02 urban conflicts

Cities are becoming more characterised by social segregation, poverty, violence, and environmental degradation, which presents enormous issues related to the speed and size of urbanisation.

Unplanned urban growth may have a negative impact on people’s economic and social wellbeing by causing traffic jams, subpar housing, strain on the government’s already stretched resources, and air and water pollution.

Urban Governance

Urban governance is the process by which stakeholders, including local, regional, and national governments, choose how to plan, finance, and manage urban regions. The distribution of social and material resources as well as political authority is constantly negotiated and contested. As a result, it is intensely political, influenced by the development and functioning of political institutions, the ability of the government to make and carry out choices, and the degree to which those decisions take into account and act in the interests of the poor. It includes a wide range of institutions, relationships, and economic and social forces.

demands; determines the quantity, quality, and effectiveness of local services;

3. determines how resources are shared among different groups; and plays a crucial role in shaping the physical and social character of urban regions.

Relevance of Urban Governance

One of the major issues facing society in the twenty-first century is how to manage cities and urban expansion. Cities can be growthpromoting forces if they are properly run, giving residents better access to jobs, healthcare, housing, safety, and social development. Cities can also help a country expand by generating more cash, maintaining political stability, and aiding in post-conflict peacemaking. On the other hand, cities that are poorly designed, run, and controlled can develop into hotbeds of inequity, strife, and poverty.

But with a democratic practice, comes the play of claim and power. There comes a shift from focusing on the city’s well-being to proving domination and power.

Urban governance:

1. affects residents’ access to local government and participation in decision-making,

2. influences affects local government accountability and responsiveness to citizen rize-winning images have been inspired by the inequality in Mumbai. Who can forget the cliched image of a jetliner coming in to land over squalor-filled slums? Films that won awards were inspired by it. To mention one, consider Slumdog Millionaire. must confront them if they are to avoid losing the vitality that makes them so appealing.

These conflicts debar people from their actual needs from the city as they get pushed deeper away from the system and its benefits. What they get access to is a corrupt, altered version of their resources.

It is a reality that wealth disparity has sharply increased in cities all across the world. The benefits of this prosperity are highly unequally distributed, despite the fact that economic globalisation has greatly increased wealth. While wages for the service jobs that have replaced manufacturing jobs lost to globalisation have stagnated or decreased, wealth has increased at the very top of the income spectrum.

The notion that global cities are beneficial to the majority of their citizens faces a fundamental challenge if this expanding disparity is both destructive to urban residents and an unavoidable component of the global city.

This approach of framing the inequality issue invites two possible solutions. The first is that, despite being inevitable, inequality in big cities is not bad. The second is that inequality is not inevitable, despite the fact that it is bad.

Numerous study papers and dissertations, including those from top overseas colleges, have used inequality as their foundation. It has given rise to a small industry of victimisation, blaming, and name-calling.

However, inequality has never been discussed at the one place where it belongs: the high table of political and administrative decision-making, where ambitious plans and vision statements to turn the city into a world metropolis are signed.

Even in that situation, it is clear that the issues of inequality are exceedingly challenging to solve because the first response is less persuasive than the second. However, cities or her opportunities in life. Mumbai’s decisionmakers can only ignore this relationship at the risk of the city’s future because it is now so clear how inequality, poverty, location, and opportunity are related in a city.

When planners and urban designers employ a long number of criteria to create alternative plans for Mumbai, it is frequently not even stated by name. How extreme and widespread is inequality in Mumbai? In the absence of a thorough and reliable investigation, it continues to be a matter of forecasts, superimposing competing data sets, and anecdotal evidence. Simply put, inequality is when many people struggle daily to get access to basic amenities while a small group of people live extravagantly wealthy lives. However, there are physical, sociological, and topographical components to the urban divide. According to the Billionaires Census 2014 conducted by multinational wealth research and advisory businesses, Mumbai is home to 28 of the 100 billionaires in India and was placed fourth among the top 10 Asian cities in terms of its billionaire population in October 2014.

Mumbai residents’ average annual income was estimated to be Rs3.54 lakh last year by Forbes, the magazine that presents its list of billionaires annually.

But inequality goes beyond a disparity between the richest and poorest earners.

It is the difference between waiting in line for water at the neighbourhood tap at 3.30 in the morning and washing an SUV with 50 litres of water. Or a five-person household taking up 60,000 square feet while the vast majority of families are content with 100 or, at most, 1,000 square feet. Or exploding in a night of revelry that cost so much money that it would cover hundreds of families’ monthly food expenses. or local schools closing as others around the world open.

There are extreme contrasts in living conditions that cannot be seen elsewhere in the nation. It’s as though there are two separate cities inside of one.

City planners and decision-makers should be concerned about inequality because it affects opportunity and mobility, particularly for the poorest, in a manner that other issues in urban environments do not. It has the potential to cause social unrest and, in the long run, urban decay. Additionally, it is ethically abhorrent.

Violence in cities is predictable; it tends to concentrate in particular locations, among particular populations, and at very precise times. This indicates that crime is concentrated in “hot spot” neighbourhoods and blocks and is hyperlocal.

Victimisation by violence in cities is influenced by various and interrelated types of inequality. For instance, victims are more likely to be individuals in the lower income and wealth quintiles than those in the upper income categories. Although poverty and income inequality have decreased nationally in Mexico, communities with larger economic disparity report higher rates of violent crime. Limited natural surveillance, residential disadvantage (poor income, high unemployment, low education), and neighbourhood instability are frequently seen in the most afflicted neighbourhoods (high levels of mobility and single-headed households).

There is a tonne of international literature on topics like how inequality is eroding cities and how a child’s neighbourhood influences his

Similar to how gender and racial disparities can contribute to economic inequality, they are also associated with greater rates of violent exposure. Higher levels of safety are directly correlated with labour force participation, academic attainment, reproductive health, and political representation.

Governments, corporations, and civil society organisations must begin by focusing on crime hotspots, especially in deprived regions, in order to reverse inequality and reduce crime in cities. It is crucial to implement comprehensive solutions that combine better environmental design, datadriven policing, targeted service delivery, and smarter infrastructure with increased security over property ownership.

Urban inequality is a reflection of where people of different skill levels choose to dwell. While skill inequality itself can be explained by past schooling trends and immigration, it can also account for around one-third of the variation in city-level income inequality.

The industrial makeup of cities may also be a contributing element. The degree to which cities specialise in these various industries could help to explain cross-city variation in the amount of skilled people and the demand for them. Varied industries have different skill intensities. Additionally, big business services industries like accountancy or legal firms might be found in locations with a high proportion of qualified individuals.

Whether measured in terms of income, wealth, welfare, or endowments, inequality has a significant impact on everything from life expectancy to social cohesion and social mobility.

Thus, one of the most effective methods to decrease violence is to eliminate inequality and concentrated disadvantage in violent cities and neighbourhoods.

Unemployment is a given, according to economists. It most certainly is in a marketbased economy. In order to envision inclusion and integration as they plan for Mumbai, planners must look beyond these assumptions. It would be unwise to fail to do so.

Programs that increase community engagement, empowerment, and access to employment opportunities are also essential.

When these regulations are in place, they can produce immediate and long-lasting effects. In the long run, lowering inequality is a down payment on lowering violence.

The city of Mumbai, often known as Bombay, is a last city to take into account while arguing that global cities have been an urban phenomenon not limited to the past century. The Portuguese took possession of Mumbai in the late fifteenth century after it had been initially ruled by native Indian tribes, and they went on to make the city a significant role in their commercial empire. Similar to how Bombay was a strategic commerce port under English rule due to its location on the western coast of India. Today, Mumbai serves as India’s financial hub. This metropolis, which was inefficiently spread out over seven islands, seemed to have been destined to become a global power from the moment the Portuguese arrived and brought it into the world stage.

However, Mumbai’s evident socio-economic disparities are arguably the best justification for it to be regarded as a global city.

The degree of spatial and socioeconomic inequality present in these cities is being exacerbated by the increase in high-level professionals and highly lucrative specialised service businesses.

Portuguese maps of the city and its surroundings reveals a concentration on the subcontinent’s coasts. Cities along the coast undoubtedly offer a platform for extending into the world market, therefore the Portuguese focused mainly on areas where they stood to gain economically. The opulent Portuguese settlements in the coastal cities flourish but the surrounding territories are stripped of their resources because maps created during this era flagrantly overlook interior India, creating a divide between the beaches and the hinterlands.

Therefore, there are little differences between Portuguese Mumbai and contemporary Mumbai. In both versions of the city, the affluent minority benefits financially while fostering significant socioeconomic gaps at the expense of the poor majority. Additionally, it seems absurd to not consider Mumbai to have been a global city even during the time of Portuguese rule given the disconnection from hinterlands and the usefulness of Mumbai as a platform to enter the global market, two tenets we have already established to be essential to the term “global city.”

Sadly, Mumbai’s slums border some of the richest areas in the city, as can be seen by looking at a map of the area.

The disparity in socioeconomic justice in Mumbai dates at least to the time that Portugal ruled the city; a close examination of

Numerous negative effects on society result from this enormous economic gap between the wealthy and the poor. On the one hand, wealthy people have access to the most pricey lifestyle indulgences since they have access to large sums of money.

On the other side, poor people battle to make ends meet throughout their lives. Many factors affect how a country develops, including the large economic divide. If given a fair chance, the impoverished may have a lot of intellectual potential as well as hidden qualities and skills that, when combined, can easily surpass those of the wealthy. These human resources, which have the potential to greatly advance a country, are untapped.

In addition, those who make sincere efforts to improve their living conditions become demoralised when they realise the disparity between their living conditions and those of wealthy people, which increases the crime rate. They come to the idea that using dishonest and unlawful methods is the only way to become affluent.

The government must take appropriate action to address the severe issues brought on by poverty. The wealthy must also demonstrate a desire to distribute their money to the less fortunate. The government should identify the impoverished and assist them in raising their standard of living by providing them with free or discounted food, health care, and education. The wealthy should be made aware of the grave disadvantages that the nation’s uneven distribution of wealth among its citizens has on the country as a whole. To provide the poor a chance to make a good living, the wealthy should be encouraged to voluntarily pay money to government programmes. rent. The state has attempted to redistribute land through legislation, particularly the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act, but the outcomes have fallen short of expectations.

In order to maintain ongoing growth and development of a country, it is crucial to close the economic gap between the rich and the poor. Long-term gains from efforts made in this direction will raise a country’s position in the world.

The city continues to be a study in stark contrasts. The majority of people living in the city do not have a legal right to the land they are on. The city’s 1.25 million slum dwellers were estimated in 1971.

People leave the challenging and diminishing agricultural sector as it gets more efficient and instead pursue positions in metropolitan manufacturing or services. This has been happening for a while.

Researchers agree that the globe will get more crowded in the future decades, despite the fact that it is impossible to anticipate population levels with any degree of accuracy.

More than half of the city’s 9 million residents, according to data gathered in 1985, lived in slums, but they only took up 2000 of the 43000 hectares of land that the city covered.

There were 10,000 hectares of undeveloped land at the time, the most of which belonged to governmental agencies, particularly the Bombay Port Trust. More than half of the unoccupied property held by private builders was owned by about 90 landlords. On 6% of Bombay’s area, more than half the population resides.

The amount of land that could be used to build houses for the lower and middle classes rose, yet the majority of the poor still reside in slums or are homeless.

Many people are huddled together in close-knit communities of one-room huts. Others must work hard to locate and then hold onto vacant areas along railroad tracks, on rooftops, or even under bridges.

Many people lack access to safe drinking water and waste disposal facilities.

The slums’ housing is claustrophobic, congested, and poorly ventilated. The average slum resident has access to about 50 square feet of space. Due to the lack of available land, even slums have a variety of socioeconomic levels.

Housing for the less fortunate is often a small area surrounded on two sides by tarpaulin, a few wooden rods, old plastic sheets, long strips of cloth, sometimes saris, gunny sacks, and other materials.

Inequities in land and housing are reinforced by ownership concentration.

Additionally, it enabled speculation, fake scarcity, and capital accumulation through

Residents of Bombay lack access to clean water in large numbers. The majority of slums lack sanitary systems for excreta, sewage, and silage disposal. One of the city’s largest health risks is this. 174 slums in Bombay’s 619 registered slums reported having no toilets during a census. Both literally and conceptually, the majority of Mumbai employees are marginalised.

Their job is unpredictable, unprotected, and uncontrolled in informalized ways of manufacturing and services. Their lives are ruled by instability and privation.

Although they have severed their ties to the village, they have not assimilated into the urban, industrial culture.

Their existence is still limited to crowded, dense locations where they must constantly fight to survive and procreate both physically and culturally.

In these conditions, little slum communities of regional, ethnic, and religious groupings act as a reflection of the community. Consciousness is dominated by regional identification.

The poor and the disadvantaged in the city have suffered adverse effects from the unequal institutionalisation of the new economies. Along with widening social and geographic disparities, it has also linked and linked up a sizable element of the underclass with a chauvinist and vigilante movement.

Inference:

Mumbai is indeed a city made extensively by its people. The people, migrants, communities that run the city are the only constants in the evolving times of Mumbai. But these people who have made the city what it is today are on a therhold of extinction. They are struggling to retain their space in Mumbai due to its capitalist shift of visions.

There is an evident loss of empathy in this due process as people are okay to replace their own species in a vicnity they find profit in. The city is changing but is losing its own in this process.

Site Selection Criteria:

Mumbai houses a diverse variety of communities who came to this land at varied different periods of development there. With the changed economic conditions and benchmarks here, a number of these communities are facing threats of displacement, power and extinction.

Chapter 03

On the basis of the concepts deciphered, approaches understood and the inferences made, this chapter involves identifying endangered indigenious communities of the city who need architectural assistance to guide a phase 2 for their life in the city and continue to make them feel relevant in the city.

Hence, to rightly identify these communities, the criteria would broadly be:

1. An evident commonality in terms of occupational practice, culture, social practices and way of living.

2. Its significance in Mumbai’s history at a given point in time.

3. The community volunteering to maintain their endangered current conditions in order to revive their authentic living.

Based on the inferences and the mentioned site requirements, 4 sites are shortlisted from within the city.

In the 16th century, Kandivali was made up of a variety of villages, including Charkop, BunderPakhadi koliwada, and Kandivali (also known as Kandol). The other historic Kandivali villages were inhabited by the East Indian, Bhandari, Koli, and SKP populations, who are still present in Kandivali and are known as the original native inhabitants of Mumbai. The area around Kandivali was populated throughout the Stone Age, according to artefacts discovered there. The Fonseca’s from Bandra migrated to Kandivali during the 1900s plagues. They initially made their home at Akurli to the east of Kandivali before moving to Poisar to the west. They flourished here, and a few families still live there now. In Poisar, there are shrines for each of the three main communities.

In the North Mumbai neighbourhood of Kandivali (West), there is a place called Charkop. The ancient name of Charkop was “Char Khop” (), which is Marathi for “a site of four huts’’ or “a little village with four dwellings.” The Koli people, often known as the fishermen, are thought to be the original inhabitants of Charkop. British records draw attention to a fact that is not supported by the rest of the article. We have Kandolee Valley and Kandivali because the place names that finish in “vali ‘’ refer to the actual valleys to the nearby little hills.