Mumbai by Moscow Urban Forum

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Twisted Peripheries: A Blob of Spit Matias Sendoa Echanove & Rahul Srivastava

Beyond Center and Periphery India was once described as the fertile soil from which new civilizational breeds emerged. Mumbai may well be portrayed as a city where so many things come together in the most unexpected of ways, producing new global-local vernaculars rooted in far-off villages and wired up to de-territorialize informational clouds at the same time. Urbanists and architects have always loved to produce conceptual archetypes. These often reduced messy, complex realities into one simple image. For instance, Cedric Price has playfully described the medieval city as a boiled egg with a neat internal hierarchy and a hard shell delineating the inside from the outside. In his worldview, the modern city is a fried egg, with a clear defining core and a sprawling, unruly periphery. The postmodern city becomes a scrambled egg, where everything gets mixed up. The core explodes into darker chunks in a yellowish spread. The dualistic notion of a core and a periphery gets lost in a blur of movement and information that connects everything indiscriminately. Along with it goes any pretention of producing or identifying urban form. Price’s scrambled egg city is reminiscent of Georges Bataille’s notion of the ‘informe’ (sometimes unsatisfactorily translated as “formlessness” or worse, “informal”). The informe challenges academicians’ urge to label and categorize what they see. Price’s postmodern city resembles nothing. It is informe, like a “spider or a spit”, to use Bataille’s examples of informe things (1929-1930: 382). It is tempting to describe Mumbai’s urban form as scrambled egg, a spider or, rather cheekily, as a blob of spit. The analogical power of the spider and its web has of course been enhanced with the advent of the World Wide Web, the spontaneously developing structure of which has been researched and represented ad nauseam. One of the most appealing features of the Web is the absence of central control. Governments can, as we know now, hack into databases and even censure some of the new information that keeps popping up. But they can’t foresee its evolution or shut it down. The Web has no periphery. One can be excluded from it altogether, but within it there is no subaltern space which would be dependent on a core. Structurally, the Web is a made up of an infinity of interconnected cores or nodes. The hierarchical distinction between nodes is simply provided by the number of connections each node has with other

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nodes. Content on the Web is also user-generated, just as Mumbai’s neighbourhoods — which are being reshaped by both an absurd, surreal estate market responsible for its vertical makeover, and the efforts of millions of “slum-dwellers” who rebuild and improve their tiny homes day after day. But perhaps the humble spit is a better analogy for Mumbai. The city to some is a disgusting, incomprehensible thing. Polluted to the point of being frankly toxic, arteriosclerosed by traffic jams, overcrowded and overbuilt, corrupt and rotten, dirt poor and filthy rich at once, unbearably hot and humid most of the year and drenched and muddy the rest of the time. Our love for the city is a perverse one for sure – we love its apparent chaos, which constantly stimulates our imagination. And for us the question is not “How does it work?” as much as “What does it allow us to do?” Mumbai’s appeal is not to be found in its glorious colonial past, or in its shining, bubbling and speculative present. Attempts at containing its growth (by encouraging rural self-sufficiency as in the post-colonial Gandhian development strategies for India), at decongesting its crowded dwellings and roads (by creating a twin city – New Mumbai), or attempting to transform it into a “world-class city (by razing its slums and replacing them with high-rise housing projects) have all miserably failed. Mumbai defies planning like few other cities do. The city’s strategic “development plan” is notoriously flawed. It has been described as being “characterized by non-implementation” and as providing “a ground for denying basic services to the slum” (Bhide 2011: 79-81). The fact that over 60% of Mumbai’s residents live in “slum areas” characterized by poor public services and infrastructure only attests to the inability and unwillingness of the authorities to “plan”, or simply to manage the city’s growth. At the macro level, Mumbai is a 20 million-strong urban agglomeration, where the center and the periphery seem to have disappeared in an enigmatic blur. The historical colonial center built by the British throughout the eighteenth century on the Southern most island of the Mumbai estuary (long before the many islands that compose the city where connected and before Bombay was renamed Mumbai), is now an old city. While the old center retains most public institutions and some important bazaars, businesses and corporate houses have moved to areas that used to be suburban but which are now central in the agglomeration. It is not that the center has shifted as much as it has exploded into various locations. At the micro level we find relationships of dependency reproduced all over the city. The most archetypical relationship being that of the upper-class high-rise building served by the slum next door. These relationships, usually rooted in old caste histories, remind us – as Umberto Eco puts it – that our civilization has never quite left the Middle Ages. The cathedral and the bazaar, the castle and the village, the master and the servant are binaries that keep flashing before our contemporary eyes as we navigate Mumbai.

User-generated City The history of Mumbai’s slums and of the discourse around them is illustrative of that critical gaze, which far from promoting the rights of the people who live in them, has trapped them in the role of a poor and passive majority, kept down by the forces of capital. The archetype of the subaltern urban subject is itself a romantic oversimplification, reminiscent of images from Dickens and Zola’s writings. It is deeply entrenched in a middle-class sense of guilt and paternalism towards the poor. The periphery, the shadow city, the slum, the informal settlements – all these terms hide a diverse reality which cannot be reduced to any one homogenized identity. What we see in Mumbai are neighbourhoods that do indeed fall out of the grid or spill over it. But their story cannot be simply reduced to one of victimhood and subordination. An understanding of the city based on its historical evolution, which would accept its inherent complexity and some of the contradictions it necessarily embodies, would go a long way in overcoming simplistic binaries, and may ultimately help improve the life of the poorest. Ideology and prejudice stand in the way of Mumbai’s potential as a model of user-generated cities. They must be actively challenged at both practical and discursive levels. Ultimately, centers and peripheries are defined by priorities that the city’s authorities and people bestow on them. Nearly 400 years ago, the city’s metropolitan region was dominated by a northern township where the Portuguese built their base from the 16th century onwards. At that time a fortified center ruled the villages and towns right up to the territory that comprises the bustling metropolis now. The old villages of Mumbai provided an alternative template to the British seaport-based urbanization that started in the late 18th century. Villages co-existed on the city’s northern side, along with the Gothic colonial landscape in the south, and even mixed and merged with the residential bazaar towns around the port. The industrial and steam technology, which transformed urban horizons globally did the same to Bombay (as Mumbai was then known). The trains elongated its perimeters as they moved up north on Bombay's eastern as well as western side. Mumbai is not a city that allows an authoritative structure to dictate terms. Users and residents have always preferred it scrambled, eventually making their own maps of centeredness and peripherals which go beyond the official map. For example, railway stations with their bazaars and street-markets created their own force of gravity and reshaped the way the city saw itself. If there is any structure to the city’s geography, it is one that followed the movement of people as they circulated and moved around its railway systems.

Mumbai’s Urban System and Polymorphic Growth Mumbai has a very particular geography. It is like a very large Manhattan with limited possibilities for sprawl. But the urban system that it has developed around itself thanks to the railways is very deep. A large part of the workforce still keeps connections with villages thousands of miles away. People regularly travel to and fro using the very cheap facility of trains. This creates a peculiar circular urbanism in which the city becomes many things at the same time – a home, a second home, a dormitory, a site of

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business, investment and markets. These identities are connected to the unseen world of the native place, the village or town of origin where ties to agricultural land remain strong. Sometimes people even return to work in the fields by taking leave from their urban jobs. This circular urbanism is made possible by the persistence of the family as a social and economic unit. If we had to list best practices in terms of urban life, we have to acknowledge the efforts of its ordinary residents who don’t have much support from the State yet still make do with very little to produce a decent life and habitat for themselves. They are the main users of the city who generate its energies and physical forms day by day, at the most micro levels. The way they appropriate the city has been salutary and makes Mumbai a unique and dynamic city. The proposed legal tolerance of street hawkers for instance (through the proposed Street Vendors Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending Bill, 2013), is a huge step in the direction of recognizing and accepting some of the existing urban features of Mumbai. At present the city is seen in a skewed way — its vision is dominated by the 40% of so-called legitimate residents who live in rich neighborhoods and middle class suburbs. Their economy dictates infrastructural needs as well. Private car transport is privileged over public transport even though the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority has initiated new innovative railway services all across its landscape in recent years. These moves came late though, and are still way too inadequate to deal with the demands of the city at large. They also do not justify the disproportionately high investments that continue to favor private, car based transport. The city’s global financial ambitions were the reason for the development and growth of the Bandra Kurla Complex, a move that was directed at creating a new center in the form of a commercial district in the heart of the expanding city. This replaced the older Nariman Point in the south, which now appears to occupy very peripheral real estate even though it was once among the most expensive areas to rent in the country. The shape shifting logic of the city, which responds directly to its physical growth, and which in turn is shaped by the needs of its citizens, keeps pulling it in different directions. A real-estate development property project in Powai that was built on land ostensibly meant for the poor is now a dominating skyline that pushes the attention of the city towards its northern central region in Andheri. Andheri is its own commercial hub rivaling the highly incentivized Bandra Kurla complex. On the eastern side, the city’s old docklands, once the main driving force of the colonial city, appears to the eyes of the city planners as a derelict neighbourhood. Its apparently peripheral status seems to hide the potential of a future real estate and modern planners wonderland that makes them hunger for its territories ferociously. In contrast, the port authorities point out that its large open spaces encompass a vibrant, active port that services first and foremost the city itself. If it is forced out, the impact on the cost of commodities in the city would be considerable.

Yet, these are mild worries for ambitious urban designers, who want to turn the Eastern Waterfront, as they call this area, into a world class waterfrontoriented urban development that would change the frontiers of the city once more. This eastern waterfront development would connect to another grand project, the famed twin city of Mumbai called New Mumbai that was conceived in the 1960s by Charles Correa and Shirish Patel as a magnet to Mumbai’s densely populated localities. Instead it became its own economic powerhouse, soon complete with a new airport, looking more closely towards the hinterland (especially the Konkan region) rather than at Mumbai. For the planners, the Eastern waterfront would be the uniting vision transforming the frontiers of the city once more, creating something new altogether.

Dharavi: Center and Periphery All At Once The neighbourhood where our URBZ office is located illustrates this coming together vividly. Dharavi has often been described as an abject slum, peripheral to the modern city Mumbai aspires to become. Others see it as an entrepreneurial beehive with thousands of tiny manufacturing units and retails, shipping goods all over the world. Whatever it is, it certainly escapes clichés of urban poverty and marginalization. Once a fisherfolk village at the periphery of the colonial city, Dharavi is now at the geographical center of the urban agglomeration of Mumbai and minutes away from the Bandra Kurla Complex, India’s place of choice for corporate headquarters. Dharavi is populated mostly by the lower caste that have migrated to the city two three or four generations ago in search of social and economic improvement. It is nonetheless representative of the situation of over 60% of the people living in Mumbai. They are the majority, occupying small patches of land all over the urban landscape representing altogether less than 10% of the city’s territory. They are “slum-dwellers”, doomed to be perennially peripheral in the imaginary of decision-makers and the media. To the elite and the middle-class, but also often in the minds of some of the people who live in the areas labeled "slums", this is an expression of Mumbai’s backward past, a residue of third-worldness that has not yet been washed away by the speculative wave rolling over Mumbai with rising furor for the past two decades or so.

Middle-class Commuter Squalor Interestingly, if "slums" are more centrally located in the city only because many of them have grown around existing historical villages that predated British colonization, many lower-middle-class residents—white collar and service workers who would never want to rent a home in an area categorized as a slum because of the stigmas associated with it—are pushed to the city’s evermore distant edge. It is not unusual for people in Mumbai to travel for two or three hours each way to reach their place of work. Exceptional densities of the city result in similarly unusual transport patterns. By far the largest group of commuters in Greater Mumbai – about 55% – walk to work. Most of them are able to reach their workplace within 15 minutes or less, making the most significant contribution to the city’s extremely low average commuting times of 25 minutes, a sharp contrast to the London average of 42 minutes. The distribution amongst other modes of transport

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is less surprising. 22 per cent use trains and 14 per cent use buses as their main means of travel. Two wheelers account for 3 per cent, motor rickshaws and private cars each for 2 per cent of the commutes. These ideal numbers emerge from a conflicted scenario on the ground. There are different urban regimes that co-exist in close proximity and are responsible for producing such a dramatic reading of its urban transport habits. Since the majority of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population live in areas officially designated as slums, where homes often double up as working spaces, many people do not need to commute. They bring the travel-time statistics of the entire city down to that 25-minute number when the reality for a huge number of its daily commuters is no less than an hour and a half of one-way movement. The Wikipedia entry on Mumbai trains provides a bleak account of the situation: Spread over 465 km, the suburban railway operates 2342 train services and carries more than 7.24 million commuters daily. Due to its extensive reach across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, and its intensive use by the local urban population, the Mumbai Suburban Railway suffers from some of the most severe overcrowding in the world. Over 4,500 passengers are packed into a nine-car rake during peak hours, as against the rated carrying capacity of 1,700. This has resulted in what is known as Super-Dense Crush Load of 14 to 16 standing passengers per square metre of floor space. On an average, about 600 people die annually on the Mumbai Suburban Rail network: over the past 10 years (2002â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2012), more than 36,152 lives have been lost on tracks and 36,688 people have been injured. A record 17 people died every weekday on the city's suburban railway network in 2008. Both sets of data are accurate. But they make sense only when understood in the context of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s special folded urban landscape based on its interwoven socio-economic and geographical texture.

The Ground as Periphery Mumbai has escaped attempts at planning from the top down and has therefore produced a city that does not fit the preconception of what a city ought to look like. The paradox of Mumbai is that the different ways in which the many peripheries can be identified do not neatly overlap each other. On the contrary, they seem to contradict each other. One can live in the economic heart of the city and yet be socially peripheral. The center/ periphery lens in Mumbai is one that allows us to see this subversion very well. Right from its physical geography to the many imaginaries that constitute it, we see a city in which settlements, considered marginal, actually dominate its horizon. At a street level, the arterial roads are punctuated throughout by smaller lanes that create their own centers, and for this reason the city comes across as one that is difficult to negotiate. Small structures cluster monumental buildings and exert their own weight on the landscape. Villages can be found tucked away behind high-rises in all kinds of

neighbourhoods and economic energy may exist most potently in localities that some may consider depressed or marginal. The city’s spatial quality is full of unexpected moments. It can boast one of the highest urban densities in neighbourhoods such as Dharavi on one hand and a dense, tropical forest within its municipal limits on the other. If there is a social psychological foundation of urban physical form, the city’s medieval heart can take much of the blame. Its middle- and upper-middle classes produce this scrambled geography because they love to be serviced by a huge labour force. They like their drivers, the caretakers of aged parents, their cooks and nannies. And they want their service providers to live close by. Thus wherever there are prosperous habitats, they are always interwoven with service-providing settlements. It is hard to classify the city into a neat stratified map showing where the rich or poor live. And along with habits, people also have aspirations. Urban ambitions are fuelled by powerful dreams and images. This is how worlds start to collide in uncomfortable ways. The folds that they themselves have created start to trip them and confused ambitions start to dictate the aspirations of the city as a whole. The best manifestation of this are the billboards that advertise a new core or center – up in the air. The most sought-after apartments are all about living high up, ignoring the ground beneath the high-rise’s feet and looking over and above the mess, straight into the hazy seascape that is the mother of all such horizons in this water-locked city. The solid ground beneath the city seems to have become the new periphery. How does one map this visually – especially from the air?

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