“The slum-dwellers,” he adds, “are experts at live-work space design. They spontaneously do mixed-use! We just have to learn from them.” [1]

When homes are also considered places of work – either unpaid housework or paid industrial homework – then the industrial geography of the city assumes new meanings. [2]

Dharavi has been described as “Asia’s largest slum”. Between 600,000 and 1 million people live in 85 dense neighborhoods clustered on 2.4 square kilometers of low-lying, marshy land in the heart of Mumbai [3]. (Mumbai’s total population was estimated at 18.2 million in 2005 by UNDESA (2010).) It is one of the most overcrowded areas of Mumbai – and one of the worst-served by infrastructure. Dharavi contains an estimated 1,440 people for each toilet seat, meaning that “streets, lacking drainage, become channels for filthy water carrying human excrement” during the rainy season [4]. In many respects, it has become a byword for urban squalor and poverty.

It’s also a chunk of incredibly valuable real estate. The relaxation of foreign investment rules brought an influx of capital into Mumbai in the 1990s, and land prices skyrocketed [5]. The city’s central business district was “the most expensive in the world” in the mid-90s, while “residential real estate prices spiralled up as well, in part in response to the influx of money from nonresident Indians” [6]. Dharavi, which lies between two of the main rail lines, with close access to the new financial district and the international airport [7], has been describes as the “Opportunity of the Millennium” for developers [8]. Remaking Dharavi would open up new territory for foreign direct investment and globally-linked industries that would benefit from proximity to the international airport and CBD. In the words of Solomon Benjamin, it would exorcise the “spectre of cities besieged by cancerous slums” by putting a “modernist spin on attracting economic development: ‘Bangalore transforming into a Singapore, Bombay [Mumbai] into a Shanghai, and Delhi into a London’!” [9]

The Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), first proposed in 1996 by Mukesh Mehta, an American-trained architect working in Mumbai and started in 2004, is the latest attempt to capitalize upon inflated land values. It is intended to mix slum upgrading with the development of new office space and housing for Mumbai’s upper and middle classes [10]. The $2 billion DRP [11] calls for Dharavi to be divided into five zones, each of which would be designed and constructed by a separate property development firm. Residents who could prove their occupancy prior to 1995 (later extended to 2000) would be offered apartments on the same sites or new locations in exchange for their land [12]. A portion of profits from the sale of newly-constructed housing and commercial space would be used to finance upgraded housing for Dharavi’s low-income residents, while the rest would be returned to the city government and private developers.

The purpose of the DRP is to globalize Mumbai; to create the sorts of “internationally competitive” living spaces and commercial areas required by globally-mobile businesses and workers in the “knowledge economy”. But this program ignores Dharavi’s actually-existing ties to the broader urban and global economies. The slum houses a wide range of informal enterprises that are integrated into globally disaggregated assembly lines through subcontracting arrangements. While we tend to think of slums as a form of low-income housing, Dharavi’s economic role is at least as important. Its living spaces often double as informal and unregulated production spaces – like many slums, it is a “spontaneous” form of mixed-use design [13].

Roughly 70 to 80 percent of Dharavi’s residents work within the slum – an unusually high ratio compared with many other Indian slums [14]. It contains at least 5,000 industrial enterprises, which produce textiles, pottery and leather, jewellery, food products, and so on and so forth [15]. Its southwest corner “has a major cluster of plastic recycling factories, with some estimates of well over 500 units,” while many streets are “lined with retailing, food stands, kiosks, taxis, small restaurants, some hotels, etc.” [16]. These industries “provide incomes and livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of Mumbai citizens who would otherwise have no employment” [17]. Because they also entail a number of negative externalities – low wages, unsafe conditions, and high levels of air and water pollution – they rely upon the existence of flexible, unregulated space in the city center.

Work done in Dharavi is a crucial part of the city’s economy [18]. Patel and Arputham observe that it “probably contributes far more to the Indian economy than most special economic zones.” Its annual turnover has been estimated at between $700 million and $1 billion [19]. And while Dharavi is somewhat unusual in the magnitude and diversity of its industries, it is part of a wider trend in India’s globalizing economy. According to Sudarshan et al, 30 to 40 percent of India’s exports now originate in the informal economy, which “includes entire industrial clusters making goods for export (metalware, machine tools, leatherware, textiles and garments, tools and equipment, and some IT services)” [20]. The expansion of India’s international trade is related to the growth of subcontracting networks and industrial homework.

Over the past two decades, the country’s manufacturing sector has undergone parallel processes of upgrading and downgrading: businesses in the formal sector have become more capital intensive, displacing labor-intensive work into the decentralized and more flexible informal sector [21]. According to Sanyal and Bhattacharya, “sub-contracting from large firms to small firms has been increasing and consequently numbers of homeworkers, to whom small firms in turn sub-contract, are also increasing” (see also UNIFEM 2000). In 1999/2000, there were approximately 28 million homeworkers in the non-agricultural labor force, 30 percent of whom were located in urban areas [22]. The bottom reaches of subcontracting networks are predominantly female. Rani and Unni found that in 2000/01, “home-based [production] workers constituted about 81 percent of all female workers and about 46 percent of male workers.”

As the case of Dharavi demonstrates, these production arrangements also rely upon certain spatial arrangements. Slums are often ideal locations for combining living and work space – a fact that is often not appreciated by redevelopment projects. Consequently, the DRP is doubly problematic for residents: it threatens both their shelter and their livelihoods. Many of the central issues of contention relate to the preservation of Dharavi’s informal industries and mixed-use spaces. As a result, “the Dharavi resistance qualifies more as a ‘labour’ mobilization than slum dwellers’ resistance” [23].

The current master plan “entails building the rehabilitation housing zones on less than half of the original land, and allocating only 2 percent of the land to retain ‘‘non-polluting’’ industries” [24]. On the one hand, this would either increase density to an unsustainable level, or displace many of Dharavi’s residents. The project “would likely create additional homelessness, as some estimates suggest that about a quarter of the existing residents would not be eligible for rehabilitation based on the residency requirement,” which provides for resettlement only for households that can prove residency prior to 2000 [25].

On the other, the DRP proposes to replace existing shelters, which often mix domestic and industrial uses, with small residential spaces in high-rise buildings. As a consequence, the “entire business district as Dharavi is under threat because most of the enterprises do not have licences and so cannot find any place in the new redeveloped Dharavi [26]. Although “non-hazardous and non-polluting” workshops can potentially be rehoused, this will still mean closure of several important industries, such as pottery, leather goods, and recycling, and the loss (or displacement to the urban periphery) of tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Two community organizations have contested the DRP, moving it into a “zone of negotiation” between inhabitants and city government. In a series of articles published in the academic journal Environment and Urbanization, the leaders of the Alliance have provided regular updates on political negotiations over the project [27].

To date, residents’ activism has secured several important gains. First, proposed densities have been lowered significantly. New guidelines issued in October 2008 specified a maximum building height of eight or ten stories, as opposed to original plans for 20 to 30 story apartment buildings [28]. The size of rehabilitation apartments for eligible slum-dwellers has also been increased, from 225 square feet to between 250 and 300 square feet [29]. This will, of course, make them more livable – but it will also provide additional space for home-based industries. Likewise, there have been incremental improvements to the space available for work in Dharavi. The original plans called for 50 percent of the floor space offered for sale by developers to be used for upper/middle-class housing [30]. Guidelines released in 2008 specify that 80 percent be available for commercial use – although there are wide variations between the five proposed sectors [31].

The fate of Dharavi is likely to set a precedent for future slum redevelopment projects in India. Activists and developers are closely watching the case of Dharavi: if such a large, economically important space can be redeveloped without significant consultation with residents, it will open the door for similar efforts elsewhere. In their latest update, Arputham and Patel note that the DRP is already being considered as a model for the redevelopment of a 1.1 square kilometre slum adjoining the Mumbai International Airport, which currently houses 85,000 or more households on commercially-valuable land.

I suppose that I’m alluding to two different types of outcome here. The first is a social one – the DRP would make many current Dharavi residents worse off, or at any rate reduce their ability to make choices about the city in which they live. But leaving that aside (and it’s a large thing to set aside!), the DRP may be a flawed project even on purely macroeconomic terms. It’s an attempt to develop Mumbai as a global city that completely runs roughshod over the actually-existing globalization occurring there. In a sense, it’s a struggle over whether a type of informal mixed-use design, and a certain mode of global integration, is allowed to continue within Mumbai.

[On the topic of the DRP, this old Airoots post, which makes a similar argument for understanding Dharavi as a "self-generating post-industrial city", is also worth a read:

The inhabitants of Dharavi have a fantastic capacity to solve their own problems. For many, Dharavi has been a platform for social mobility to middle-classdoom. However, one problem the inhabitants cannot get their head around is the threat of a top down redevelopment plan backed by the state. This burdens the residents of Dharavi more than anything else. Not only does the state not help, it even comes in the way of self-development. Why would anyone invest in their homes or business if it risks being bulldozed in a few months or years?

What seems to separate Dharavi from the DRP more than anything else is a generational gap. In the age of user-generated content, open-source and P2P, the net generation connects intuitively with the archetype of the squatter, who, just like the hacker in another realm, delves in and strives to overcome loopholes leftover by the system, and uses community and social networking as its modus operandi. In fact, it makes total sense to understand Dharavi as a self-generating post-industrial city...

More than a master plan, Dharavi needs a liberation of the imagination. Lets drop the heavy CAD maps and GIS surveys and zoom in to the street level. All Dharavi needs is some creative photoshoping and less of a patronising colonial gaze. If allowed to develop through their own internal skills, if provided for with basic infrastructural and amenities, the hundreds of enclaves, will keep improving their conditions, as they have always done. While no one can imagine what the neighbourhood may look in a couple of decades, it is certain to represent the city’s spirit like nothing else.

Click through for the references for Peter's post.]

References

Arputham, Jockin and Patel, Sheela. 2010. “Recent developments in plans for Dharavi and for the airport slums in Mumbai.” Environment and Urbanization 22(2): 501-504.

Benjamin, Solomon. 2008. “Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 719-29.

Chalana, Manish. 2010. “Slumdogs vs. Millionaires: Balancing Urban Informality and Global Modernity in Mumbai, India.” Journal of Architectural Education ?(?): 25-37.

Fernando, Valerie. 2009. “In the Heart of Bombay: the Dharavi Slum.” Available online at esp.habitants.org. Accessed 20 June 2011.

Frenkel, Stephen and Kuruvilla, Sarosh. 2002. “Logics of Action, Globalization, and Changing Employment Relations in China, India, Malaysia, and the Philippines.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 55(3): 387-412.

Grant, Richard and Nijman, Jan. 2003. “The Re-Scaling of Uneven Development in Ghana and India.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95(5): 467-481.

Harriss-White, Barbara. 2010. “Globalization, the Financial Crisis and Petty Commodity Production in India’s Socially Regulated Informal Economy”. In Bowles and Harriss.

Harriss-White, Barbara and Sinha, Anushree, eds. 2007. Trade Liberalization and India’s Informal Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mason, Paul. 8 August 2011. “Slumlands — filthy secret of the modern mega-city.” New Statesman. Available online at http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2011/08/slum-city-manila-gina-estero.

Nijman, Jan. 2009. “A Study of Space in Mumbai’s Slums.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 101(1): 4-17.

Patel, Sheela and Arputham, Jockin. 2007. “An offer of partnership or a promise of conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai?” Environment and Urbanization 19(2): 501-508.

Patel, Sheela and Arputham, Jockin. 2008. “Plans for Dharavi: negotiating a reconciliation between a state-driven market redevelopment and residents’ aspirations.” Environment and Urbanization. 20(1): 243-253.

Patel, Sheela, Arputham, Jockin, Burra, Sundar and Savchuk, Katia. 2009. “Getting the information base for Dharavi’s redevelopment.” Environment and Urbanization 21(1): 241-251.

Patel, Shirish. 2010. “Dharavi: Makeover or Takeover?” Economic and Political Weekly 45(24): 47-54.

Rani, Uma and Unni, Jeemol. 2009. “Do Economic Reforms Influence Home-Based Work? Evidence from India.” Feminist Economics 15(3): 191-225.

Sanyal and Bhattacharya. 2010. “Beyond the Factory: Globalization, Informalization of Production and the Changing Locations of Labour”. In Bowles and Harriss, eds. Globalization and Labour in China and India: Impacts and Responses.

Sudarshan, Ratna, Vekataraman, Shanta and Bhandari, Laveesh. 2007. “Subcontracted homework in India: A case study of three sectors”. In Mehrotra and Biggeri: 173-209.

UNIFEM. 2000. A Preliminary Study on the Productive Linkages of Indian Industry with Home based Women Workers through Subcontracting Systems in Manufacturing Sector. New Delhi: United Nations Development Fund for Women.

United Nations. 2006. Human Development Report 2006. New York: United Nations Publishing.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2010. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.

The filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar, the auteur of the toilet documentary Bumbay, told a startled interviewer that in Bombay “half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in, so they shit outside. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and a half million kilos of shit each morning.” (Mike Davis, Planet of Slums: 142)

In India, where distance from one’s own excrement can be seen as the virtual marker of class distinction, the poor, for too long having lived literally in their own shit, are finding ways to place some distance between their waste and themselves. The toilet exhibitions are a transgressive display of this fecal politics… (Appadurai, Arjun, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics” in Public Culture: 39)

“Slum” is a word with a weighty and questionable history, but in the last decade it has been “operationalized” into a small set of criteria by housing agency UN-Habitat. Although it has become commonplace to talk of “a billion slum-dwellers” globally¹ , it would be more accurate to discuss the infrastructural and legal shortcomings of developing-world cities. For example, in 2010 the UN’s Global Urban Observatory estimated that  185 million Indians, or 50.7 percent of the country’s urban population, lived in slum conditions². Actual living situations are highly diverse, ranging from Kolkata’s pavement-dwellers to Mumbai’s chawls, or run-down former factory housing, but one thing that most slums have in common is a profusion of shit.

According to the World Bank, in 2008 46 percent of Indian urbanites – or nine out of every ten living in a slum – lacked “improved sanitation facilities”, meaning that people living within them lack sewerage and public toilets³. Where community toilets do exist, poor maintenance and overuse often render them unsanitary before long. For example, a survey of 151 slum settlements in Mumbai conducted by Mahila Milan/NSDF found that there were 3,433 municipal toilet seats, 80 percent of which were not working, to serve one million people – a ratio of one toilet for every 1,488 people⁴. Likewise, a 1993 survey of half a million slum-dwellers in Kanpur found that 66 percent had no toilets. Lacking facilities, they shit in the open or in waterways.

As a result, residents of slums face a disproportionately high disease burden, with high incidences of cholera and diarrhea. “One macabre joke among Mumbai’s urban poor is that they are the only ones in the city who cannot afford to get diarrhea. Lines at the few existing public toilets are often so long that the wait is an hour or more, and of course medical facilities for stemming the condition are also hard to find”⁵. But in addition to being a public health crisis, the lack of sanitation is especially concerning for women, who are most severely affected by the lack of privacy when defecating⁶. In public toilets, they are frequently harassed. Defecating in the open in the absence of toilets is even more risky; as a result, most women choose to do so at night or in the early hours of the morning, which in turn leads to gastric disorders.

There is no obvious solution to this particular infrastructural shortcoming. Because many slum settlements are illegal or informal, occupying the margins of railway lines and airports and other undeveloped land, city governments are not keen to extend sewers and other utilities into them. Funding and building public toilets is often problematic for the same reason. When the Indian government allocated money for toilet block construction in the 1990s, most of it went unspent due to city governments’ disinterest in upgrading slums. In Pune (population: 4.4. million in 2005⁷), a municipal initiative resulted in the construction of only 22 toilet blocks between 1992 and 1999⁸. The toilets that were built often became unusable relatively quickly due to overuse and a lack of maintenance or cleaning. Even in cases where projects were completed and maintained, the “focus on cost recovery from the poor means that sanitation is often provided not according to those who need it most, but according to how many people can pay a contribution”⁹.

I’d argue that sanitation in Indian cities is not just a challenge for urban planning and architecture; it’s also an essentially political problem. One of the most successful programs of community toilet construction involved not just new design elements but the development of what Arjun Appadurai describes as “fecal politics”. After the failure of Pune’s city government to deliver toilets, its municipal commissioner invited NGOs to bid for construction and maintenance contracts. A national shelter activist group, the Alliance between the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), the National Slum-Dwellers Federation (NSDF), and Mahila Milan (or “Women Together” in Hindi), won a contract to build 320 toilet blocks with 6,400 seats throughout the city¹⁰. As a result, “between 1999 and 2001, more toilets were constructed and more money spent than in the previous 30 years”¹¹. Equally important, the new toilets were designed and constructed by those living in the slums, resulting in lower building costs and several important architectural innovations.

The Alliance’s success in sanitation is a result of its particular model of political activism, which is rooted in the everyday experience of slum-dwellers but diffused among national and global networks. Its “politics of shit,” tested in Pune and subsequently replicated in Mumbai and other cities, is a response to the infrastructural and legal dilemmas facing its members. Others have written at greater length on the organization and operation of the Alliance¹². Rather than duplicating all of their work, I’d like to discuss its technique of employing the knowledge and expertise of the urban poor.

Fecal politics relies upon information generated by and for slum-dwellers, testing and legitimizing new or existing uses of urban space. Appadurai describes it as “a politics of show-and-tell”, in which slum-dwellers “claim, refine, and define certain ways of doing things in spaces they already control and then use these practices to show donors, city officials, and other activists that their ‘precedents’ are good ones and encourage such actors to invest further in them.” The Alliance’s projects invariably employ community knowledge of the daily challenges of slum living – particularly in terms of housing quality and access to water and sanitation – to devise ways of improving their lives. As Burra, Patel, and Kerr note, this is appropriate given that slum-dwellers are the people who actually build cities:

People are the best experts. A long-established myth is that experts with advanced degrees are needed to plan improvements in slums. But the realities of life in India’s slums are best understood by slum dwellers themselves. If experts had a better track record, their expertise might have more credibility – but the deplorable state of infrastructure in Kanpur or Bangalore suggests there are serious holes in this “expertise”. The slums in India are home for most of those who actually build cities: masons, pipe layers, cement mixers, brick carriers, shuttering designers, stone cutters, trench diggers and metal fabricators. The poor, as they construct their own homes and neighbourhoods, are already the designers and implementers of India’s most far-reaching systems of housing and service delivery. The systems they use are not ideal, are largely “illegal”, and often inequitable, but they reach down to the poorest groups and cover far more ground and affect far more lives than any government programme could ever achieve.

Quite often, the “people” Burra et al are referring to are women. Although women still face a number of structural barriers to participation in the public sphere, as suggested by their low rate of labor force participation (in 2009, 81.1 percent of men were in the workforce, compared with only 32.8 percent of women), they are often the most knowledgeable about living conditions in slums. Most women in urban India labor in the home, performing unpaid domestic work or various types of subcontracted homework, and they are most heavily affected by the lack of water and sewerage. As a result, women play an important role within the Alliance: they are strongly represented in its leadership and are responsible for much of the financial side of slum upgrading through Mahila Milan’s savings collectives.

The politics of shit is, of course, an intrinsically local thing. What could be more intimate, more deeply particular to an individual place, than defecation? But at the same time, the lack of toilets and sewers is a problem shared by most slum communities, irrespective of their own particularities. As a consequence, the Alliance’s work tends to cross geographic scales: it integrates local struggles into national (the 750,000 members of NSDF across 52 Indian cities¹³) and international (Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), a federation of shelter groups from Latin America, Africa and Asia¹⁴) networks. This gives the Alliance scope to scale up projects and precedents that have proven successful at a local level. This process facilitates “horizontal learning” through the exchange of slum upgrading methods, critical debate, and solidarity among shelter activists and slum-dwellers.

Practicing fecal politics has delivered concrete gains for Indian slum-dwellers. In Pune, the Alliance ultimately constructed 400 toilet blocks with roughly 20 seats apiece, which are capable of serving roughly half a million people a day provided that they are kept clean. They were designed, built, and managed by community members, those who “actually build cities”, rather than by outside contractors as is normal for such projects. In doing so, Pune’s slum-dwellers were able to draw not just upon their own experiences but on knowledge developed within the Alliance as a result of smaller-scale projects carried out in  Mumbai, Kanpur, Bangalore between 1988 and 1996 with funding from the UK charity Homeless International and from slum-dwellers themselves¹⁵.

The result was better toilet facilities constructed at a lower cost – 5 percent under municipal cost estimates, according to Burra and Patel. Design innovations made them well-lit, better-ventilated and easier to clean, important considerations given that public toilets in Indian cities have a history of becoming rapidly fouled. For example, storage tanks were increased in size to ensure that there was sufficient water for washing up and keeping facilities clean. Input from women, who are particularly vulnerable to the lack of appropriate toilet facilities, resulted in several simple but important new features. Toilet blocks were designed to reduce harassment by including separate entrances for men and women, and seats that did not directly face each other. And, recognizing that children are generally shunted aside in latrine queues, blocks of children’s toilets were also constructed. As the picture below shows, these were specifically designed to be easy for children to use, with handles, smaller openings, and child-friendly decorations¹⁶.

The Alliance recognized from the start that constructing a toilet isn’t sufficient to improve sanitation in the slums, as they must be cleaned and maintained in order to be usable. Collecting the money to do so is challenging, as it must balance usability with accessibility. “User-pays” fees for public toilets are unaffordable for many residents. They are usually set at one rupee per month – a small amount that adds up quite rapidly. Families living at the official urban poverty line of 20 rupees per person per day would strain to pay even that. Consequently, the Alliance has relied upon community organization and a system of affordable collective payments from slum households – roughly 20 rupees per month – to pay for maintenance¹⁷. In order to hold maintenance costs down, caretakers and their families are provided with a room in toilet blocks as part of their compensation.

In keeping with its principles, the Alliance has actively shared the knowledge it has developed, both within its own network and with other interested groups. Communities have put on “toilet festivals” to celebrate and publicize their new facilities, thereby reinventing “this private act of humiliation and suffering as the scene of technical innovation, collective celebration, and carnivalesque play with officials from the state, the World Bank, and middle-class officialdom in general”¹⁸. This has helped to stimulate interest in community-built and -maintained toilet blocks among city governments, other NGOs and CBOs, and the World Bank. As a result, Pune’s toilets have set a precedent for future sanitation improvements in Indian slums. For example, in 2000 the World Bank and the Mumbai Municipal Corporation funded the Alliance to construct 320 similar toilet blocks in that city¹⁹. In 2001, the Alliance’s successes in Pune and Mumbai encouraged the national government to provide subsidies for similar public toilet construction programs²⁰.

There are many more things that could – and should – be said on fecal politics. I’ve hinted at a few of them here. Obviously, there is a lot more to say about the architectural practice that it might generate. But speaking for a moment as a political scientist, what I find fascinating about the work of the Alliance is the way that it alters the meaning of citizenship. If the politics of shit is a way for slum-dwellers to “place some distance between their waste and themselves” – both literally and figuratively – it is also a way for them to claim the right to live in the city. When Bapat and Agarwal interviewed slum-dwellers in Pune and Mumbai about water and sanitation issues, a recurring complaint was about their own invisibility to politicians and planners. By building their own toilets, and then showing them off in toilet festivals, they reclaim some of the legitimacy denied to them by governments.

Click through for references and tables.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 2002. “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics.” Public Culture 14(1): 21-47.
Bapat, Meera and Agarwal, Indu. 2003. “Our needs, our priorities: women and men from the slums in Mumbai and Pune talk about their needs for water and sanitation.” Environment and Urbanization 15(2): 71-86.
Burra, Sundar and Patel, Sheela. 2002. “Community toilets in Pune and other Indian cities.” PLA Notes 43: 43-45.
Burra, Sundar, Patel, Sheela and Kerr, Thomas. 2003. “Community-designed, built and managed toiled blocks in Indian cities.” Environment and Urbanization 15(2): 11-32.
Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.
Patel, Sheela, Burra, Sundar and D’Cruz, Celine. 2001. “Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) – foundations to treetops. “ Environment and Urbanization 13(2): 45-60.
Patel, Sheela and Mitlin, Diane. 2001. “The work of SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan.” Institution Institute for Environment and Development Working Paper Series on Poverty Reduction in Urban Areas 5.
Satterthwaite, David, McGranahan, Gordon and Mitlin, Diana. 2005. “Community-driven development for water and sanitation in urban areas.” Presented at the 13th session of the Commission on Sustainable Development, New York.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2008. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2009. World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2010. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.
World Bank. 2011. World Bank World Development Indicators. Accessed online 1 July 2011.

Tables

“The developed world’s version of ad-hoc urban growth – suburbia! – certainly doesn’t elicit the same marveling response that uncontrolled fringe settlements get from visitors to the developing world … I wonder, why don’t we look at our own cities with the same open eyes as we look at places like Mumbai or Medellín; searching not for failure and horror, but for potential? Is the unplanned city only valid if it’s dense and dirty? Why don’t we see our cities as legitimate landscapes from which we can build our future?”

I have a number of minor quibbles with Galloway’s article (for instance: I don’t think I’d agree that there is no ecological reason to promote density, though I would agree that the dry formula “density=good, sprawl=bad” is simplistic), but he does a commendable job of teasing out two important and contradictorary threads, which are that the informal city, whether in the developing or the developed world, is (a) pregnant with possibility and (b) problematic and in need of intervention.  Becker and I would, obviously, like to think that it is exactly those contradictorary threads we were addressing with our recent project/essay on fog farming in Luanda.

These contradictions also tie back into the observations Stephen made a couple weeks ago about the endurance of the city.  The permanence of infrastructures such as roads and property lines is the exactly the reason why tactical insertions aimed at altering the city through the modification of flows of capital, people, goods, services, water, etc. are the proper tools for the urbanist.  Observing the permanence of the city argues for flux-based interventions, not against them, as it is this permanence which renders the grand scheme inoperable and insufficiently pragmatic.  The significance of the recent projects in Medellin that Galloway takes note of is not that they fetishize the problems of the slums they are sited within (or refuse to confront them), but that they confront them without attempting to erase the existing condition of the city.   Improvement without demolition.  The master planner — whether a new urbanist, a landscape urbanist, or modernist — refuses to confront the exigencies of the city, both good and bad, preferring to imagine an idealized condition (which, when constructed, is much more likely to trend towards dystopia than utopia).  Learning to deal with the city we have, and, in particular, the informal city in guises suburban and slummed, is, as Galloway argues, an essential challenge.

[Galloway's article via Nam Henderson, in a post on JG Ballard and Mike Davis]