, purposelessness and social vice. Even 1992’s Indian film Dharavi constructed the slum negatively. In these circumstances, the biggest contribution of this documentary is that it brings to light the actual life in slums. After a long time refreshing discourses are emerging on topics previously considered unimportant.
Konnerman has done a remarkable job in producing this documentary. The documentary provides actual stories of hope. Instead of adopting neoliberal ideas of housing and commercialisation, urban policymakers should adopt the practices of the people. The way the people of Dharavi and other slums are shaping their lives is remarkable. Policymakers need to learn resilience from slum dwellers.

The writer is an assistant professor at the FC College