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.