Solutions to Informal Housing in Mumbai
An Investigation into Sustainable and Accessible Planning
The five keywords I have chosen are intricately connected with this analysis; although all terms utilized stem from between weeks two and five, these basic concepts are absolute and foundational to the idea of reimagining the problem of housing conditions in informal settlements such as Dharavi and Mumbai as a whole. As follows, livelihoods are foundational to any settlement within a society because it is not only where many individuals find work, but also where they begin on a work day. It is important to ask: what frame of mind do these living conditions exert an average resident?
Incremental adaptation was defined by Professor Lerner during week three as "adaptation actions where the central aim is to maintain essence and integrity of a system or process at a given scale." This seems to be the exact prescription for improving the quality of life through urban planning in informal urbanization (slums). Through sustainable development, which according to professor Lerner during week four is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” it would be possible to not only gradually improve conditions for communities in informal settlements, but also to gradually transform those communities into sustainable and cyclically self-sustaining architectural centers. However, it is important to note that gentrification beyond the point of the average residents means (or, in other words, creating a community that is no longer affordable for its original inhabitants) is not the goal; rather, the goal is to build the community slowly and sustainably so that its residents will be elevated alongside it.
Internationally, a distinct challenge in urban planning is the creation, renovation, and reimagining of housing its safe access in urban centers. Informal settlements, more colloquially known as slums, are examples of precarious housing and are often places where homelessness and poor quality of life stem in urban centers. Housing is vital to an individuals' sense of self within the community around them and the community they participate in on larger scales (such as the city at large, their state or province, and even their nation as a whole).
The quality of life is vital to understanding housings' importance: if an individual has access to secure, cleanly space, not only are they more likely to feel more valued by their society, becoming a more productive member of their various levels of society, but they are also more likely to move into higher levels of economic and ecological consciousness. If the first step is the creation of affordable, accessible, and readily available housing, the next is the promotion of environmentally progressive and conscious building opportunities. These steps, however, are not necessarily fundamentally distinct.
Spatial sustainability refers to the intersection of community, market, and state (9); balancing these three socio-economic components is one of the United Nation's environmentally-minded plans for urban centers internationally. According to the UN, “spatial sustainability and urban density” (8) can be best promoted by the "sustainable use of land and resources in urban development, ...by building urban resilience,...and by mitigating and adapting to climate change" (p. 47, (8)).
How are we to go about such rapid and extreme urban development in a center of dense informal settlements? This is a question that the Chinese special administrative region of Hong Kong dealt with during the mid 1990s when they rapidly began to gentrify and reinvent the famous slum, now neighborhood, of the Tai Hang district (10). Although the scale and history of the slum was nowhere near that of Dharavi in Mumbai, it serves several important lessons.
To begin, the district is as of 2021 a high-salary, luxury district with restaurants, housing, and entertainment to match--a far cry from the former slum. This rapid and complete change from a collection of squatter settlements to a staple of high-fashion living serves more as a cautionary guide on the dangers of sudden destruction of urban community, however impermanent, in favor of complete reconstruction. However, in its contrarianity there is quite a lot of guidance that can be obtained in what not to do, rather than what we should do. For example, the government of Hong Kong burned most of the settlement to the ground, leveling it, in order to more easily begin afresh and redesign a new urban layout.
The problem with this is not necessarily the formation of a new urban layout, although it is sometimes vital to a community to have the history of their community preserved; instead, it is, perhaps obviously, the complete destruction of what was once housing for at risk and marginalized people. By completely beginning from scratch, the government of Hong Kong displaced its citizens without providing a plan to rehouse them in their original community. Instead of following this route, it would be more sustainable for community members to have their housing remodeled and rebuilt to support their pre-existing needs and designed to support them in the community they already live in. Building housing around and throughout a community, instead of starting from scratch, will sustain a community and foster a sense of investment in the neighborhood as a whole.
The famous informal settlement of Dharavi in Mumbai, India is one of the oldest and largest informal settlements in the country (1). This district is a microcosm of community unto itself, and although its living conditions have exposed its residents to unfortunately high rates of disease (4) with the onset of Covid-19, its culture is worth preserving through urban development. The federal government must necessarily work actively with the local government to fund and sponsor this urban development in collaboration with such interested international parties such as the United Nations (7), but treating that funding as assumed support, it is likely that an investment in this urban informal settlement would greatly boost the economy of Mumbai.
Private investors, corporations, nonprofits, and other interested parties could begin to slowly work alongside community representatives to incorporate structurally sound and sanitary housing options that could provide safe housing to the workers and residents of Dharavi. This investment would in turn supply "new opportunities for social enterprises, mission-driven nonprofits with a fee-for-service component, and worker cooperatives" (6) which would boost the local economy of house-creation inside of the informal settlement itself.
This would not only signify a self-sustaining and self-developing region, it would also create more jobs and reduce issues such as homelessness due to lack of income. This sudden boost of income and infrastructure could lead to other useful, environmentally-minded innovations in the city of Mumbai's structure at large. Many of the bodies of water which pass through and around the city are heavily polluted; if there is a boost in building projects throughout the city it is logical that the systems of sewage and drainage would benefit from improvement as well. This could add to the sustainability and natural architecture of Mumbai (5), increasing its beauty and its sustainability.
Although there are some blocks, such as the long and drawn out process of actually obtaining funding from the federal, state, and city governments, as well as motivating private interest, there is a present and increasingly urgent call from international non-profits, such as the United Nations, to increase the quality of life in cities such as Mumbai. Therefore, although political and monetary difficulties create a great amount of uncertainty for the actualization of this proposal, it is beyond feasible if a dramatic ideological or political change happens in Indian government.