Sustainable lifestyle

On Mahashivaratri, Shiva's birthday, a street is transfigured and turned into a temporary temple. A building is not needed to convey the sacred (heterotopia is neither necessarily a building, nor permanent). Social practice takes place anyway. Who needs architecture? Although it becomes clear to me when studying Dharavi, that architecture has a dialectical relation to our lifestyle. The actual structure of Dharavi, like compressed villages, allows for a specific lifestyle, sustainable in some aspects (poor people are able to survive, social structures are strong), but not in others (dogs have turned blue from the poisonous emissions of the industries). A different architecture of high-rises will generate other lifestyles, maybe not as sustainable for the poor. Next phase of this semester (Architectural Body) will bring on the challenge of designing a developed and preferably more sustainable lifestyle. It will probably keep me awake at night.

Fieldwork in kumbharwada, the potters' nagar

I meet Ranchhod, a proud potter in kumbharwada. He makes a strong impression, talks english fluently - he was the only one of his generation who went to college. We have an interesting discussion about the future of the area. The interview turns into a dialogue. I discover later he will be starring in a coming documentary about the future of Dharavi. He tells me all children go to college today, people's minds evolve and what was enough yesterday won't be enough tomorrow. Change is bound to happen.

Our group organises a small workshop with children from the area, with help from inhabitants of kumbharwada. To get things organized is quite difficult but proves instructive (which spaces are to be used, are the open spaces communal or private, how do we transport the clay to the chosen spot, etc). We ask the children to use clay to build their dream house. Even a couple of grown-ups show interest and participate. All participants get a prize at the end, after a short interview.

Our last day in the area doesn't go according to plan because of lack of time. We wanted to give photographs taken the previous day to each participant, and use them to discuss with the families about the future of kumbharwada. From what we have gathered the inhabitants are very aware of the changes ahead, but they were understandingly not willing to share their plans with us the first days. But I'm pretty sure it would have been a good method to open up for a dialogue, judging from the reactions when we gave away the photographs.

Sophistication

While watching television at the guest house, I discover a local channel that features old bollywood movies and shows ads for businesses in Dharavi, that change everyday.

Food for thought

Rahul Srivastava and Matias Sendoa Echanove from Urban Typhoon talk about Mumbai consisting of denied villages. The informal city shouldn't be considered an anachronism, but a highly sophisticated and functional space (highly relevant I think!). The problem is not the slum, but the urban imagination.

Mapping Dharavi

In the evening of march 10, we are sent out to map a main road in Dharavi. But going out at night proves to be foolish and many groups go through pretty rough experiences. During the 3 weeks in Dharavi we are constantly warned by local people not to go out after darkness falls. Especially women are rarely seen outside at night. My group walks 60 Ft Rd up and down several times, but whenever we try to make notations (or take pictures) the atmosphere quickly turns sour. Dharavi can also be a very hostile environment. It is of course possible to study hostile environments, but an evening and an afternoon are not enough. More time should be spent on establishing a relationship with the people, before any actual fieldwork can be done.

Spoiling the man

Bhau Korde, a key figure of the Koli Wada community, claims that the government's proposed plan spoils the man. "Man is a social animal, when you architects design a house you destroy this." In the planned high-rises each family from Dharavi (with proof of their living there since 2000) would get a flat, but the social structure and the possibility to earn a living is lost. To work on the communal harmony after the riots of 1992-93, the different communities started discussing together what happened and tried to achieve a mutual understanding. "Only when the grassroots work, you get 100% results." But although I sympathise with this approach, I also fear it is too idealistic, because some problems require solving on more levels, Dharavi is not only enough in itself, but also part of the city that is Mumbai. Is dialogue only possible on grassroot level? Why not vertically? The fact that one party has power over the other is of course the answer. How can balance be created to allow for real dialogue, between equal parts, to take place? Is it even possible? Where does the power balance lie between the grassroot level of the struggling people of Dharavi and the government's plans to develop Mumbai as a new Shanghai? Answers to that question are complex, but some hints were given during the rest of the workshop. International focus from media acts as a deterrent to go ahead and force the development says Kalpana Sharma, journalist and author of Rediscovering Dharavi. A member of Mashal (the organisation that is carrying biometric surveys in Dharavi) explains that the very situation of Dharavi within Mumbai works to its advantage: squeezed between two of the three railway lines that millions of Mumbaikers use everyday, the inhabitants of Dharavi could make the city stop. The city is also dependent on the informal work sector to function. Imagine if the million people of Dharavi would go on a strike for one day: no taxis, no food, to name only two obvious effects.
So they are in a position of possible negociation with the government. From what I have gathered, discussion has been focusing on the amount of sqft each family would get in the new plan. Still no alternative plan has been proposed. Maybe because a truly sustainable solution would have to involve not only Dharavi, but Mumbai, its metropolitan region, even the whole country since migration to the city from villages throughout India occurs because people are looking for work.

David Harvey, Lieven de Cauter, Mukesh Mehta and the boys

David Harvey talks about the right to the city. Arguing within a marxist view of the world, he sees urbanization as a key to the capitalistic system. In times of crisis, when growth is stopped, the system circonvents crisis using urbanization to invest capital. The system constantly reinvents itself, the scale becoming bigger each time, and finds its apostle in an urban planner, like Haussmann, reengineering Paris, later admired by Robert Moses, himself answering with suburbanization to the crisis after WWII, again in a bigger scale than before.

I felt pretty convinced by his analysis, especially the very sharp reflection on how ideas about the urban are applied, then dismissed and later revalued, when a new economic crisis arises. I don't believe in culture being independent of the course of events in the world, or self-sufficient. To quote Edward W. Said, from his Culture and Imperialism (that we discussed in one of the seminars): "For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire, (...) and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture; then in turn imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences, and a presence of ruler and rules alike within the culture." I would also like to quote Lieven de Cauter here: "some people call me conspiracy theorist, my answer to them is that there is a conspiracy against conspiracy theories!"


Harvey's ideas about the right to the city are definitely spot on. Today we can see the appalling discrepancy between the city of slums and the city of construction sites. We are not building cities for everyone. Dharavi is the perfect example, an informal settlement with strong communities and industries, with a potential for development, different from the one proposed in the Redevelopment Plan by architect Mukesh Mehta. He expresses the wish to turn Dharavi into a middle-class neighbourhood, using words like sustainability, the poor man's struggle for a better life, branding of products, improvement of skills, social corridors created in vertical schemes, terrasses where children can play. But his answer on the question of the transition from an informal lifestyle to one that immediately requires more income, is (unconsciously?) naive. The time-span he talks about is years, but who will be able to stretch their income for so long? When the proposed plan is scrutinized it seems obvious to me that it has fallacies. What is more convincing in his discourse is his ambition to create a strategy that would make the world slum-free. I think his wish to go to history for this achievement is far more convincing than his claim to have spent 6 months in the slum (later in the lecture it became "3 or 4 months") to understand the inhabitants of Dharavi and their struggle.