Invisible Infrastructures

invisible infrastructures E xplor in g E ve r y day u rb a n i s m s t h rou g h S t re e t Ve n d ing in Mumb ai

Parul jain

INVISIBLE INFRASTRUCTURES Author : PARUL JAIN PROMOTERS Bruno De Meulder Filip De Boeck READERS Min Tang Anamica Singh Rohit Shinkre [Academy of Architecture, Mumbai] MORE INFO ?

MAHS / MAUSP / EMU Master Programs Department ASRO, K.U.Leuven Kasteelpark Arenberg 1, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium Tel: + 32(0)16 321 391 Email: Hilde.meulemans@kuleuven.be © Copyright by K.U.Leuven Without written permission of the promoters and the authors it is forbidden to reproduce or adapt in any form or by any means any part of this publication.

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Invisible infrastructure s Exploring Everyday Urbanisms through Street Vending in Mumbai

Parul Jain Thesis submitted to obtain the degree of Masters in Urbanism and Strategic Planning

Department of Architecture Faculty of Engineering Promoter Professor Bruno De Meulder

ACADEMIC YEAR 2016-17

Co-Promoter Professor Filip De Boeck 3

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS After an intensive period of seven months, today is the day: writing this note of thanks is the finishing touch on my master thesis. This has been one the most impactful learning phases of my life. Not only scientifically, but also personally. Through the process of writing this thesis, I have evolved immensely as a person, and I would like to take this moment to reflect on the people who have supported and helped me so much throughout this period.

his unfaltering motivation,guidance and faith in me.

And to Karim Panjwani, who has inspired me in all these years, and provided me with encouragement and courage to make it to this day.

Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my Promoter Professor Bruno De Meulder for his untiring efforts at guiding this thesis and sharing his deep insights. For organising special feedback sessions, and all the weekends that he invested in helping me develop this thesis. Not only for all this, but for all the valuable things I have learnt from him in these two years, I will forever be grateful.

To my hallway mate Rahul, with who I shared many meals and meaningful discussions. To Spandan Das for being there as a constant support, not only academically but also personally, both in Belgium as well as from India .To Swagata Das, for being my unfailing support through this thesis. For her everyday charm, her spirited energy, for deliberating over our problems and findings, and for being a constant support and motivation through everything that we did together, including Dutch classes.This thesis would not have been possible without you.

To my co-promoter, Professor Filip de Boeck, for his continuous support during my thesis and fieldwork. For his deep insights, and his comprehensive feedbacks despite of a very busy schedule. His course on Urban Anthropology was the first place, where the idea of this thesis came from. For his motivation, enthusiasm, and immense knowledge, I would always be grateful.

I am heartily grateful to all the people in Mumbai who have always encouraged me and provided me with resolute support. Priyanka, Ashish,Neha, Sohan, Viraj and Sneha, thank you for always being there for me. My heartfelt gratitude to Bhavleen and Shreyank for hosting me in Mumbai, and providing me with constant motivation and extending all of their connections to me. To Maneet, for

To the many friends that I have across the globe, who have from a distance supported me personally and kept me motivated to do this: Grace, Roze, Supreet, Min, Mitul, Sandeep, Giovanna,Caroline, Elvia, Ernesto, Nicky and Chau.

Furthermore, I would like to show my sincere gratitude to all the scholars and professors I met in Mumbai. Thank you for giving me your time and valuable feedbacks. And to all the street vendors who stopped their customary activities and shared their stories with me.

I cannot miss to thank my best friends Ankit and Kunal for supporting me through thick and thin, and for always being my pillar of strengths. And unequivocally, to my parents and my darling brother for their wise counsel and sympathetic ear. You have always instilled faith me, and supported all my endeavours. Thank you for believing in my dreams, and for making this possible Thank you very much, everyone!

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Infrastructure Noun The basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.

The use of the word “Invisible Infrastructures” here is attributed to social practises that operate everyday lives in a city, but are not regarded as Infrastructures. It indicates towards the poetics of infrastructure that Brian Larkins describes as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space. As physical forms they shape the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown. They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern societies, and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life.” (Larkin, 2013, p. 328)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS PROLOGUE 1. Mumbai: An introduction 1.1.

The intertwined insurgencies

2. Making of everyday spaces

2.1. Social practises and People as Infrastructure 2.2. Microcosms and tautologies: 2.3. Enmeshed social and spatial Practises: Understanding the network

3. Cartography: Unpacking the unruly streets 3.1.

3.2.

3.3.

3.4.

3.5.

Messy Visual Aesthetics: An Urban gallery Convertibility and Taxonomy Auto constructions and Constellations Urban scenes and manifestations Unveiling the chaos: Patterns, Movements and Intersections

4. Insecurity, Uncertainty and Vulnerability 4.1. Marginalisation, Bribes, and the politics of survival 4.2. The case of Linking road, Bandra 4.3. Negotiations and collective bargaining

5. Remaking the city: Possibilities and Explorations 5.1. Inclusive Public Spaces 5.2. Devising new strategies 5.3. Re-profiling the Streets: Design explorations

EPILOGUE 9

PROLOGUE India today exists in a moment of a large demographical shift from its rural populations to the urban areas. It is estimated that by 2050, 300 million Indians will move to urban areas (UN Habitat, 2016), which means India will need to build 700-900 million square meters of urban areas, or a new Chicago every year, for the next twenty years. (Mckinsey Global Institute, 2010) In the midst of this rapidly changing scenario of development, there needs to be a focus on inclusive and equitable public spaces in the city. Since the opening up of Indian economy to private investments due to the Economic reforms of 1990, Real Estate Developers have become political actors who are building the new urban fabric of the city.

The poor then often find themselves powerless and excluded in this process of remaking. “A renewed rhetoric of nationalism and exclusion questions who has a right to the city? In the city, the front line of our democracy lies in our freely accessible spaces. As urbanists, we need to continue to advocate for dynamic, open, and engaging public realms.�

(Astrid Sykes, Christopher torres, 2017) How can urbanists ensure making space available to people from all sections of the society? In order to do so, the understanding of Everyday Urbanisms is a must. Everyday Urbanism (John Chase, Margaret Crawford, Kaliski JohnJohn Chase, Margaret Crawford, Kaliski John, 1999) is a concept that explores the meanings in a city, by substantiating everyday life practises that are often unnoticed. It aims to under-

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stand the challenging appropriation of places in a city with temporary, short lived urban activities. (Walters, 2007, pp.

135-139) India is a multicultural country with numerous social practises that do not comply with the new global standards of the built form. With public spaces increasingly becoming semi private, with the strips of malls and recreation parks, the streets of the city have been rendered as the last public space where one can find an assimilation of all sections and activities of the societies. Cities when designed are looked at through a bird eye view, with its structured blocks and roads that can be read on a map, but what truly defines a city is the ground floor, the city that is first visible to the eye. The public places in Indian cities are hybrid and complex spaces embedded in cultural and social practices that are tangible and symbolic. And it is the sidewalk, that then becomes the threshold between the private and the public here, where various actors engage on an everyday basis to create the spectacle that the city is at a ground level.

This thesis work lays emphasis on such practises, taking the case of the densest and the financial capital of the countryMumbai. The streets of Mumbai offer a sight of multiplicities of social, religious, cultural and economic activities, that come together to create a spectacle that is complex and chaotic at first, but is actually very structured. Take street Vending for example; it is a practise that is largely prevalent in most of the metropolises in the world. But with practis-

es like street vending, there are always questions regarding urban governance, evictions, contests and corruption that are raised. In the current framework of the built city, these practises are often regarded as non-adherence to discipline.

Thus the insipid issue of street vending also speaks of a much broader issue of spatial exclusion and rights to the city. Recently in India Right to livelihood has been recognised as a constitutional right, with the passing of the street vendors act 2014. Amidst the changing legalities and forms of governance, the challenge still remains on how to spatially accommodate them in the given density and scarcity of land. According to the Street Vendors act, the city is entitled to provide legal licenses and hawking spaces to 2.5% of its total population (Ministry of Law and-justice, 2014, p. 3), which is around 300,000 hawkers in the case of Greater Mumbai with a population of 12 million . In the re-branding of the global city, what is the place of these practises? Can we re-imagine public spaces to be more “local” rather than global? If so, how?

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social practises mesh together. In doing so it divulges how the social practise of street vending, through its various adaptations and transformations, is a productive incongruity in the city, that is redefining public space.

It further articulates these self-organised and auto-constructed constellations to bring out the possibilities that lie within public spaces to be more elastic and inclusive.

It prompts towards new typology of public spaces that can accommodate the elasticity and multitude of activities it holds.”

Through cartography, photography and translation of empirical data collected during a five-week fieldwork, it aims to unfold the way these social practices structure themselves along the streets spatially in order to better understand it. It brings forth the patterns of spatial structuring and self-organised and self-constructed constellations in which street vending occurs, underlying the implicit negotiations and collaborations through which this phenomena weaves across the city.

“This thesis explores Everyday urbanisms, by elucidating the case of Street Vending in the city of Mumbai. It tries to better understand how spatial configurations and 1 Greater Mumbai refers to the combined administrative zones of Mumbai and its suburbs, the population of which is around 12,442,373, and Mumbai Metropolitan Region[MMR] refers to greater Mumbai along with the satellite towns of Navi Mumbai, Thane, Kalyan, Dombivali, Mira road and Bhayandar. The total population of which amounts to 20,748,395 [ all figures are quoted from 2011 National Census count]

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1. Introduction Mumbai : The Metropolis

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Mumbai

, or Bombay2 is a city shaped by numerous transformations, constant reuse, reinterpretations and reclamations of land, made over the last centuries. The city has constantly been put together to use for various purposes of trade, access [to the hinterland] and exchange under colonial occupation. It has been altered and reformed repeatedly since its inception.

From what once was sea, it became seven fishing islands, that were reclaimed to form the colonial harbour city. It was then entitled as the capital of the newly formed state of Maharashtra of the liberated nation post-independence.

And today, it stands as the financial capital of the country and one of the world’s alpha cities.

Cities change all the time, but the way they change is affected by global finance markets, information systems, geopolitical relationships, cultural identity, family structures, transport technology, health policies, population growth and changes in work patterns and industrial production, political changes and many more issues that are of a different order and scale than the cities themselves. (Bunschoten, 2001) Mumbai too, has been set against a backdrop of alterations, exploitations, and constant restructuring, which has resulted in the accumulation of several layers of complexity. Events of social and political upsurges, economic transformations and changing cultural compositions have brought together

2. The name of the city has undergone several changes since its inception. The Portuguese called the city as Bom-Bahia, meaning good bay , but after it was gifted to the British, the name was anglicised to Bombay, which is still preferred by many residents. With political upsurges, Hindu extremist party Shiv Sena demanded that the name be changed to a more Marathi name, hence Mumbai. In Popular culture they always say that Mumbai is a city, but Bombay is an emotion.

various sections of the Indian society together in a vivid landscape of dichotomy.The poor and rich both make equal claims to the city, through stark contradictory practices of occupation. Surprisingly still, these dichotomies exist hand in hand, creating a juxtaposed image of what Mumbai is to the world.

As Mumbai moved towards being the financial capital of the country, its already cosmopolitan culture found the setting for the huge and celebrated film industry, Bollywood. More than any other city, Mumbai became home to fantasies- on celluloid, the cricket pitch and in people’s minds. (Priya Sarrukai Chhabaria, 2013). Mumbai is world’s 29th largest city as per GDP today. It accounts for slightly more than 6.16% of India’s economy contributing to 25% of industrial output, 40% of maritime trade,70% of capital transactions to the Indian economy. It contributes to 10% of factory employment, 33% of income tax collections, 60% of customs duty collections, 20% of central excise tax collections, 40% of foreign trade and rupees 40,000 crores (US $10 billion) in corporate taxes to the Indian economy. (Priya Sarrukai Chhabaria, 2013, pp.

93-94). The alluring opportunities offered by the city in all economic spheres soon made it a magnet for migrants from across the country.

There are 44 new migrants entering Mumbai every hour, an alarming rate that is swelling up the megacity. The density of Mumbai is soaring, as Suketu Mehta describes it befittingly “it is an assault on one’s senses”. Despite of so many issues, what is it that brings people towards Mumbai? Gregory Robert in his book Shantaram, wrote that “more dreams are realised

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and exhausted in Mumbai, than any other place in India.” It has become the city of dreams, where everyone comes with nothing much than hope, that someday they will make it big.

(Roberts, Gregory David, 2003) Amongst all these decades, Mumbai has been very accommodating to the huge number of poor, gathering them in residual spaces, the crevices and corners of the limitless city.

According to the latest survey, around half of Mumbai’s 12 million population lives in slums that cover around 10% of the city’s area. ( Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, July 2012-December 2012).The population density of Mumbai is 28,508 persons/km2 (The Registrar General & Census Commissioner, 2011) The national sample survey conducted in 1999-2000 shows that around 37% of the city’s population constitutes of migrants, 75% of which arrive from rural areas and in order to cope with affordability and infrastructure deficit in the city, build their own homes of temporal nature and engage with the everyday life of the city for livelihood, while they wait for better provisions of housing.

You can find them under the bridges, along the railway lines, behind the bus stops, sleeping in squatters along the sea and its industrial backsides. The pavements of Mumbai are squatted by some 200,000 hawkers, (Bhowmik, n.d.)constructing a make shift city, that is woven across the built landscapes of the city. This make shift city comprises of auto constructed constellations of housing and livelihood. Sheets of tarpaulin covered houses made of brick, mortar, and corrugated sheets that are sometimes cramped in density that of 277,136 persons /km2 [which is 10 times the density of the city] in places 14

like Dharavi, or the hundreds of temporary kiosks and vending stalls that unfold on the streets of the city every morning, and wind up in the night.

The open space available today for each person in Mumbai is only a meagre 1.1 m2 (Das, 2012). In 1991 the Mumbai textile mill that employed 250,000 workers were deemed shut, and the former industrial lands were opened up for public use in the city. What could have been a great opportunity for the city to create more open spaces in the city, was lost to the opening up of Indian markets to privatization due to the Economic reforms that took place the same year.

Hundreds of acres of those mill land now house giant skyscrapers, high end shopping malls and corporate offices, leaving only a handful of parks, playgrounds, and streets as open space for the city. The public places started to be privatised and affordable only to the richer classes of the city, leaving the poorer sections to occupy the in between spaces of the transforming city and the sidewalks, which remain as the only threshold between the public and the private. The streets to the poor is a place of livelihood, of survival and occupation in order to cope up with the deficit infrastructure.

Figure 1: The original seven islands of Bombay Source: The British Library - Image taken from page 678 of ‘Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency. [Edited

by Sir James M. Campbell. General index, by R. E.

Figure2 :The reclaimed seven islands together formed The Island of Bombay Source : he Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island. Volume 1. Bombay, India 1909 Author : J.G. Bartholomew, The Edinburgh Geographical Institute

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1.2 THE INTERTWINED INSURGENCIES Mumbai never belonged to a kingdom, and it was never an ancient capital. It always was, and till date is, shaped by commerce, rightfully being called the financial capital of the country. Land in Bombay was always scarce. Since its inception, the city has had to reclaim the sea, with compressed dirt, to allow space for people. Nothing has changed even today. In Mumbai today, you can see skyscrapers of 50-100 storeys, some of the richest homes in the world rub shoulders with the poorest settlements of the world, together forming one of the densest cities in the world. Distinct visual fragmentation and juxtaposition of each, next to the other, has created a very overwhelming landscape.

In Popular stories, it is often said that the probability of finding God in Bombay is much higher, [and maybe easier] than finding a home in the city. But when it comes to work, anybody and everybody can find a job in Mumbai, even the poorest do.

In few months of arriving at the city, they find a way to enter the vortex that the frenzied city has become, and are able to earn some and send home money.

The city today is a spectacle like that of a ‘Bazaar’. (Mehrotra).

You walk ten yards in Mumbai and you can see every section of the Indian society living together. Mehrotra explains in Negotiating Kinetic and Static Cities : The emergent urbanism of Mumbai that cities in India are sites of negotiation between the elite and the subaltern. Post industrialization the service and production locations have been fragmented, creating a new “bazaar’ kind of urbanism weaving across the urban land16

scapes.The new relationship of the social classes with the post industrial economy is very different from that of a state controlled economy The form of urbanism that resulted outside the domain of modernity is not a conscious attempt at creating a counter-culture, but merely a mechanism adapted by the subaltern to survive, sometimes slipping under the law if need be. (Mehrotra, 2008, pp. 205-206) With the entry of new private actors in the market, post the 1991 economic reforms, everyday spaces became spaces of social,cultural and economic articulation. These spaces have been largely excluded from discourses of globalization that focuses on the elite domains of production of the city.

Though the rich in the city have projected their presence through a landscape of flyovers, sea links, gleaming glass façades, and tall buildings that are no longer visible without looking up at the sky, the poor chose to present themselves at the very foot of these façades, along, above and under the transport lines leading to them. They have carefully positioned themselves along the needs of the rich, weaving their presence in an indispensable manner. From the clothes that you wear, to the food you consume, they have linked themselves to the “Everyday” of the city from visible services like cab drivers, rickshaw drivers, the laundrymen[dhobis], Tiffin deliverymen [Dabbawalas], milk and newspaper deliverymen, housemaids, watchmen, small eateries, street vendors, domestic services, to the less implicit services of production, recycling, garbage collection, rag-pickers, and blue collar workers.

The issue of affordability may have castrated most of them from the right to proper housing, but it has not deterred them from finding a source of livelihood. They can be seen occupying public places for their everyday. The same space represents their workplace in the day and a shelter to sleep in the night. Streets of Mumbai are a representation of various such practises in the form of street vending, pavement houses, homelessness and informal markets, et al. Peruvian Economist Hernando De Soto sees informality as the key to survival, with a conscious ignorance of the taxing and long processes of legal registrations. He blames excessive regulatory control by the state that hamper development processes for the development of alternative free markets.

Let us take a very literal example to understand this enmeshing in the city. Figure 1. tells the Everyday routine of a middle-class woman, working in the formal economy. Rupal ÂŹwakes up at 7 am in the morning as the doorbell rings.

The milkman is here to deliver her daily share of milk packets, eggs and bread that she uses for breakfast. After getting dressed she rushes to catch her 8:30 am train to work. She buys a newspaper from a vendor outside the train station, so that she has something to read. The regular vendor on the 08:34 local, Aarti boards the train with her bags full of domestic products like hair pins, face tissues, and file holders.

This works well for Rupal as she has not been able to find time to buy hair pins last week. Since there is no supermarket near her house, a few things always remain pending from the

weekly shopping list. Having some of the vendors sell them on the train certainly saves her that extra trip to the store.

At noon, her Dabbawala delivers her lunch-box at work, post which colleagues leave the office premise to smoke a cigarette. Ramesh, a cigarette vendor smiles at her, and takes out her brand of cigarette for her as soon as he sees her walk to his kiosk. It is 6 pm now, and after a set of long meetings that followed lunch break, Rupal and her colleagues are hungry.

So they step down to grab a quick bite before they can wind up for the day. She takes the 7:20 train back to home then, and while walking towards her flat from the train station, she buys vegetables and fruits from the market on the road. It is interesting to note that almost each part of her day is linked to the informal sector in the city. The newspaper that she reads is a legitimate product, but is sold by a mobile hawker outside the railway station. Her everyday lunch, breakfast and dinner is prepared from vegetables and meat that are sourced from the Legal municipal and whole sale markets, but are brought to the neighbourhood from informal vegetable markets. Most of the legitimate products that she consumes are either sold, or delivered to her doorstep through by these social practises. The manufacturing of most of these products takes place in workshops and warehouses mostly located in the slums and settlements on the fringes of the city, but it is the streets where these two worlds meet and share the same space through negotiated relationships, organised around the everyday requirements of the formal city.

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Figure3: Diagram representing the everyday schedule of a Mumbaikar, and the inter dependency of formal and informal systems

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Hence it is very important to understand here, that Informality is not the same thing as Illegitimacy.The form of transaction, or the front of purchase maybe informal, however it engages in production and provision of legitimate services that aid everyday lives of Mumbaikars. Street vending thus is engrained in the everyday lives of its citizens.The city is never simply the built city, or the bird’s eye view which is representational of two dimensional plans, but it is an agglomeration of social practices with spatial configurations. Space in a city has two components the Static City and the Kinetic City. The first is the Static city which constitutes of monumental constructions mad e of permanent materials like steel, concrete and brick.The one that can be read on maps.

And the second component is the kinetic city, a third dimension that is implicit, and arises out of the incremental growth of the city. It accounts for the city in motion and is built by mostly recyclable materials like tarpaulin sheets, scrap metal and waste wood. The Kinetic City constantly reinterprets and transforms itself. And unlike what images suggest, it is not just the city of the poor, but rather is the temporal articulation and occupation of the spaces that imparts an indigenous logic to spaces. It suggests how in conditions of high density, space can be re-imagined. (Mehrotra, 2008, p.

206) The streetscapes of Mumbai are characterised by the elements of this Kinetic City, and street vending is visibly the largest component. These practises have, in time created an inter-dependency in the everyday life of Mumbaikars. How is it then, that a functionality so integral is linked with “illegality” “illegitimacy” and termed as “encroachment” “chaos” and “nuisance”. ?

The taxonomy and vocabulary for the informal sector usu-

ally ignores the huge hidden economy that supports street trade. The word “informal sector” is loosely used to describe an enormous diversity of activities that completely or partially operate outside the national and local legislative or regulatory context. Alison Brown explains the concept of Informal economy through two principal approaches:The structuralist approach argues that the informal economy is a result of the restructuring of workforces post the recession of 1970’s across the globe. It explains how urban workers have been pushed out of the formal sector, where labour is outsourced from. These labour conditions are more exploitive, however provide national enterprises with reduced costs of labour, hence more profit. The second approach stems from Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto’s argument that informality is a response to bureaucratic obstacles.

He states that the due to high costs associated with meeting the demands of state regulations, which are often lengthy and unjust, (De Soto, 1989) the urban poor is pushed to work in the informal sector. Informal economy is something that cannot be defined nor measured in exact terms.

Street vending is regularly encountered with untimely, and un-notified evictions in the city, and with only 15,159 hawkers [about 6% of the estimated number of hawkers in Greater Mumbai] most of them live in fear and insecurity.

Thus, the existence of hawkers and vendors on the street gets an attribute of temporality. They secure their positions through daily negotiations with shops and buildings around the street and with the municipal and police officers that occasionally patrol the neighbourhood. But any form of change that is needed in the city, first calls for cleansing if en19

Residents from Mumbai took to the streets protesting against hawker nuisance.

Source : Mid day News 19 April 2015 Author : Suresh K K

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croachments, leading to loss of shelter and livelihood to the poorer half of the city.The street is a part of the public realm, and the public realm is symbolic of the civic and community life of cities, but control of urban public space is also an important demonstration of municipal power. (Brown, 2006, p.

11)This leads to regular unrest. The 1998 Citizens forum for the Protection of Public Spaces or Citi space¬ as it came to be known later, is one the first few examples of such a case.

The forum campaigned for removal of street vending and encroachments from the city, which after being escalated to the Supreme Court in 2003 was issued in the favour of the residents implementing a ban on most kinds of food hawkers.

Regardless of which, hundreds of thousands of hawkers continued to work on the street irrespective of the ban, as before. (Anjaria, 2016). The need to organise their own source of income, outside of the new global domain, in which the poor and unskilled population didn’t fit led to the occurrence of a kind of silent dismissal of these protests from a select segment of the society. Dipesh Chakraborty points out that since the withdrawal of the state, the people in India have not heeded to the elite’s call to discipline, public health and public order. He calls it as a representational encounter to vernacular and modern ideas of space. (Chakrabarty, 2007) The involvement of the middle class and elite in the recent decades, who are asking for removing this population of hawkers, that is unwanted for them, has resulted in louder claims of beautification and cleansing of the streets through spatial practises and denial of citizenship.

Frequent municipal check-ups and demolitions of street markets are ritualised scenes of terror and chaos on the streets.

These demolitions are meteoric in nature. A speeding municipality van arrives suddenly, with inspectors jumping out with

sticks, threatening the vendors, and confiscating goods and destroying arrangements as they sweep across the streets.

Hawkers quickly wind up their make shift arrangements and within minutes disappear into the surroundings, while the customers engage themselves in the surroundings, both waiting for the inspectors to disappear.

In a few hours, the markets are reconstructed. Almost like a street theatre, assembling of actors and audience happens.

Hawkers appear from their obscurity, rebuilding their space.

There is re-stacking of pavement tiles and bricks, unfolding of the blue bags, and re-stacking of merchandise hidden at a sympathetic shopkeeper’s store. The display of clothes and shoes are reorganised and callouts to pedestrians are heard.

The stage for everyday life is set again! How is the process of eviction and reoccupation so recurrent? What does this ebb and flow represent? What makes the spatial reoccupation so easy?

This brings us to a reflection that there exist different claims, different definitions, but simultaneously neither one of these claims manages to completely impose itself, some groups win battles on paper/court but cannot enforce it de facto, some are there de-facto but cannot find right on paper, the daily theatre of eviction and raids rather is a manifestation of de-facto undecidedness that derives from mismatching’s between the given place and taken place.

Hawking in Mumbai even though a contradictory existence, is structured and secured through cultivated relationships with civil servants, through unofficial payments of Protection money or “Hafta”.They inhabit a precarious legal status, while still being deeply enmeshed in the daily life of a neighbourhood. (Anjaria, 2016). These spatial occupations are not just 21

Hawkers from across the city marched in protest to the new pitches allocated by BMC for relocating vendors post the passing of Street Vendors Act in 2014.

The hawkers claimed that moving them from their place of operation would severley affect their livelihoods. Dayashankar Singh, founder of the Azad Hawkers Union, said, “The money collection by officials will end if hawkers are granted pitches legally. That is why, the BMC has deliberately marked hawking zones in residential areas so that the proposal is axed because of protests.�

Source : Indian Express 22 April 2015 Author : Salman hashmi Photographs by Prokerela Photo news

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devised through the haftas but also through counter surveillance, social interactions and customer relations.

Hawkers protested against Assistant Commissioner of Police , Vasant Dhoble after a 40 year old vendor died due to Lathi Charge [use of wooden sticks in an attacking movement by police officers in India] during an eviction raid.

Hawkers fearing a similar state, demand punishment for the Police Commisioner.

Source : National Association of Street Vendors of India, 12th January 2013

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2. Making of everyday spaces People as infrastructures and interweaving of spatial and social Practises

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2.1 Social practises and people as infrastructure What sets apart Mumbai from the other metropolises of India is the culture that it holds. A culture of resilience in accommodating every person who comes to the city, looking to make their fortunes in the “City of dreams” 1. Mumbai has people from all parts of India, and yet it is very different from the rest of the country. The city is representational of pluralism, but not just in the sense of existence of multiple ethnicities and communities at one place; but in combining its multitudes together into one sentiment, often revered in popular culture with a reference to the old name of the city Bombay. So much that cinema and theatre have used the city as a character, and not a mere location. It is the sentiment of co-existence, and living in together in this city that defines the urban culture of Mumbai.

If one looks at the popular culture of the city, one can feel the omnipresence of the street vendor, the taxi driver, the rag picker, the Dabbawala or the Dhobiwallah almost everywhere. It is the essence of what Bombay is. Whether it is in Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram where he describes his first impression of Bombay:

“The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air … it’s the smell of gods, demons, empires and civilisations in resurrection and decay. It’s the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them human and rats … It smells of ten thou1 City of dreams is a popular name for the city, owing to the numerous financial opportunities it provides

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sand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense and freshly cut flowers.”

- (Roberts, Gregory David, 2003, p. 1.1) Shantaram Or Murzban Shroff ’s excerpt from Breathless in Bombay,

“To walk along the streets of Colaba and to be wooed by peddlers of all trades, all motives, always involves me with a measure of excitement … To sit in Café Leopold and watch the world go by; and to sit on the parapet at Apollo Bunder and see the sail boats tossed on the coruscating waters; to walk past Jehangir Art Gallery and see the drug addicts huddled over their foil … to walk along the Gothic colonnades of the Ballard Estate and relive the solidarity of a lost era of architecture; to walk along Marine Drive and see the couples, their backs to the city, their heads huddled, a universal sun casting its light on them.”

- (Shroff, Murzban F., 2008) Breathless in Bombay : Stories Infrastructure is commonly recognised in physical terms such as roads, highways, bridges, electric and water supply, built structures et al, that produce territorial configurations that define the production and reproduction of the city gathering various actors and resources in an accountable manner.

Concurring with Abdoumaliq Simone’s article on “People as Infrastructure “I wish to extend the notion of infrastructure to the social practises defined by people’s everyday activities in the city. These activities facilitate the intersections of social practises in everyday spaces of economic and cultural articulations, that expand spatial limits to residents with limited means in the city.

In July 2017 Urbz Mumbai held an exhibition in the Bhauji Lad Museum, called the Mumbai return exhibition. As a part of the exhibition , all visitors pinned threads connecting there area of residence in Mumbai to their native villages in India. The exhibition was a reflection on migration in cities and Circulatory Urbanism.

Urbz is an experimental action and research collective organisation Source : Urbz net Instagram feed https://www.instagram.com/p/BXPT-VmDmTd/

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Indian cities are characterised by diverse cultural and social practises that are provisional and mobile and operate in spite of the defined notions of discipline and functioning of a city. As I have mentioned in a previous paper, the establishment of human relationships with spatial boundaries, that happens against

conjunction, which is capable of generating social compositions across a range of singular capacities and needs (both enacted and virtual) and which attempts to derive maximal outcomes from a minimal set of elements, is what I call people as infrastructure.2”

The planning instruments indicate towards the elastic nature of these boundaries, and their ability to accommodate much more than they were planned for. This gives us possibilities of multiple reinterpretations of the city. (Jain, 2017) These practises impart specific identities, functions and characteristics to places in a city, with the help of which one can begin to read the city.

As Henri Lefebvre calls them, these “representations of space” create links between spaces, people, functions and things, which then account for irregularities and pluralities of space. These different actors and heterogeneous activities, create everyday spaces through patterns of everyday use, adaptations and transformation of urban environments, deploying invisible networks that weave across the city. These everyday spaces and practises thus become regularities in the functioning of a city.

-(Simone, 2008, p. 411) People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg The Everyday life of Mumbai can be representational of sen-

Quoting Abdoumaliq’s definition: “Regularities [thus]ensue from a process of incessant convertibility—turning commodities, found objects, resources, and bodies into uses previously unimaginable or constrained. Producer-residents become more adept at operating within these conjunctions as they deploy a greater diversity of abilities and efforts. Again, it is important to emphasize that these conjunctions become a coherent platform for social transaction and livelihood. This process of

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2. Abdoumaliq Simone here attempts to extend what Lefebvre meant by social space

as a practice of works: modes of organization at various and interlocking scales that link expressions, attraction and repulsion, sympathies and antipathies, changes and amalgamations that affect urban residents and their social interactions. Ways of doing and representing things become increasingly “conversant” with one another. They participate in a diversifying series of reciprocal exchanges, so that positions and identities are not fixed or even, at most times, determinable.These “urbanized” relations reflect neither the dominance of a narrative or linguistic structure nor a chaotic, primordial mix. (Simone, 2008)

Clockwise 1. A group of flower vendors make use of the street below the Dadar Station to sell flowers.

2. A Dabbawala making use of the corridors of the local trains to carry the dabbas.

3. An image of a sidewalk occupied by hawkers and vendors , and taxis and bikes are parked next to the sidewalk, at the Gandhi Market in Sion, Mumbai Source : All images are a part of travel story by Uncornerened Market.

Photographed by Daniel nod and Audrey scott

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2.2 MICROCOSMS AND TAUTOLOGIES sory and visual juxtapositions that one encounters while proceeding through one’s day in the city. The city starts dressing itself up from 4 am in the morning when the local trains start their first trip of the day. With the early morning sweepers cleaning the streets, the doorbell of the milk man, and the newspaper man, the quiet city rises to the noise of the trains announcements, the setting up of bazaars on the streets, of commuters walking to the train stations, with rickshaws, buses and cars all hustling on the street. The temples and mosques echo of prayers. The street smells of fresh Mogra3 and marigold flowers and hot Vada pavs4 and Sandwiches that are being prepared to be consumed as breakfast for on-goers.

The Kinetic city starts crawling upon the Static city, positioning itself in tandem to its linear rhythms, recreating the “chaotic” impression that a visitor has of Mumbai. This chaos instead, is the image of the functioning Mumbai, what Rahul Mehrotra describes as “Bazaar Urbanisms”. The superimposition of the Kinetic city with the Static city, begins to define what constitutes the everyday in a city.

“The city and its architecture are not synonymous and cannot contain a single meaning. Within the kinetic city meanings are not stable, spaces get consumed, reinterpreted and recycled.

The kinetic city recycles the Static city to create a spectacle. “ (Mehrotra, 2008, p. 208) He talks about the existence of the “non-modern” (read ille3. Mogra is the Indian Jasmine flower that is sold by flower vendors, for a lot of women dress their hair with it.

4 Vada Pav or Vada Pao is a popular snack, mostly consumed as a quick meal to go by majority of the city’s residents. It consists of a fried ball of potatoes stuffed between a bun.

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gal) components like street hawkers, homeless people, informal businesses, relentlessly making their way into the built and formal part of the city. It is not just the city of poor that constitutes the kinetic city, but he also speaks of the festivals, and events that happen in the city and transform the city temporarily. The appearance of temporary structures and production spaces that support the everyday, and mark the culture or the soul of the city are all embedded in the Kinetic city. The architecture of the city, indeed has very less to do with the emotion that the city generates in the user.

While the city gathers itself in motion, and the white collar workers start moving from home to work, the streets of the city transform into a workplace for ones with limited means.

Sheets of tarpaulin are lifted to display the vegetables sourced early morning. Crates, baskets and stalls are rearranged to form a lucrative display of products, vendors hurl slogans to attract the passer-by’s. The vegetable markets of Mumbai, which are prevalent along the streets of most railway stations start functioning even before sunrise. Prakash [a vegetable vendor at Vile parle east market] gets up at 04:00 am in the morning, to take his ride along with other fellow vendors to the wholesale vegetable market of Vashi in Navi Mumbai, where all vendors from across the city source their fresh stock of vegetables at a cheap price. The journey to and from, takes about 2-3 hours depending on the location of the market in Mumbai. By 7 am, Prakash, along with other fellow vendors has already set his display of fresh fruits that he has sourced. Stocks of green pears, red strawberries and apples, Oranges, melons stacked neatly form an unmissable sight for the pedestrian passing by. Around 10 am when most of the office going crowd has disappeared, a Chaiwallah appears, serving tea to all the vendors. He is

A migrant community of South Indians distributes warm Idlis and Vadas in many parts of Mumbai. Some of the natural markets of hawkers also seek their midday meal from these vendors.

Photograph by Deepa krishnan

The ubiquitous Chaiwallahs or the tea vendors provide tea service to the city. Corporate workers are often spotted having a cutting chai [cutting chai means half a cup of tea]. Most large hawker markets receive their morning and evening cup of tea from them.

Photograph sourced from Mumbai City Blog by Stan Mathew

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not a service to the customers, but to the vendors. He comes three times a day, bringing the community tea. The organisation of services is similar to what one sees in the corporate offices.

Similarly, at 3 pm in the afternoon, a vendor arrives with fresh hot Idlis5 for lunch of all the street vendors. During periods of low customers, the vendors are often seen chatting with each other. Prakash watches small movies on his phone, and even shares it with his neighbours. His regular customers greet him while passing by, and he is seen chatting with them occasionally.

They talk about life sometimes, the customers ask him how his kids are doing, whether they study in a school or not. There is a building of relationships between the customer and the vendor, which doesn’t involve exchange of personal information, rather a pleasant exchange of a question or two that enables a code of bargain and healthy exchange between the two.

The entire market flanks the fronts of a big Retail market of Clothes, watches and jewellery, ironically with a Police station next to it. The municipal cleaners clean the market streets every day, while Prakash and his colleagues ensure they keep it clean themselves. On asking him where they store their goods in the night, he tells me that the watchmen of the shops, whose front’s they encroach in the day, watch their goods for them in the night, as they leave all the unsold goods, right there, covered with a tarpaulin sheet. One can see them exchange pleasantries with the most of the shop owners in the market. In moments when there are uncalled municipal rounds of checking, and regular evictions, some of the vendors wrap up their unpacked goods into their bags which they leave with the shop owners and disappear in the vicinity, waiting for the officers to leave.The shop-owners are not very happy about this sometimes, but they oblige to help them owing to the healthy relationship they maintain otherwise. Many of them said they 5. Idli is a popular south Indian breakfast item, which is basically a savoury rice cake.

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don’t mind the vendors being around as it helps them earn a livelihood, but it becomes a pain sometimes for customers to find their way to a function or service that one is seeking at the moment6 Maybe there is a monetary exchange between the shopkeepers and the vendors, to ensure a smooth functioning of their practise. But as a single female researcher in the field, I was unable to extract this information.

Street Vending is thus, an occupation of the streets established by deep enmeshed relationships with every actor in the neighborhood, as well as the state. Each day is a cyclic repetition of the same phenomena. Like every other corporate or retail organisation in the city, the “chaotic” and banal phenomena of Street vending too functions as microcosm in the city, echoing the everyday of its other machineries. It aligns itself with the liner rhythms of the city, producing an everyday urbanism that forms a central identity to life in the city.

As Jonathan Shapiro states in his book The Slow Boil, “Everyday urbanism is not a product of the grand transformations that aim to remake the city dramatically, but by the unactual projects that represent historic continuity. “ (Anjaria, 2016).

6. Data collected from the interviews done by the author during fieldwork

Vegetable vendors at the Agarwal Market sharing a mobile screen to watch a movie during noon, when there are no customers

Vendors leave their goods covered with tarpaulin sheets on the street. The watchmen from neighbouring buildings watch their goods during the night.

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2.3 ENMESHED SOCIAL AND SPATIAL PRACTISES Understanding the network

In the book: Urban Flotsam, Raoul Bunschoten speaks of cities as second skins of the earth, the ground on which they are built being the first. Cities are tools for living, interacting, producing, but they are also expressions of this life, signs of interaction and production of labour. Together these qualities make cities into a life form, generating the second skin. (Bunschoten, 2001, p. 26) The built form of the city can change rapidly, be it in the case of a war or natural calamity like flood or earthquake. According to him, a city’s form can only be defined and can have a clear identity in the manner by which it changes or evolves. The behaviour of people and institutions are influenced by larger invisible forces and actions that create instability or changes in the existing structures. These forces or events are referred by him as proto -urban conditions.

Social practises in India are proto-urban conditions that constantly challenge the new forms of global development.

With cities constantly expanding, rebuilding themselves with generic replicable models of built surfaces, proto urban conditions often find themselves displaced in this process. The Indian emergency of 1975 followed by the economic liberalisation in 1981 triggered many invisible changes in the structure of the Indian society which resulted in eruptions of new social structures like Street Vending.

But Indian cities have not been built completely yet.They remain in a phase of transition, from the once agricultural land to a post industrial and service based economy. There are supermarkets and malls that are being made every day in all cities, but they aren’t enough in number, and cater only to a 34

select population of the city, namely the elite and the upper middle class. The question of affordability leaves a major part of the population to seek services from the economic sections outside of this formalised form of purchase and transaction. Thus, in this scenario, the infrastructure of street vending lessens the burden of affordability and creates provision of services for the remaining section of the society meanwhile.

The lack of an alternative, or insufficient provisions of affordable services ensue the formation of these natural markets that are filling in the gaps in the functioning of the city.

In the past, countless efforts have been taken to centralise trading, let’s take the example of the building of the Crawford market in 1865 (Anjaria, 2016) which only resulted in attracting more vendors outside the huge market building. The crowd visiting the big wholesale market became a potential for another natural market to spring around. Dozens of vendors serving sugar cane juices, lemonades, clothes and shoes squatted on the gates and the street across, while a dozen mobile vendors went from customer to customer offering balloons or jewellery at dirt cheap prices. The setting of a centrality and a pavement is all that was needed for the setting of a natural market.The natural street markets follow the flows of people in the city, appearing as the second layer of the facades of the buildings abutting these streets. Hence the colonial plan of the city gets subverted. The spaces in the city gain new identities through these spatial practises, most of them even though illegal, are famous tourist spots in the city.

From a mere function of transportation, the streets become places containing new materialities, meanings and practices.

The figure below shows the amount of mapped natural

Figure 4:This network diagram is a translation of empirical data collected during a five week fieldwork carried out in February and march 2017. It is a reflection on the large economy that lies behind street trade. Street trade is supported by industries of both small and big scale, and exists due to a very large customer base in the city that seeks their services. The location of industries, and home production units have been collected by interviewing hawkers from different neighbourhoods , from the locations covered in the fieldwork.. A detailed description of these cases can be found in the next chapter.

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Figure 5 :Map showing the informal markets in the city of Mumbai in red. These are markets that consist of a constellation of hawkers selling a similar category of products at the same location for longer periods of several years. The map shows how these informal markets exist along major streets or in proximity to areas of commercial and industrial purposes.

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The data has been collected through a collaborative mapping conducted in a private project by Akshay kore from the renowned IIT Bombay, combined with data from the municipal authority MCGM.

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markets and vending zones in the South of Bombay. ÂŹAll of them follow the logic of crowded streets and institutional or commercial centralities.

Street vending is more than a social practise in the city.

In-fact it the final outlet of a much larger economic network that engages with a larger population engaged in the production and trade processes. While the street food vendors are examples of home produced economics, other goods sold by the vendors are gathered from several parts of the city, country and sometimes even from China and Korea. There are over 2000 small scale industries in Dharavi itself, the largest slum of Mumbai.

The small-scale industries in Dharavi and other neighbourhoods of Greater Mumbai and the satellite cities of Navi Mumbai,Thane, Mira road and Mumbra of the metropolitan region produce products of everyday use like domestic products, accessories, clothes and bags. There are huge recycling units present in Dharavi that recycle the waste in the city and engage in production of goods.

Some of the goods are sourced from industrial outlets and the port of the city, where large amounts of products are sorted into a lot that do not qualify for the retail outlets and supermarkets, and are thus sold at much cheaper prices. The vegetables sold are sourced from large municipal markets that are situated in Navi Mumbai, Borivali and sometimes from cities like Vapi from the neighbouring state of Gujarat. Clothes and accessories are sourced from many places from the country and some from similar markets in China and Korea7 Thus street vending engages with a much larger network of economics globally.

7. This data is quantitative data collected on the basis of a 4 week fieldwork done for this research[ based on personal vendor interviews]

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“Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.”

— JaneJacobs

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Mumbai is a landscape of parallel worlds nestled next to each other. An image of Dhobi ghat, Mahalaxmi 40

Photograph by Mitul Kajaria 5th June 2014

3. Unpacking the unruly streets

Photo-journal and Cartography

3.1 Messy visual aesthetics When one first steps foot in Mumbai, one is overwhelmed with the extremely crowded streets and tonnes of bastis or what are better known as slums rubbing shoulders with tall skyscrapers rising above the ground. The streets are full of people walking speedily towards their destinations, while at the same street, several hawkers operate with their make shift installations, trying to make a sale, and at some shady corner, that is mostly neglected due to lack of cleanliness and poor materiality, a homeless lying on the pavement, living his everyday in the public.

The trains are moving constantly from 4:00 am in the morning until 1:40 am, carrying a population of about 7 million passengers each day. Thousands of cars crawl slowly in the north south passages that connect the city. And the pedestrians finding their way amongst all this. So what creates this spectacle?

How do so many things function at the same space together?

This chapter is a photo-essay and translation of fieldwork into cartography in order to understand the impact of street vending spatially

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A scene from the vegetable market on the arterial road below the flyover to Lower Parel train station. The street is occupied by vegetable vendors on both the sides, while large number of commuters take this street to reach the train station.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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An everyday street scene outside Bandra station [west]. Photo depicts the self organised appropriation of the street by the pedestrians, waiting for an autorickshaw to take them to their next destination while the sidewalk is being used by the Dabbawalas arranging their lunch-boxes for delivery.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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Stalls built from temporary materials, lined next to each other, displaying different kinds of footwear at Linking road, Bandra [west]The vendors waiting for their next customer. Even with minimalist installations, the vendors use rugs on the street, to demarcate the entrance to their stall, a kind of spatial limit on which the customer can enter in order to make a purchase.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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Scene outside Vile Parle [east] train station. Numerous vendors occupying the sidewalks outside the train stations, while the auto-rickshaw drivers wait for customers. The left sidewalk is shaded by a canopy of large trees, while on the right side , the vendors create their own canopies in order to prevent the sun.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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A Dabbawala arranging the lunchboxes to be delivered to various offices, at the entrance foyer of Bandra [west] train station.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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Customers browsing for goods from vendors inside the arcaded passages of buildings at Veer Nariman Road, Fort, Mumbai Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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A scene along the stretch of Fashion Street at Churchgate. Pedestrians. The pavement is occupied by hawker stalls and customers , while the threshold of the sidewalk and the street is occupied by cars parked along them. The pedestrians can be seen walking on the street instead, avoiding the sidewalk and the cars.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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A homeless family gathered in shade behind the bus stop, at the pavement outside of Lower Parel Station. Notice the poor condition of the pavement with broken and damaged segments.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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3.2 convertibility and taxonomy Classification of Vendors based on types of installations, permanence of location, and duration of operation

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A roadside tailor , waits for customers, alongside other vendors. The bamboo installations are supported by using a stack of paver blocks, used as a weight. The threshold between the sidewalk and the street too seems to be damaged.

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So, what are these infrastructures of street vending made of? How do we begin to read them in the city? How do they lay out themselves on the space that is made available for everyday use? How many different kinds of vendors inhibit the city?

In order to understand this, better, I first begin with the physical materiality that constitutes of this practice. As mentioned earlier the kinetic city is made up of temporary materials like plastic sheets, scrap metal and unused wood. On the left is an atlas of the materials that are most commonly used by street vendors to build up their outlets of sale everyday. Most of these materials consist of the containers of the goods, basic construction and support materials are made up of bamboo sticks, rope and weight that are easily sourced from the surroundings.

Thrown away and unused materials like paint boxes and oil boxes are used as supports, for a wooden plank that showcases the products. Bamboo baskets and jute/tarpaulin bags are used to carry goods around easily. The investment in the structure is kept to the minimum.

And focus is laid on convertibility. The arrangements are based on the idea of making the best out of things that are available easily, and those that can be retracted quickly and occupy minimum space for storage and allow ease of movement around.

Figure 6 : Informal markets in Mumbai

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Figure 7 : Materials used for vending Installations

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1

2

3

1.A Small permanent milk kiosk along the street 2. A semi permanent fruit vendor outside the train station. 3. A mobile vendor selling accessories in the vegetable market 4.. Unpackers selling shoes from tarpaulin sacks on the railway bridge.

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4

Based on this observation of the materials used and the kind of space occupied, and the durations at which space is occupied, one can classify the vendors into four categories.

•Permanent Hawker : The permanent vendor is the most prevalent typology on the streets of Mumbai...Small shops of 1-3 m² flank all major streets of the city’s sidewalks. These shops have fixed locations and can be locked during non-working hours. Some of them hold valid vending licenses •Semi-Permanent Hawker :

The semi -permanent vendor are the ones that use packaging materials and product containers to build a small stall of their own.They are present at the same location each day.

Security for products is obtained through collaborative relationships with watchmen of the shop-fronts or streets they occupy •The Mobile Vendor: Mobile Vendors are the ones that are constantly on the move. Hence their footprint is relatively small, for ease of movement. They travel across various spans of the city during the duration of the day, selling products that are mostly made in small workshops consisting of 10-15 men. They travel via, foot, trains or self-organised group transport networks •The Unpackers: This category of vendors occupies the same spot everyday, but makes use of the product containers like baskets or gunny bags as their display front. Mostly occupying marginalised corners in bigger natural markets, these vendors carry back their goods once sale time is over.

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A small folding cabin display by a footwear vendor, Colaba. The cabin has been Fixed in the pavement , permanently resting against the column.

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Installation details of bamboo grids used by vendors

Fruits stacked up creatively to form a display. Note that the bamboo installation is supported by the shop facade

A mobile vendor selling Candy floss walks along the Fashion street at Churchgate. The sidewalk here becomes a representation of a shopping alley with displays on both sides of the walkway.

Photographs based on fieldwork by author, March 2017

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Figure 8 : Vendor typology studied 66

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3.3. Auto constructions and Constellations Cases Studied

These convertible materials are assembled each day on the streets forming the outlet for the sale of each day.The size can grow and shrink depending on the amount of product available for sale each day. These materials are assembled neatly in geometric stacks, combined with support structures to last the day. Often, a tree, a railing, a parapet wall [in the case of foot-over bridges] or an electric pole is taken as a support on which the ropes and strings tying the frame together are tied. But in many places, there is a negotiated existence of vendors with the shopkeepers. Ropes and bamboo sticks take the support of the elements of shop faรงades. Parapets are used to squat, leaving a careful entrance to the shop, arcades are occupied by display configurations lined inside as a second skin. While locations shaded by trees are preferred but in the absence of which, an artificial canopy using cloth, umbrellas and tarpaulin sheets is created. Sometimes paver blocks from the sidewalks are used as risers for avoiding contact with ground. In places of high density of flows of people, these auto-constructed configurations come together in large numbers, situating themselves in the form of constellations.

These constellations, that have now existed at the same place for a duration of more than 40 years, have become centralities of their respective neighbourhood. These are the frequented by residents and tourists alike, but they never exist on maps, due to their illegal status.

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The fieldwork for this research was carried out by studying five urban scenes in the city. The selection criteria were based on different types of locations in the city, showcasing similar constellations and spatial contests

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Figure 9 : Cases studied across different types of neighbourhoods in the city

Container crates stacked together in a geometric form, laid over with a wooden plank used for product display. This type of installation allows ease of resetting the display on an everyday basis

Figure 10 : Study of the formation of different methods of auto-constructions and installations used by street vendors in the city

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Bamboo structures tied up together take the support of existing infrastructure around , in order to gain more stability. paver blocks are stacked up to be used as a plinth, match level differences.

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ENTRANCES TO VILE PARLE TRAIN STATION

mongibhai road

NE

HR

U

road

Figure 11 : View outside Vile parle Railway station [east] showing the commercial buildings of Agarwal market in yellow and the hawking zones in the vicinity in orange.

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3.4 URBAN SCENES AND MANIFESTATIONS Fieldwork and Mapping

CASE 1 AGARWAL MARKET, VILE PARLE [EAST] Location type : SUBURBAN RESIDENTIAL ZONE Category : Food and vegetable market Vile parle one of the suburban areas of the Northern Mumbai. It is an educational hub with several schools and universities in the area. It consists of comparatively smaller housing typologies since it lies next to the domestic airport.

The eastern entrance of the Train station is home to a cultural centre and a cloth market, known as the Agarwal market. Mongibhai Road, the main street to the train station crossing through the market buildings is flanked by about 226 vendors selling fresh vegetables and fruits everyday. The market is occupied by vendors coming from the neighbouring slums that have been practising in this street for over 40 years now. The vegetable market exists as a second layer to the cloth market, with vendors vending from 07:00 am in the morning until 10:30 pm in the night all seven days a week. The parallel streets are occupied by vendors selling street food and domestic products. During the evening , a few mobile vendors can also be spotted selling balloons for children, accessories and toys. The vegetables in the market are sourced from the wholesale vegetable markets of Vashi in the sister city of Navi Mumbai or Borivali in the northern suburbs of Mumbai. Most of the vendors present in this market are second generation vendors who are continuing with the occupation of their previous generations 1

1.Data collected by Sharit Bhouwmik and Rohit shinkre as a part of quantitative survey conducted to prepare report for implementation Street Vending Act, for the Bombay Municipal corporation.

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Mongibhai road, outside Vile parle train station [east] is the site for a Natural vegetable market, that co-exists along with the cloth market, commonly known as Agarwal market. Note the array of umbrellas on the left sidewalk in the absence of trees.

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Almost all of the sidewalk along the shop fronts of Agarwal Market are squatted by Vegetable and fruit vendors that can be found from 7:30 am in the morning until 10:30 pm in the night. The condition of the pavement next to the fruit stalls is uneven and damaged.

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A vegetable vendor arranging his display for the day

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During the afternoon, an addition of large umbrellas are made to their installations

Bigger installations make use of bedsheets and tarpaulin sheets to curb the harsh sun

The entrances of the train station are flanked by small shops that are one square foot in size.

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Figure 12 : Map showing vending zones in the vicinity of the train station

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The vegetable vendors from the main-street are present all day from 07:00 am until 10:30 pm, there is addition and subtraction of other vendors that happens. During the late afternoon and evening, mobile vendors from nearby neighbourhoods like goregaon, Andheri and Santacruz can be spotted in the market. They move around the street seeking potential customers. The arterial streets gather commuters around the food stalls that arrive in the evening hours selling fast food and snacks to the passerbys. A few female vendors occupy their usual spots selling domestic products like kitchenware, handbags, pillowcases. Some henna artists can also be spotted near them.

A handful of mobile vendors can be seen selling vegetables [small ones like lemon and berries] from just a plastic bag in their hand.

These vendors do no belong to the group of vendors that remain all day, but rather are vendors from nearby locations that are trying to make a sale of the remaining quantity of the day’s sale .

Figure 13 : Time chart depicting the different types of vendors occupying the street throughout the day 79

Figure 14 :Street scene depicting the overlaying of social practises on spatial figures. The bazaar of infrastructure that is overlaid on the existing shop-front of Agarwal market.

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here becomes a second skin

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Figure 15 : Sectional perspective of Mongibhai Street 82

From the section we can see that the vending installations are constructed with the support of the built infrastructure of the city, or the Static City as described by Rahul Mehrotra. Side walks are permanently occupied by street hawkers that assemble the bazaar every morning, and disassemble it every night.

During fieldwork I observed for the first time that there was absolutely no space for someone to sit. The flows of people was constant, and uninterrupted except for the occasional commuter stopping to buy something from the vendors. The busiest hours of the street are from morning 08:00 am -10:30 am and evening 5:30 pm until 9:30 pm. These are also the busiest hours of public transport in the city,, where a majority of travellers commute from their places of residence in the suburbs towards the corporate districts located in the south of the city., and vice versa in the evening. Vendors report the evening hours to be the most profitable part of the day where they are able to make a good sale. Through casual conversations initiated by the vendors with me, I got a glimpse into their everyday schedule .

Prakash [ age 44] walked up to me intrigued by the sketches I was making along with my notes. I casually ask him a few questions in an attempt to familiarize myself with the market dynamics. It is afternoon, and there are not many customers, so he begins to tell me his story in Hindi..Here is a translated version of the same : Me : Where do you get such fresh vegetables from everyday?

Prakash :“I stay here all day ...at 5 I leave in a tempo with fellow vendors to go to the wholesale market of Vashi, to source vegetables for the day, and by 7 :30 am we come back, and most of the market is set”

He tells me they rent the small truck collectively to travel to Vashi, as it is easier to transport goods in it. The vendors stay together in the slums in vile parle itself.

M;: Have you been here for long?

P: “This market is very old, almost 40 years, my father used to sell vegetables at this spot, now it is me since last 11 years. “ M: So are all the vendors fixed here? Are there new vendors?

P: [looks away, trying to rearrange his vegetables]”No way, we all have been here for long, it is not possible for a new person to come here. Everything is fixed” I point to an empty spot on the street, and ask him, what if a new vendor wants to come there? And he tells me it won’t be possible as the shop keeper would not allow., M: Are the shopkeepers nice in general, or are there-frequent conflicts with them? What about the police outside the train station?

P:” Some shopkeepers are nice, some are not...you can see that there are railings on the sidewalks at some places...these are put by the shopkeepers, they don’t mind us being here on the streets, but they want to ensure space for their customers to access them. The police patrols sometimes, we try to not give him a reason to be unhappy”

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The vendors use a collective shading installation as the sun advances in the day. The vendors have a collective system of tea and lunch as well.

Photographs based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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Complete width of the sidewalk is occupied by Vendors at certain places, leaving the pedestrian with no option but to walk along the street

The use of discarded paint-buckets, oil containers and tin cans are used as support to gain elevation from the ground.

Notice the railings behind the vendor, that has been installed by the shopkeeper, in order to maintain a clear frontage in-front of their shop

The unsold goods from the days sale are covered in a tarpaulin sheet and left on the street during the night. Upon being asked about the security and risks of leaving the goods, I was told that the security guards of the shops and buildings around do that for them. The existence of the market is tied upon relationships of co-existence.

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Figure 16 : Location of causeway street market and important structures nearby 86

1. Gateway of India 2. Maharashtra police headquarters 3. National Gallery of Modern art 4. Cafe royal 5. Regal Cinema 6. BEST bus depot 7. Colaba Police Station

CASE 2 COLABA CAUSEWAY, COLABA

Location type : CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT Category : Fashion accessories, antiques and clothing Age of practise : 40 years Colaba is one of the seven islands of Mumbai that were ruled by the Portuguese. It is home to the Indian Navy base today. It consisted of two islands, Colaba and Little Colaba [Old woman’s island] that were joined together by a causeway. Colaba is the southernmost neighbourhood of Mumbai and is the art centre of the city with all art galleries and museums located here. It is also renowned for its rich architectural beauty. Numerous high end boutiques, some of the oldest theatres also lie in this area. The monumental Gateway of India, and the Taj Mahal Palace hotel make this area a prime tourist attraction.

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Figure 17 : Colaba Causeway market, or commonly known as Causeway lies on the inside of the arcaded passageways that flank the art deco buildings on Shahid bhagat singh road.

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Figure 18 : A representative view of what the market looks like inside the passageways. It is lined by vendors on both sides of the passage, with name boards of the cafés and shops behind competing with the canopies made by the vendors in the absence of an overhang.

Starting from one of the most classic cafés of south Bombay, Cafe Mondegar. The arcaded passageways of the art deco buildings are occupied by vendors on both edges, selling beautiful antiques and colourful imitation jewellery. The market in itself has become a centrality in the neighbourhood of Colaba. Owing to the large number of art museums and historical monuments,classic cafés in the neighbourhood the area is a haven for tourists, the youth, and the public administration workforce.

The market of causeway offers lucrative and quirky things to this crowd. The vendors here are also trained in speaking English, and few foreign languages like Spanish, French and Russian. Most of the vendors in the market are employed and fixed income earners. goods sold in the market are sourced by these suppliers from small scale industries in and around the city, and from other countries like Korea, china and Thailand.. Common products sold are fashion clothing, imitation jewellery, bags, footwear, books, clocks and antiques.

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Figure 19 : The shops on the ground floor of the buildings are mostly cafĂŠs, international clothing outlets, perfume makers and leather merchants. There is a co-existence of different scales of shops, restaurants and cafĂŠs along with the street vendors. The commercial street continues on for a kilometre until the Colaba vegetable market.. The market remains open on all days of the week from morning 10:00 am until 9:30 pm in the night.

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Figure 20 : Time chart depicting the different types of vendors occupying the street throughout the day 91

A view from the inside of the commercial street of Colaba Causeway. The spatial organisation of the entire street is continued in the form of a tunnel like passage,even in the absence of an arcade.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, February 2017

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Clockwise : 1.The Classic Cafe Mondegar marks the entrance of Colaba causeway Market. 2. A dull sale hour gives a clear view of sidewalk 3.Hawker making use of the railing around the tree for arranging his goods. 4. The corners of the arterial streets between the blocks also contain hawking installations

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Clockwise : 1.A Commuter walking through the causeway 2.Antiques and clocks sold in the causeway, mostly to foreign tourists 3. Vendor arranging his goods at his spot behind a bus stop, visibility from outside doesn’t affect this shopping street 4. A vendor setting up his display of clothes on a Sunday early morning. the shaded portions are used for sitting through the day.

Photographs based on fieldwork by author, March 2017

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TOWARDS LOWER PAREL WEST

VIEW 2

ENTRANCE TO LOWER PAREL STATION [WESTERN RAILWAYS]

MONORAIL CONNECTING WADALA STATION ON HARBOUR RAILWAY LINE, TOWARDS MAHALAXMI STATION ON THE WESTERN RAILWAY LINE

Figure 21: VIEW 1 showing entrance to lower Parel station from the flyover on the eastern side [as marked on the panorama in the next spread ]

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ENTRANCE TO CURREY ROAD STATION [CENTRAL RAILWAYS]

CASE 3 LOWER PAREL STATION, LOWER PAREL [EAST] Location type : OLD MILL AREA Category : Fashion accessories, antiques and clothing Age of practise : 30 years Lower Parel is the previous Mill land area of the city. It is the western part Parel, one of the original seven islands that were combined together to form the colonial city of Mumbai. Around the 80’s this area was a prime production zone with several cotton textile mills that were built in the area..After the closing down of the textile mills in the late 90’s, the area was proposed to be redeveloped to create more public spaces for the city. Unfortunately, the area was engulfed by privatization and is home today to some of the largest corporate houses in the city. Lower Parel is one of the most expensive and posh areas today, with some of the tallest skyscrapers in the city located here. Some of the previous Mill lands like Phoenix mills and Kamala Mills , today are large private multifunctional hubs combining elite residential towers, Shopping malls that are home to top international brands and leading fashion designers ,elite discotheques and bars that by design and security, attract the elite population of the city here.

World One, [under construction] is the tallest residential building in India with the tallest tower being a 117 floors [440 m], is located in the now defunct Shrinivas Mill Due to gentrification, the neighbourhood continues to remain under transformation, with old chawls being converted to residential or corporate towers by the real estate developers. The area also houses the Western railway and Central Railway yard along it’s train stations..

With the inauguration of the monorail in 2015, the area now has connectivity to Western, central and Harbour line.

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Drone view of Lower Parel assembled by author.

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View source : Brainwing Aerial solutions

RAILWAY YARD

View 1

LOWER PAREL RAILWAY STATION

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Figure 22: VIEW 2 : The Pedestrians crossing the busy bridge without a pedestrian crossing, outside the east entrance of Lower parel Station.

Delisle road. The railings on both sides, vendors on the right sidewalk and vehicles and taxis parked on the sides of the railings create difficult walking situations for pedestrians

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Clockwise : 1.Vendors on the sidewalk outside Lower Parel Station during evening 5:30 pm. 2. Same spot early in the noon when vendors are just setting up their goods 3.A locked cart with a board painted with the vendors BMC license number [both old and new numbers. All text written in Marathi] 4. The end of the bridge meeting the Currey road Flyover. Lack of pedestrian crossing, and narrow width of the sidewalk here makes it extremely difficult for pedestrians to cross this road.

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Vendor organising his goods on the sidewalk, while the second vendor setting up the canopy to prevent the sun

The Hawking installations not only occupy half of the sidewalk, but also make use of tree in order to make a higher space available for display.

There are large flyovers connecting various parts of this former mill land, which is intersected by the railway lines.. The west entrance of the railway station is still flanked by defunct mill areas, some chawls and lots of small scale shops flanking the street. The eastern entrance of the train station however lies on a flyover that crosses over the railway yard, to meet Currey road bridge..Since lower parel is a corporate hub, it brings in thousands of commuters everyday. The sidewalks are flanked by vendors from the area that serve refreshments, snacks, stationery and household things to these commuters. During peak traffic hours, i.e. morning 9:00 am until 11:00 am and Evening 6:00 pm until 8:00 pm , the streets are congested with large flows of pedestrians moving towards the train station.

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Figure 23 : Location of Fashion street market and important structures nearby 104

1. Victoria terminus/CST Station [central railways] 2. MCGM Office 3. Bombay Hospital 4. Central governments Office Complex 5. Income tax office 6. Wankhede Cricket Stadium 7. Colleges and Educational Institutes 8. Churchgate Station [Western Railways] 9. Western Railway Headquarters 10. Cross Maidan 11. Azad Maidan 12. Tata AIG office 13. MTNL headquarters 14. Law college and Library 15. Hospital 16. High court 17. City telephone Exchange 18. Bombay gymkhana [clubhouse]

CASE 4 FASHION STREET, CHURCHGATE Location type : CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT Category : Fashion clothing and bags Age of practise : 40 years Fashion Street is one of the popular street markets in the southern business district of the city. Situated between two terminating stations of Churchgate on the Western railway line, and Victoria terminus, or Chattrapati Shivaji terminus as it is known now, the street has become a centrality in the neighbourhood. It is surrounded by many important public administration buildings like the Municipal corporation Of greater Mumbai, MTNLTelephone exchange, Income tax office, Bombay Hospital,government office quarters and a number of schools, colleges and libraries.

It is also happens to be located between two of the largest playgrounds the city has : Oval maidan and Cross Maidan, with Oval maidan towards the other side. Located close to Colaba and Fort, the art districts of the city., These Maidans become sites of art exhibitions, movie screenings and display for the art festivals during the year.

It is a long commercial street with vendors selling fashion clothing for men and women, bags, belts, accessories and footwear. A few food stalls can also be spotted. With over 395 [licensed ] stalls selling Fashion clothing at affordable prices, the street market brings people from all parts of the city, including tourists to this area. The market opens at 10:00am in the morning and continues making sales till 10:00 pm in the night. Apart from the licensed stalls, there are many Unpackers present on the side walk.

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A panoramic view of Fashion Street. It is a constellation of 395 licensed vendors that occupy one side walk of MG road at Churchgate, South Mumbai. The view reflects on how the entire street along with the array of stalls is also lined by vehicular parking, mostly by cars.

Photograph based on fieldwork by author, March 2017

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Figure 24 : View of stalls lined up at the sidewalk on Fashion street

The permanent stall owners here, rarely face municipal or police harassment , but the mobile hawkers and the Unpackers are frequently targeted..During fieldwork, many municipal vans and police Jeeps were spotted to be parked next to the sidewalks.. The sidewalks next to the Maidans are extravagantly wider than 6metres.

The goods sold in this market are sourced from large industrial warehouses and from the port, where large quantities of goods that do no meet the requirements of export or retail goods, are then sold off at a much lower price to small scale buyers, including these vendors This process makes available a good amount of high street fashion affordable for a larger population. The hawkers association of Fashion street is also one of the few streets to become a plastic free zone. The market uses paper bags produced by the National Association of the blind..

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Fashion street occupies the sidewalk adjoining Cross maidan. Image above shows an everyday scene of the market bustling with customers who come here from all parts of the city for shopping.

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While the sidewalk on the opposite side, adjoining the Bombay Gymkhana and Azad Maidan remains abandoned, and underused

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Customers looking at the display of footwear at the street.

Notice the tarpaulin bags at the edge of the sidewalk, and the van standing next to it, in case there is a need to repack and leave. Also a police van can be seen behind

Photographs based on fieldwork by author, March 2017

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Vendors trying to make a sale, as the crowds advance on a Sunday evening.

An Unpacker relaxing on the chair while his neighbour gives back change to the customer.

Few men sit on their chairs on the edge of the sidewalk, chatting during the evening, while two vendors repack their goods , leaving for the day. The social space extends beyond the limits of the sidewalks and expands to fill in gaps between the parked vehicles

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CASE 5 TRAINS The Mumbai locals carry 7 million passengers daily, along it’s three railway lines, that were laid initially by the British to carry goods and raw materials from the hinterland to the port. The trains move to and fro the northern most suburbs and the southern tip of the city, with a remarkable frequency of a train in either direction every 4 minutes. They operate from 4:00 am in the morning until 1:40 am past midnight, stopping only for duration of 2 hours and 20 minutes. A one way ticket to the shortest distance costs 5 INR [0.08 USD] and the farthest distance costs 20 INR [0.31 USD]. Unequivocally, this makes them the most efficient way to move around the metropolis. The trains connect not only suburbs of Mumbai, with its sister cities Navi Mumbai and Thane, but also to nearby districts like Kalyan, Dombivali, Vasai and Virar.

The morning hours from as early as 07:00 am for the northern most connections, until 10:30 am and a similar duration in the evening from 05:30 pm for the southern most trains until 8:00 pm are the rush hours when most people are moving to and from work. These hours bring about 55% population of the metropolis and more from the neighbouring districts to the train stations of the city, which from there take a taxi, auto-rickshaw or walk to their destinations. The trains are said to be the lifeline of the city, as it is the quickest, cheapest and thus the most efficient way of travelling in the city. The train stations thus are home to a large density of people flows, which renders its vicinities as the most profitable spots for commercial businesses, including street trade.

Taking advantage of this density of flows, hawkers can be spotted selling small domestic and fashion goods inside the trains. It works well for both the hawker and the commuter, who saves time, rather makes use of his/her travel time [an average Mumbaikar spends 90 minutes in train travel everyday]. A lot of small scale commerce relies on the trains for transport of goods , the most well known example being the lunch-box delivery service of the Dabbawalas

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A vendor sells imitation jewellery in the Ladies compartment .

Image taken on the Western Railways on a March Monday afternoon

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A male vendor unveils a range of accessories produced by his family in a workshop in Mumbra in a compartment reserved for females.

Image taken on Western Railways on a March Sunday

Tiffin crates being loaded into the Mumbai trains Photograph by Satyaki Ghosh, Published in the web article “Mumbai Memoirs – Mumbai’s ‘Men In White’! by Shraddha Sankulkar, September 2016

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An old vendor selling books to read in the train

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A female vendor selling accessories made in private workshops in Mumbra in the Female reserved compartments

Figure 25 : Seen above is the way in which the train vendor operates, making use of the grab handles designed for standees. The vendor typology found here is the Unpackers. They enter the train with a blue tarpaulin sacks that contain goods to be sold. The products are usually strewn together and tied to a hook that is lifted out and hung on one of the grab handles . This process is retraced after a few stops, when the vendor de boards the train, and continues with the same in the opposite direction, thus constantly moving to and fro between a span of roughly 4-5 stops

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3.5 UNVEILING THE CHAOS Patterns , movements and Intersections Going back to the question of contests that keep surfacing from time to time in the city, it is impor tant to understand that there are several reasons to this, star ting from the multitudes of activities that happen on the street to the magnitude of it. In order to understand space, one must look at it from a space-time frame.

In order to understand the comprehensive nature of everyday life where spaces are constantly re-interpreted over the different hours of the day there is a production of rhythms that come together. Henri Lefebvre’s work on Rhythmanalysis is useful in gaining insight into the double sense of the notion of the everyday- a dual meaning found in the English and the French. Le quotidian means the mundane, the everyday, but also the repetitive, what happens every day. He shoes how space and time are inseparable and that they should be thought about together. Lefebvre takes a number of themes – the thing, the object, life in the urban or rural environment, the role of media, political discipline and the notion of dressage, and music, among others – and rethinks them through the notion of rhythm. (Introduction to Rhythmanalysis (ix),Lefebvre, 2004) Everyday life is linked to hours of the day, the time you wake up, meal times, work time, to the time you sleep.

It is a repetitive process that is linked to the cycle of the sun rising and setting everyday. Hence the everyday is linked to universal cycles of days, months, seasons 120

and years in a vital manner. Lefebvre formulates the framework for understanding of the par ticular through repetitions (of Movements, gestures, actions, situations and differences] creating rhythms, their intersections, their birth, duration, and death. As he notes, “Everywhere there is interaction between place time and expenditure of energy, there is rhythm” (Lefebvre, 2004)He mentions two kinds of rhythms, Linear and cyclic rhythms, and the need to separate those in analysis. Cyclic rhythms are simple to understand… days, months, years, tides et al. Cyclic rhythms are those that have a determined frequency, and hence a beginning, an identical moment of returning, and hence belonging. Linear rhythms on the other hand are defined by consecutive and reproduction of the same phenomena at almost identical intervals, but with a difference in intensity. For example waves, they hit the shores in a continuous motion but the distance and strength differs each time. Sometimes there are shor ter lashes and sometimes they are taller. During the times of low tides and high tides, the strength with which they lash the shore differs.

Hence linear rhythms are reproductions that engage with the cyclic rhythms In the chapter “seen from the window” he associates the heterogeneous street rhythms with the

Figure 26: Seen above is a graphical representation of the use of the same space by different actors of the public space, during different hours of the streets. Evidently, the duration of morning 07:00 am-10:00am and evening 05:30 pm-09:30pm are the most congested times of the day, as many actors come together at the same place during this period.

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vile parle train station [east]

Figure 27 : The above diagram is an analysis of various patterns of movement that can be observed on the street.

The case analysed here is Mongibhai Street outside Vile Parle train Station [Case 1, page 74] 122

mongibhai street

The overlapping circles are representative of the space in which the hawkers on the street operate, which is the threshold between public and private, at the sidewalk. The black and white lines indicate vehicles parked along the street. Together these two factors, along with more like materiality generate a pattern of pedestrian and vehicular movements.

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sounds of everyday places. There is an alternation of silences and outbursts of people and vehicles commuting daily. Alternating linear rhythms of commuters, customers, vehicles often mix with cyclic rhythms of the retail and commercial stores, the railway schedule, the delivery trucks, the vendors and parked vehicles. Once a perhaps tipsy driver approaches the crossing and drives straight through the stop signal. People on the opposite side of the road can be observed at night in arrhythmic intervals. The traffic rhythms slow down during the night without ever coming to a complete standstill. Some vehicles are waiting at red lights even at three or four o’clock in the morning. The interaction(s) of these varied rhythms, the repetitive and the alternating, make up, as it is said, the animation of the street or the quar ter.

(Kur t Meyer, 2008) The street in Mumbai is emblematic of a similar stage, depicting the inter twining of similar rhythms. The subordinate invisible infrastructures that mark the image of the streets of the city, though temporal in nature, are woven across, along with the flows. The street is used by various actors that fluctuate throughout the day. The longest occupation of which is by the vendors and parked vehicles.

As Filip de Boeck states in Divining the City , speaking about such infrastructures in Kinshasa “The often disjointed infrastructural figments and fragments that make up the urban landscape are thus embedded in other rhythms and immoral-

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ities, in totally different layers of socially networked infrastructures, punctuated by varying spatial, temporal and affective oscillations between connectedness and disconnection, situated in the waxing and waning movements between foreground and back- or underground, between surface, fold and gap, between the visible and the invisible, darkness and light, movement and motionlessness, continuity and discontinuity, flow and blockage, opening and closure (Filip De Boeck, 2015, p. 5) There are multiple linear rhythms that intersect on the streets in Mumbai. There is adaptation and fluctuation of flows throughout the day. The movement of the commuters, customers, cars and two wheelers all follow different patterns in the same space, during different times of the day. The figures below are choreographical char ts that show the different patterns followed by the actors in motion on the street.

It becomes evident here that the sidewalk, or its occupation is not the only factor that determines how people move on the streets, rather a lot of factors like materiality, the scale of commuters, obstacles like parked vehicles, broken paver blocks on the streets and sidewalks, the narrow width of the sidewalks and garbage on the streets. The vehicles also follow patterns in order to avoid intersections, keeping directions of flow in mind. The commuters going towards the train stations take the right and

Br oken or da ma ged p ave r s Figure 28 : Street Materiality

the commuters walking away cross the streets to use the other side walks. There is a logic followed by all pedestrians, that determines the rhythms of movement on the streets. When we look at all these rhythms together, we see that the contest arises due to intersections of various rhythms owing to the multiple fact mentioned before. The streets are subjected to a multitude of functions everyday. And the sidewalk being subjected to flows above its capacity actually render them as physical thresholds between the private and the public. The only streets where sidewalks are indeed used, are the ones that are wide enough to accommodate the flows of commuters and passengers. The smaller ones thus become magnets for other purposes.

Materiality Lets us take the example of Mongibhai street to understand different logics of activities that occur on the street., In order to better understand where the spatial contest actually lies. Is hawking the real issue?

The first fieldwork observation was the materiality of the streets in Mumbai. The streets are paved in the city, just like the pavements, for ease of repair due to heavy monsoons that cause damage every year.

Though some paver blocks are missing as they are removed by the hawkers to use as weight or plinth for their display, some are uneven , damaged or missing from the pavement.

This causes discontinuity in the sidewalk.

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Pedestrian patterns This diagram is a translation of fieldwork analysis that was done in February 2017. It was observed that the street consisted of three kinds of pedestrians : the daily commuters to the railway station, customers visiting the market with the sole motive of purchase, and the occasional commuter that stops on his/her way to the train station to buy something he/she needs.

Based on this categorization, the patterns of movement of these pedestrians were mapped. Evidently, the commuter avoids the hawking zone and the parked vehicles, and follows a pattern of movement , that is clear and free of obstacles.

While the commuter who also seeks to buy something on his/her own way, chooses to traverse between the parked vehicles and the vending zone.

Where as the customer seeking goods from the stores next to the street avoids all of them all together.

Figure 29 : Pedestrian Patterns

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Vehicular patterns The automobile in Mumbai not only needs to watch the traffic signals, but also an occasional pedestrian that traverses across the street between moments of pause due to traffic jams.

By the general rule cars move on the right leaving the left passageway for auto-rickshaws and two wheelers. But in the secondary streets that are narrower, a different logic takes place. The smaller vehicles like auto rickshaws, two wheelers and bicycles travel between the thinner passages available between larger vehicles like the car or the bus.

The thickness of the line segments in this diagram are representative of the size of the vehicle occupying the street at a given moment of stop in the traffic flow.

Figure 30 : Street Materiality

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Figure 31 : Trees, and Canopies

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trees and canopies

Trees in the city can be found in abundance along the streets. But the sidewalks that run around them, have broken pavers around the roots, and also reduce the width of the sidewalk considerably.

Vendors occupy the areas beneath the shade of the trees, but nevertheless, in a large constellation, such as the Agarwal market here, the vendors on the other side of the street, create their own canopies with the help of umbrellas fixed to their stalls or by tying a piece of cloth to the nearby structures and fixing them on the ground, with the use of bamboo and weight.

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Figure 32 : Intertwining Patterns

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Intertwining patterns

When all these patterns of movements on the sidewalk and the street are put together, one sees the intertwining of many of these patterns. A point where a pedestrian turns when it arrives at a parked vehicle on his/her path, or a segment of damaged pavement, litter on the ground , or be it another customer stopping to buy something from a vendor. The vehicles constantly use their breaks to stop for a pedestrian crossing the street , The diagram reflects on the competing flows of movement on one spatial figure, each having a different velocity and a pattern devised out of logic.

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Figure 33 : Contested Spaces

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The contest

These logics when come together, appear to be conflicts on the street. As we can see , It is not just the vendor, but a major part of the contest lies with other factors like parked vehicles and poor materiality of the street. While factors like the vendors and cars are visible to the eye, many smaller factors like materiality, discontinuity and shade often go unnoticed, but play an important role in the formation of patterns of movement in the streets. The attitude towards the hawker, and the status of the car as mentioned earlier, give rise to contested claims over the street, with the hawker being the target owning to legality of his status as an actor.

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4. INSECURITY, UNCERTAINTY AND VULNERABILITY Exploring the Everyday struggles of Street trade

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4.1 MARGINALIZATION, BRIBES AND THE POLITICS OF SURVIVAL While the previous chapters focus on the productivity of street vending in the city, this chapter looks briefly into the politics of survival of vendors in the urban space, in order to understand their existing situation in the urban public space.

Public space is not just a physical space, but a multidimensional space that is representative of social political, economic and legal relationships. De Soto speaks of a ‘form of capital’ that generates income in the absence of other capitals. The existence of ‘social relationships’ help perpetuate this activity.

It carries a political meaning as it is used as a tool of exploitation by few classes of urbanities. And it holds a legal aspect because there is a lack of ownership, laws and regulations.

(Saha, 2017) As established previously in the text, the existence of street vending is not simply a population of the poor section of the city using public spaces to earn a living but it is also an important service to the larger urban population. It exists because of the demand from its customers. According to article 39 A of the Constitution of India “any citizens, men and women, have equal right to an adequate means of livelihood (NCEUS, 2007) But there are regular scenes of evictions and removal notices that are issued to these vendors. There are many adversities that vendors have to face from day to day in order to carry their activity. They work with a limited capital, having no access to loans to expand, the denial of defined space for them means no space of storage, no access to proper sanitation, ventilation and shading. They need to work long hours because their trade occurs on an everyday basis. Most vegetable vendors interviewed cited that they work from 4:00 am in the morning until midnight at the same spot. Fresh produce is sourced everyday and needs

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to be consumed within the same day due to lack of storage.

This leaves them with no time for family, and poor health conditions. Land being one of the most precious resources of capital in urban economy, imparts a conflicted scenario, where utilisation of space give rise to politics. In Mumbai eviction drives and BMC raids are regularised scenes.

Nearly 68% of vendors reported Eviction threats and confiscation of goods by the municipality in a survey conducted in 2009-10. Evictions and police harassments are regular features in the name of cleanliness and beautification, municipal norms, security concerns and so on.(Ibid) These events of evictions and confiscations occur with consents of senior municipal officers and are often uninformed, without any warning being issued to the vendors.This often results in loss of property and physical damages. The vendors also complain about the daily bribes that they need to pay to these policemen in order to peacefully vend on the streets. These bribes, though mostly are in the form of cash but also happen in kind, depending on the type and quantity of good the vendor is selling. Debdulal Saha in his book Informal Markets livelihood and Politics points out that 5-20%1 of their daily income is being expropriated by the police illegally. Vendors stated that payment of higher bribes doesn’t ensure no harassment, but reduces the degree to which this harassment occurs. Vendors selling larger quantities of products or perishable items are forced to pay higher amounts of bribe because they make bigger sales. Tea-coffee vendors need to pay INR 2,500 per month, a Chinese food vendor needs to pay INR 5000 per month.

1.(Saha, 2017, p. 133)

Despite of bribe payments being a completely illegal process, is extremely well co-ordinated in its operations. Saha mentions that there are two sets of actors involved in the collection of bribe payments. The first set is that of the civic authorities, namely the municipal officers and the police, and the second is a group of intermediate collectionaries which are generally street vendors who double up to collect this payment from all vendors and deliver it to the civic actors.

There are the ‘zero numbers’ who are the informers from the markets itself, that warn of an eviction drive before the civic authorities arrive. The collection intermediaries then collect money from all the street vendors in this market and then negotiate with the civic authorities on their arrival, paying them with the cash collected. The estimated number of actors to which a single vendor pays bribes to is 43. (Ibid, p.

119) The police are not authorised to confiscate goods or raid the streets, unless asked to do so. Between 1988-1977 there was a ‘pavti’2system where vendors were issued receipts of INR 5-10 everyday as a formal recognition of an informal, yet widely spread activity. This entitled them to vend. According to a survey conducted by Tata institute of Social Sciences [TISS] and Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action [YUVA], around 22,000 vendors were issued a pavti on an everyday basis. But the system no longer exists. Everyday negotiations are made based on payments of bribes as unofficial rents to access public space. In the cases of evictions and confiscations of goods, the vendor is supposed to receive a receipt of the goods confiscated, and upon payment of a fine, the goods are then released. However, surveys and 2. Pavti is a Hindi word which means a Receipt or an acknowledgment on paper

interviews reflect that in most cases there is no receipt issued.

The collection of confiscated goods happens after the official hours [5pm] of the civic bodies, and the amount of fine charged is much more than the investment in the goods. Half of the goods have suffered damage, and are most of the times missing when the vendor reaches the local office to release his products. This further makes the transaction of payments illegal.

The census on street vendors conducted by TISS-YUVA in 1998 showed that the authorities collected INR 4000 million [62.23 million USD3 ] in Mumbai and INR 50 [0.78 million USD] crore in New Delhi. (Ibid). This is huge amount of money that is unregistered and unaccounted for. De Soto describes this money as ‘dead capital’. He points out that these illegal payments are dead capitals, and a loss to the government. Upon legalisation of this activity, this ‘dead capital’ can become ‘active capital’ which can become a source of revenue collection. (De Soto, 2000) During the four-week fieldwork done in February 2017, one

3. Rate calculated as per Exchange rate on the day of 17.07.2017

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4.2 THE CASE OF LINKING ROAD, BANDRA

Linking Road Shopping Area is a well known street market that specialises in different kinds of footwear. Around 150 stalls of hawkers sending footwear and clothes have been operating from this street for over a period of 40 years. The stalls are licensed and registered with the Municipal corporation. They occupy the sidewalk outside Patwardhan park on Linking road, Khar. The stalls are fixed, folding cabins, which during the working hours display an array of products sold , for the customer to choose from.

Panorama compiled and photographed by author on 3rd March 2017, after the market re-opened for customers

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such case of harassment and eviction was noticed in the street market of Linking road, along a half a km stretch between Bandra and Khar West. Linking road is one of the famous street markets in the affluent neighbourhood of Bandra [West]. There lies a forty-year-old street market of around 167 (Mid Day, 2017) fashion retail stalls, largely known for the wide variety of shoes available. The vendors in this market, hold vending licences and are registered with the municipality. This market attracts crowds daily from all sections of the society, mainly the youth. The market is a famous tourist destination in the city, and people come from all parts of the city to shop here.

In the beginning of February, the market vendors were issued a notice by the Municipal Corporation to stop vending activity and were asked to relocate to another street. However, an alternate location of sufficient capacity, was not offered to the hawker community.The cited reason was beautification of the area. The municipality claimed an extension of the park behind the street and underground parking. A number of stalls were broken and damaged. This also lead to the death of two vendors. During fieldwork, the vendors were found to have shut their stalls and protesting on the streets. Several articles were published in the newspapers, following the updates on the strikes. The interviews with the vendors brought an understanding of the collaborative bargain instruments they used. Most of the vendors were not aware of their rights to file a police complaint about the harassment.

President of Linking Road Stall Owners Welfare Association Faisal Qureishi, reached out to urban activists and other unions. With the help of Aftab Siddique , an urban activist and resident of Khar neighbourhood, they were able to get a stay order from the State High court[see image], until a proper location was offered to the vendors. Mrs Sidique shared details of the events that she orchestrated to help the vendors seek

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security from the harassment. According to her,there were refusals from the police to register complaints. Scenes of protests were repeated daily by the hawkers, also seeking public support.The vendors protested outside of Khar police station for several days [ see image] After 17 days of street marches and repeated protests outside the police station, the vendors re-opened the market, still waiting for a solution to the upcoming issue. As has been already observed through fieldwork and mapping, here too the issue of congestion, arises from a lot of vehicles parked along the street.

This brings us to the many questions about use of public space in the city and a reflection on some of the everyday struggles that vendors have to face. It also raises the question of attitude of civic bodies and civilians, the status of the car over the pedestrian and the hawker. Explicit forms Regulations that are issued by municipal corporations arise from this implicit mentality.

How do these negotiations happen? How is the process of eviction and reoccupation so recurrent? What does this ebb and flow represent? What makes the spatial reoccupation so easy? Hawking in Mumbai even though a contradictory existence, is structured and secured through cultivated relationships with civil servants, through unofficial payments of Protection money or “Hafta4” . They inhabit a precarious legal status, while still being deeply enmeshed in the daily life of a neighbourhood. (Anjaria, 2016). These spatial occupations are not only devised through the haftas but also through counter surveillance, social interactions and customer relations.

4 .“hafta” is a Hindi word that literally translates to a week. But in this context it refers to the weekly bribe vendors need to pay to the civic authorities.

The market which is open all seven days of the week from 10 am in the morning until 10 pm in the night was found closed in protest against the municipal raids that were carried out in the first week of February . The harassment led to deaths of two vendors, angering the Linking road hawkers association.

Picture taken on the 21rst of February, 2017

The Hawkers association sought a stay order from the State High Court, in an attempt to lawfully fight for their place of livelihood. A print out of all licensees with license number, validity and a copy of the Stay order was pasted on all stalls , to avoid further damage from the municipal officers.

Picture taken on the 21rst of February, 2017

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Many activists and NGOs, along with a few residents joined the protest by the vendors against harassment from the municipal corporation, seeking revision in the eviction notice.

Image Source : Aftab Siddique

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The hawkers association prepared banners and stood on the site through the day in order to gain public support against the decision of BMC. They requested pedestrians passing by to pen down whether they wanted the

The hawkers association was seen wearing T-shirts with a clear message asking the Municipal Corporation to stop harassing citizens. The image echoes with a cry for right to the city.

Image source : Mid Day times Photographed by Nimesh Dave

Image showing the hawkers association stationed outside Khar Police station to file an FIR [first information report] against the BMC. According to activist Aftab Siddique[right] the Police refused to take a complaint against the municipal authorities.

Image source : Aftab Siddique

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Aftab Siddique speaking to the media regarding the Linking road protest

Media article about the proposal of car parking that was cited as a reason for the eviction drive.

Media article about the proposal of car parking that was cited as a reason for the eviction drive.

Image Source : Aftab Siddique

Media source : The Times of India Published on February 4.2017

Media source : The Times of India Published on February10, 2017

4.3 NEGOTIATIONS AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING Since vending requires everyday transactions of goods procured, it needs capital to start. Most vendors start with their own savings or loan the money from other sources like relatives, wholesalers or moneylenders. In the absence of access to formal loan and capital through banks, moneylenders become an important point of financial access for those who want to enter this business, or need social security. These money lenders formulate their own scheme of loans. These loans are normally provided on a daily basis or on a short -term basis, as this ensures them full recovery quickly. A lot of vendors take loan from them for personal reasons, in which case the rate of interest is 10-15%. In terms of business loans, there is no rate of interest in cash, but in terms of trade contracts with the wholesalers. Thus, there is a formation of trust based relationship. If the money is paid back in time, things remain smooth. But in the case of money not being paid on time, there is confiscation of goods and acquisition of the vendor’s spot [ even though it legal belongs to no one] Sometimes money is asked to be returned many months prior to the loan period, citing an emergency. These lenders generally target small and marginal groups that rely more on borrowing.

This leaves the vendors to be in a continuous debt trap.

Another measure against the exploitation faced by vendors, are the Trade unions that exist in the country, particularly in Mumbai owing to the large number of vendors and the steep competition. These unions are instruments of collective bargaining and regulation of groups in the society. They facilitate the negotiation process with civic authorities, during times of threat and harassment. These are voluntary organisations that look into vocational, economic and social interests of the workers. It is perhaps the most effective form of collective bargaining, that enables marginalised sections to raise voice

against the wrong and get easier access to financial resources.

There are many trade unions and organisations that work for the street vendors in India. The Self-Employed women’s association [SEWA], National Association of street vendors of India [NASVI], National Hawkers Federation in India [NHFI] and Nidan are few unions that have been working on initiating and developing policy dialogues at local, regional, state and national levels.

Despite of the benefits, Unions too face many challenges in trying to organise this activity. The heterogeneous nature of street vending makes it more difficult for them. Several layers of illegality and vested interests make the functioning of loyal leaders difficult. There are often complaints of loopholes where annual contributions of INR 500 are collected from all vendors for various insurance schemes and registration issues.

(Saha, 2017). These unions pushed for the Street Vendors Act for legalising street vending with the help of Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. The Act was introduced in the parliament in 2012 and came to force on 1rst May 2014 (TNN, Sept 12. 2017) The policy was framed in 2006 and was revised in 2009, when street vendors were recognised as urban service providers following several protests by NASVI and SEWA. The act focuses on issues related to registration, issue of identity cards, setting the terms and conditions for hawking and taking corrective measures against defaulters and collecting revenue. Unions like NASVI,SEWA,Nidan and Manushi were important participants in each stage of drafting the central act for Street Vending. The unions therefore can be helpful instruments in not just collective bargain, but to promote self-regularisation and self-compliance amongst the vendors.

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“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.�

-Jane Jacobs

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5.0 REMAKING THE CITY: POSSIBILITIES AND DESIGN Towards polyvalent urban spaces

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5.1 INCLUSIVE PUBLIC SPACES Cities are now becoming home to a major population of the world. As mentioned in the beginning, in countries like India where an estimated population of 300 million will be moving to urban areas, (UN Habitat, 2016) calls for an urgent need to build cities that are more inclusive and dynamic in nature. In this momentous shift happening in our cities, urbanists need to think of accommodating for transitions, the multitudes of minor changes that cities undergo with time.

Change is always a gradual phenomenon, and thus cannot be imposed in the form of a fixed infrastructure. Increasing shifts of population ask for cities to rethink their attitudes towards migration. They must admit to a new definition and shape of urban spaces, as this shifting population brings with itself new frictions within the previously imposed built forms and regulations that are inscribed in the city’s image.

The imposition of standard designs that arise from a singular emblematic image of the city [ like the long term political agenda of Shanghai-fication of Mumbai] excludes social and cultural practises of the people who will eventually inhabit them. This often results in fragmented sections of the city.

Thus, in my opinion, urban designers must lay emphasis on including them while articulating the space they design in the remaking of cities, in order to domesticate them. The process of building cities is to orchestrate designs and forms that stimulate self-organisation. New interventions must be

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created that contain the capacity to engage with the existing complex nature of cities.

To study urbanism is to invent organisational forms that can enter and engage with the complex dynamics of contemporary cities. Architecture is a practise that is engaged in speculating these emergent configurations and orders. It recognises them suggests mechanisms to make them instrumental and provides them form. At the same time, it invents scenarios for built structures and their uses. As physical objects, these structures are part of the existing world, as models they describe emergent orders, possible realities.

Bunschoten refers to the frictions caused in the second skin of cities, by these emergent practises as wounds. He urges that urbanists must aim at healing those wounds.The wounds are indices that need interpretation, mapping and modelling of the dynamics of the subliminal forces.

How do we stimulate their dynamic tendencies and imagine alternative development? How do we create instruments of planning that use the emergent phenomena to implement alternative developments? (Bunschoten, 2001, p. 25) To do so we must look at these practises with a different eye. The previous chapters articulate how street vending is carried out in the city. And when we look beyond the norms

of municipal control over public spaces, we realise that contest and conflicts occur apart from matters of legality and occupation. It is because of the existence of pluralities on a limited space, and the coming together of different forms of appropriation of the same space by different actors. The street in the city is a constantly transforming space where all forms of economic and social articulations occur. While the Street Vendors Act promises legalisation of street vendors and acknowledges right to livelihood, how can the city equip its public space to facilitate these social practises?

The important thing to understand, and remember before we think of design as an instrument to equip these practises is that cities are constantly changing, and so do social structures. The enforcement of Street Vendors Act, if carried out carefully can play an important role in changing the city. Not only is it supposed to increase the tax base for the solidarity of the welfare state, but with access to monetary loans, health insurances and security of livelihood it would empower many of them to move out of this transitory phase, and expand their businesses. Thus, allocation of a fixed infrastructure for street vendors is not the way forward, rather what we need to do is to design for this transition in a way that it minimizes conflict, and allows a form that can be adapted to various needs of all sections of the society. Urban design for public spaces should engender cultural polyvalence through a non-functional form.

The course of this research raises certain points that can be used to re-imagine the streets of Mumbai. The idea of which requires moving away from standardisation and incorporating elasticity. Mumbai has its specific needs, that arise from the social practises that are an important service to the city.

It is a city with a very high density of population that already depends heavily on public transport, yet the street design lays more emphasis on facilitating car flows, as opposed to the 78% population that uses public transport and prefers walking. The existing conditions of the city are an invitation to think of a possibility of a pedestrian friendly city. In such a case, incorporating strategic features to the existing streets can help make the street more polyvalent in nature, and can allow multiple appropriations of the same space, and minimize conflicts.

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5.2 STRATEGIES These strategies have been devised from the cases enumerated in Chapter 3 1. Identifying Rhythms and Patterns In Chapter two the research analysis of rhythms and patterns of the street, we understand that conflicts of use and space occur due to multiple factors.The major ones being the scale of flows, vendors and cars, and the mentality of civic authorities and the status of the car. Factors like materiality and shade also play an important role. Each actor in the public space devises his/her own pattern of movement, that is guided by the aforementioned factors. For example, the commuter defines his pattern of movement depending on the availability of a clear path that is free of obstacles like water logged potholes, damaged or discontinuous sidewalks, zones where customers stop to make a purchase from a vendor, a parked vehicle, or garbage litters, or in the daytime s/he seeks a shaded path, avoiding disturbances of any kind.

While the vendor seeks a corner that allows flexibility of installation, proximity to nodes of maximum flows in order to seek customers, and shade. While parked vehicles seek surveillance and proximity to their destinations. In order to re-imagine streets, we must understand how these different actors use and appropriate this space. And then we must single out what is important, and needs to be addressed first.

According to a survey by MMRDA cars account for as a means of transport for only 22% of the total population of Mumbai Metropolitan region, while 11 million people or 78%

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of the population depends on public transport [52% railways and 26% on BEST buses] (Nandargikar, 2016). A car occupies the space of 10 pedestrians but caters to only on 22% population of the city. Hence there is a disproportionate allocation of space according to the given numbers.

2. Designing for people: imagining a car free scenario It is clear from the statistics of MMRDA that more than 2/3rd of the city’s population depends on public transport. Mumbai is the only city in India where such a large proportion of the population uses public transport. Thus, it should not be impossible to imagine a car free scenario in the future. The linearity of the city and the density of people that traverse along its spine each day provide the premise of a walkable city, and pushes us to re-imagine how our streets would look like if we designed for people and not cars.

With increasing populations and decreasing space, cities will have to think of new forms of transports that will come along in the future, changing again the way the city functions. Water transport and Rapid public transport can prove to be efficient future transport systems. Currently ferry transport has been proposed for certain routes in the City. New metro lines are under construction. With the depletion of oil, the number of cars would drastically reduce, and will be replaced by electric cars and bikes. What would streets look like then?

To begin with, Mumbai needs to get rid of street parking, as a general rule. That would be the first effective measure to discourage people from using the car in the first place. A car

occupies the space of 1 entire room. And in a city where the open space per person is less than 1 square metres, imagine the amount of open space that can be made available by getting rid of surface car parking. Same goes with private vehicles of a larger size. Most of the drawings for flows show that parked vehicles on the edge of the sidewalk actually are a bigger obstacle than a vendor. A vendor occupies a much smaller footprint and is flexible with location, while the parked vehicles in the absence of their owners need to be towed by a giant machine.

Strategic placements of bollards or organisation of planters at a distance small than the width of a car can obstruct vehicles from being parked along the roads to begin with.

This comparative representation of space used by different actors is an answer in itself to the question of density.

Image source : denvercity.org

A visual exercise carried out by Australian Cycling fund to demonstrate the benefits of avoiding use of cars , and promoting people friendly streets.

Image source : Australian Cycling fund

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3. Redefining space management through time Time sharing of spaces is an extremely important strategy for a city like Mumbai where space is limited. Vendors reported that the evening hours from 05:00 pm until 10:00 pm were the hours of maximum sale.This time of profit though, differs from the goods and commodities being sold by the vendor.

Street food vendors make most of the sales during the three meal timings of the day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Major bulk of pedestrian traffic is noted to be from 08:00 am in the morning until 11:00 am, and from 05:30 pm in the evening until 08:30 pm. Most of the bulk transport vehicles are allowed inside the city only between 10:00 pm and morning 06:00 am. While some of these timings coincide with each other, a reasonable time sharing model can be worked out for vendors to practise.This can ensure pedestrian safety and would minimize conflicts. This does not imply moving the vendor away from his most profitable spot and slot in the day, but to organise time sharing of the same space. As a way to make way for more people and activities.

For example, the current street parking lanes can be cordoned off with bollards/planters as mentioned earlier, and this lane could then become the elastic zone that can be pedestrianised during peak hours, allowing commuters who do not wish to make a purchase to move uninterruptedly towards their destination. And during the same hours, movement of private vehicles that need not access the public transport hubs could be diverted to alternate routes and priority to be given to buses and taxis fetching people to the train stations.

This could be a model for the 5 peak hours in the day, while

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during the remaining hours vehicular traffic can still move at its pace. The cordoned off elastic lane could be accessed by two wheelers and bicycles, ensuring a safer zone for them.

The schema proposed for two cases in this thesis, demonstrate how cordoned off space can be used by pedestrians during peak hours, but they can still allow bicycles and two wheelers to drive through in the remaining hours of the day.

In a city like Mumbai, where there is no bicycle infrastructure, this can ensure a safer zone for the ones who wish to bike, and the ones that already use it.

4. Tree as an infrastructure There is no denying that trees are very useful things one can give to a city. The importance of trees is culturally embedded in Indian traditions. Indians have a deep-rooted reverence for trees as they symbolise the foundation of life in the Indian culture. They are considered a source of shelter for birds and mankind, of wisdom, of fruit and of knowledge. Before the arrival of the city, the tree was the point of social gathering, of panchayats where matters of justice were debated between groups of people sitting on the basin that surrounds the tree.

It still is a place of social gathering to a certain extent. Before the arrival of the classroom, the tree again was the sole infrastructure.

Planting of trees not only will help in the creation of a micro-climate, which is an urgent need in the city ,but also to make life easier for the ones who seek opportunities on the street, as they can offer multitudes of possibilities like support infrastructures for shades, [temporary and collective

Figure 34 : Top: Trees, are important urban elements. A modern adaptation of tree basins can provide multiple functions to the user. The diagram above shows how tree basins can be extended to store goods, as a bench, or for vending too.

Image created by author Left : Different types of tree basins Image source : Pinterest

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installations]. By reintroducing the tree basin, with a folding materiality, can offer multiple purposes of storage and plinth that are otherwise created by damaging public property [ refers to the removal of paver blocks by vendors to create plinth or to use as weight for support] Currently sidewalks are constructed around existing tree structures which often results into damaged portions of the sidewalk because of root growths and hence creating discontinuity. By using tree basins and grates, it can become an invitation for different kinds of activities 5. Micro-topography Another traditional element that has vanished over the time is the “Otla� or the raised verandah outside the houses, which was designated as a semi-public area, where trade was made, and social contacts were created. It can still be found in the traditional dwellings that still exist in the city, and in the old city cores of many cities of the states Gujarat and Maharashtra and many more. What if the sidewalk could bring back these? An adaptation of the traditional concept of Otlas in contemporary designs can re-establish the semi-private nature of the threshold that lies between the street and the private. Different levels can determine the way spaces can be occupied and used during different times of the day , by different people.

6. Asymmetry: Abandoning standard designs For decades, we have stuck to the process of building with standards. While it is easy to replicate standards, they some-

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times lead to a lot of wasted space and infrastructure. In my research, I observed that the street is a symmetrical design almost everywhere in the city. But the patterns of flows and user experience is very different from this set standard.

When we are thinking of designing for people, it can be a very important strategy to abandon the so called standard designs.

In case 2, 3 and 4 we have seen that the constellations of vendors in the city transform the way space is used. The setting of the market attracts all flows towards one sidewalk, leaving the other abandoned. Can we then think of getting rid of this redundant symmetry that municipal engineers and law makers have sworn by for decades?

Can we combine the abandoned and the overcrowded to get more out of the limited space that we have in Mumbai?

What if our streets followed a different design, that stems from an understanding of how flows are structured in the city.

Future extensions for pedestrian space

Figure 35 : The raised porch of the traditional ‘otla’ could be recreated by positioning trees with basins along one axis, to form a continuous platform that provides a separate level to the existing public spaces,. With future pedestrianisation of streets the same idea can be permuted to achieve varying heights , thus inviting multiple possibilities

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7. Water as a strategy Street vending as an activity at many levels requires water.

During fieldwork vendors have were noticed to keep their surroundings clean, and washing their spots with water first.

Most of the food vendors also have a lot of water that is required for cleaning of utensils or washing hands. But a lack of a proper drainage system and water sanitation provisions on the street are also some of the challenges faced by the vendors.

Mumbai has heavy monsoons for almost 4 months of the year. A part of the issue of the streets is water logging during monsoons. Many streets get inundated by water post a heavy shower. On the other hand, there is also a shortage of water supply in the city. The spread of impermeable surfaces in the city help no further. With rising temperatures and frequent floods due to climate change, the city must equip itself with more trees. Indeed, the streets and sidewalks can become permeable, by introducing more trees, rain gardens and a parallel water system below the street could help mitigate not only flooding, but can also be a rain water reservoir. There should be provision of public toilets near these vending zones, which could use this water supply for flushing purposes.

Figure 36: Use of rain gardens along pavements can help collect water , and are a good landscape addition

Figure 37: permeable pavement materials can be used to collect storm water during heavy monsoons and prevent flooding on streets

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8. Materiality And last but not the least, the materiality of the street. Materials play an important role in guiding actions, and so do colours. In Mumbai, most of the streets as well as the sidewalks are made up of paver blocks for the ease and speed of repair, since monsoons cause frequent damages to them. The type and size of pavers used for the two are however different. In Chapter 3, a reflection on the materiality of the street shows that at many places the street has missing and broken paver blocks. While the sidewalks have the red and yellow cosmic shaped paver blocks [218 x270 mm], the street has grey zigzag paver blocks [ 250 x 123 mm].

Cosmic paver blocks used for the sidewalks Photo by Indiamart

The very same concept can be further articulated in introducing a third or the fourth type of paver that can define the new elastic zones on the street.

These paver blocks need to be permeable, in order to allow storm water to percolate to an underground water system that could harvest this water for other sanitary purposes.

If we attempt to incorporate elements that are non-functional, and provide the possibility of appropriation by need, we can stimulate inclusiveness to our cities.

We can begin to restructure urban space by not providing for standards and designations, but by designing for flexibility and elasticity.

Zigzag paver blocks used for the sidewalks Photo by Indiamart

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5.3.

Re-profiling the Streets : Design explorations

The re-profiling of streets is a design exploration that re-imagines the possibilities of creating more shared spaces within the city. In a few years, transport ways will undergo drastic changes when there is no more fuel. Newer ways of transport like electric vehicles, more public transport, waterways will emerge as alternatives to the current car based scenario.

What does this mean for the streets? What becomes of the long streets and the huge flyovers in that case? With increasing climate change, the temperatures would rise and floods will be frequent. Ad designers, what possible interventions can we do in order to equip out public spaces for the forthcoming changes?

This provides us with an opportunity to re imagine a new form of the street , that can accommodate a lot more than cars.

There are two Design explorations that are schemas for gradual transformations over a span of 12 years.

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5.3.

Lower parel station [ east entrance ] delisle road This sub chapter is a design exploration on how areas of high density can be restructured to minimize conflicts

TOWARDS LOWER PAREL WEST

The first exploration is for the case of Lower Parel train station. The eastern entrance to the train station is a contested site which is a regular victim of traffic jams and pedestrian safety issues.

VIEW 2

ENTRANCE TO LOWER PAREL STATION [WESTERN RAILWAYS]

MONORAIL CONNECTING WADALA STATION ON HARBOUR RAILWAY LINE, TOWARDS MAHALAXMI STATION ON THE WESTERN RAILWAY LINE

Lower Parel as described in Chapter 3 is a corporate hub with lots of office areas, bringing in a high density of floating population during corporate working hours.

ENTRANCE TO CURREY ROAD STATION [CENTRAL RAILWAYS]

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EXISTING SCENE : 2017 Figure 38

ENTRANCE TO TRAIN STATION

TAXI WAITING AREA

CARS PARKED ON THE SIDE

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In the existing scenario, entrance to lower parel station has no pedestrian crossings, neither does the turn from Curry road station to Lower parel .

The bridge is a difficult place to cross while entering and leaving the train station.

TAXI STAND

The sidewalks have railings along the bridge, and hawkers occupy the inner corners of the pavement, thus reducing the effective walking space to less than half. Side parking on the bridge further increases conflicts

MONORAIL TOWARDS MUMBAI CENTRAL STATION

SCALE 1:200 HAWKING ZONES

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SCALE 1:50 163

Figure 39

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Figure 40

SCALE 1:25 164

SCHEMA : 2018

Figure 41 Relocating bus stand away from the pedestrian crossing

Removing railings from the sidewalk

Relocating the taxi stands towards the edge of the bridge

Introducing raised pedestrian crossings with ramps on both sides to slow down vehicles approaching the pedestrian crossings.

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This cordoned off area could be effective in accommodating more pedestrians during peak hours, and during the remaining hours can allow entry of two wheelers and bikes. The spacing of bollards at 4 metres would prevent entry of cars and thus prove to be a safer and faster lane for two wheelers during non peak hours and for pedestrians during the peak hours Introducing raised pedestrian crossings with ramps on both sides to slow down vehicles approaching the pedestrian crossings.

Placement of bollards at a width of 2.5 from both the sides of the street, spaced at an offset of 4mts. This would prevent any cars from being parked along the edges

Using the tree basin strategy to introduce space that could be used by vendors to vend and even store goods. Since it’s a bridge, it could be a planter basin.

SCALE 1:200

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Figure 42

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Bollards

Bollards Raised pedestrian crossing

Cordoned zone

Figure 43

SCALE 1:25

cordoned zone

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SCHEMA : 2025

Figure 44 Reducing the width of the sidewalk her to half because it is a rarely used stretch of sidewalk

Shifting the bollards further to allow a dedicated passage for public transport. I.e. the buses and taxis

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Claiming the former cordoned off zone into an increased width of the sidewalk.

The street is now reduced in width with two dedicated public transport lanes, allowing frequent buses and shared cabs. Increased capacity of public transport would considerably reduce car traffic.

SCALE 1:200

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SCALE 1:50

Figure 45

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Installing permeable pavers for storm water management

Figure 46

SCALE 1:25

Dedicated Public transport lane

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SCHEMA : 2030

Figure 47 A new extension of the existing Monorail could be imagined to connect all corporate hubs in order to facilitate the movement of the working population that the corporate hub attracts.

The monorail would be an addition to the exchange hub that the neighbourhood would becoming facilitating shifts between different connections available

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The street in 2030 is imagined to be completely pedestrian around the train stations. With ways of transport mostly shifting to public, increased flows of people will set foot at these station nodes.

Hence the street takes a complete pedestrian form, with the possibility of buses still passing by. The street now becomes more of a plaza where vendors, street artists and more small commerce could shift responding to the increased flow of people

The present bollards and planters allow the possibility of using sail shades as collective shading instrument by vendors in the plaza

SCALE 1:200

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Figure 48

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Extension of Monorail to connect all corporate hubs, providing a transfer connection to the Western railways

The plaza like street inviting a mix of commuters customers, vendors and small scale enterprises to create a market space

Figure 49

SCALE 1:25

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1

16 2

FASHION STREET

11 17

18 3

12 4 5

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10 15

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9 8 7

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1. Victoria terminus/CST Station [central railways] 2. MCGM Office 3. Bombay Hospital 4. Central governments Office Complex 5. Income tax office 6. Wankhede Cricket Stadium 7. Colleges and Educational Institutes 8. Churchgate Station [Western Railways] 9. Western Railway Headquarters 10. Cross Maidan 11. Azad Maidan 12. Tata AIG office 13. MTNL headquarters 14. Law college and Library 15. Hospital 16. High court 17. City telephone Exchange 18. Bombay gymkhana [clubhouse]

5.3.

FASHION STREET, CHURCHGATE

Fashion street has been described previously in chapter 3. It is the renowned street market , located between two of the largest Maidans [playgrounds] of the city, and the third one across the main street. The municipal corporation plans to regulate Fashion street as the first legalised street market. Also, pedestrianisation of certain streets in Fort has been proposed by UDRI and the BMC. Considering the strategic location of this street market between two terminating train stations and three of the largest playgrounds of the city, the design exploration is done in continuum to the proposals in pipeline. It envisages the street to become a linear park with market squares, that would connect all the important stadiums and playgrounds and be home to the largest art festival in the city, the Kalaghoda Arts festival. Binging these multiple activities together, the park could benefit citizens and vendors both.

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EXISTING SCENE : 2017 Figure 50

AZAD MAIDAN

Street market consisting of 395 stalls of vendors selling fashion garments

8 m wide sidewalk, remains largely unused throughout the day.

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railings along the sidewalk

BOMBAY GYMKHANA

cars parked by the side of the street

CROSS MAIDAN

SCALE 1:200

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Figure 51

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Figure 52

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SCHEMA : 2018 Figure 53

Cordoned off zone for pedestrians during peak hours

Reducing the width of the sidewalk to half and introducing bollards to cordon off the sidewalk for car parking.

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AZAD MAIDAN

BOMBAY GYMKHANA

Removing railings

Cordoning off the edge of the street with the help of bollards

CROSS MAIDAN

SCALE 1:200

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Figure 54

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Bollards

Reducing the size of the unused pavement

Figure 55

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Cordoned off zone

Bollards

Cordoned off zone

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SCHEMA : 2025 Figure 56 Claiming the cordoned off space and extending further to create a market square to accommodate all the existing vendors.

Removing the sidewalk completely and incorporating a rain garden at the edge of the Playground

Planting a new line of trees for shading and support purposes 187

AZAD MAIDAN

Second market square. The linear street market can now position itself in a wider market square , collective shading installations to be expected by the municipal corporation.

BOMBAY GYMKHANA

Creating new opening between the two Maidans in order to allow for flow of people across the playgrounds

CROSS MAIDAN

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Figure 57

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Installing a rain-garden

Figure 58

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Expanded pavement to create market square Reduced road width

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SCHEMA : 2030 Figure 59

AZAD MAIDAN Changing the material of the street to that of turfstone

Addition of Street furniture that could be used to install sculptures that are created during the Kalaghoda arts festival each year, and can also be doubled up as benches

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BOMBAY GYMKHANA

CROSS MAIDAN

The street now becomes a completely linear park, that acts like the spine between the three playgrounds in the neighbourhood. Reorganisation of the street market into market squares, and the linear park would further invite multitude of activities in the region. The art festival venues could then shift here, as a response to the many art installations

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Figure 60

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Street furniture incorporating art sculptures created in the city art festivals

Market square

Access to maidan Rain garden

Figure 61

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EPILOGUE Social practises play a huge role in conceptualizing the city through the understanding of new practises of urbanisms that acknowledge various multiplicities of the city, and thus reject the idea of a singular emblematic image. In economies like India, social practises like street vending are integral infrastructures in the making of cities. The mechanisms of a city arise from the different rhythms and undulations that are caused by the overlap of these social practises within its spatial form. Often what is seen by the privileged as an eyesore in the city, or a nuisance is that which is left out- from the spatial designs and the two-dimensional plans of the city. For social practises that are embedded culturally generally adapt to the space that is available. It is the adaptability of spaces that begin to define the elasticity that exists in a city, in the form of a second skin.

Street vending has proven to provide livelihood to a large part of the population that in the capitalist status quo, found itself displaced from a regulated form of employment. As has been presented through this research, it is a self-organised structure that engages with the production of the city, and is an integral service required in the machinery of the city. It is through their existence that spaces begin to get defined in the city. These practises are also activators of public spaces.

Some of the dullest corners and former leftover spaces in the city are lively public spaces today. Such social practises thus help us in realising the full potential of public spaces in the city.

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Not only are street vendors the purveyors of everyday needs of Mumbaikars, but they are also safety watchers in the city. Most people in the city feel safe walking through a road that has street vendors. Vendors are present along a radius of one kilometre of most train stations, for the longest part of the day. They are the first reporters of unusual activities and crime in public spaces. Thus, as Jane Jacobs rightfully calls them, they are the “eyes upon the streets�.

Thus, city authorities need to recognise the potential and value that lies within social practises such as street vending.

Many cities, including Mumbai have now recently decriminalised street vending. The Constitution of India has recognised the economic potentials of street vending with the passing of The Street Vendors Act,2014.

The Act aims to provide social security and livelihood to the street vendors in India. It proposes to designate vending locations in the city, that would be looked after by Town Vending Committees of the respective neighborhood, in the cases of conflicts and non-conformation to unlicensed practises. The bill implies that all cities must issue vending licenses for 2.5% of the total population (Ministry of Law and-justice, 2014) While policies can empower communities by providing access to systems of security, financial credits to expand their business and health insurances, they fail to understand spatial implications. Policies work with numbers, codes and legalities, and fines. Instead of arbitrary limits on the number of licenses that can be issued, street vending should have reasonable restrictions that prioritize public safety, and enable a less con-

flicting co-existence. Street Vending after all is a transitory phase for people who currently have no access to formal forms of employments.

By legalising and regulating street vending, we can enable people to move out of this state of being limited to their current forms of livelihood, and living in constant insecurity. By giving them access to proper sanitation, loans and security, a lot of people will be able to expand their businesses and move out of their current state and progress in life. Just the way slums are cities that are waiting to be built, street vending too is a transitory phase, a temporary form of livelihood for people with limited means. Also, not only can the city gain a large amount of active capital as an addition to its revenue, it can also ensure the safeguard of public spaces by placing street vendors in the urban space. In doing so, the city can leverage their strengths as ambassadors of public space.

Through the visual essay in chapter 3 the research unfolds the self-organisation and constellations of street vendors, that is seen to replicate throughout the city in the form of informal markets. The seemingly chaotic markets, are actually set and organised on a set of principles and rules.These rules are not the same as that of formal organisations, nevertheless they hint at the assertive self-organisational and auto-constructed forces that exist in the absence of provisions. And since ÂŹseveral claims are made at the same space, conflicts arise due to nomenclature and issues of legality.

City authorities must ask themselves who are we building

for? And who does development cater to? These questions not only indicate towards the politics of occupation in developing countries but also towards the process of making a city. The social, spatial and cultural reconfiguration of the city requires interventions not only in the built form in the static city, but at the points of intersection of the Kinetic and the static cities. The idea should be to articulate these components for the reading of the city. But the challenge lies in not polarizing these components. Rather, to consider them for an interpretation where both can simultaneously exist side by side, and yet survive within the constantly evolving social and economic conditions of the cities of the south (Jain, 2017) We need to look at these scenarios from a different lens, one that uses a different tool, that grounds them in the understanding of rhythms and behaviours of actors in public space, we realise that frictions arise more because of imposed orders, that reject social practises and enmeshing of different patterns of use. The thesis touts that spatial figures and social practises work in tandem with each other, regardless of implied definitions and regulations. And in order to design for better cities, we must understand the mechanisms of social infrastructures in the city and tap the existing potentials in these infrastructures.

Hence it further urges to re-imagine street profiles with a vision of cities for people.

It suggests that designing of urban public spaces should be done in order to allow for flexibility, and transitions to happen. Because cities are constantly evolving, they remain in a 196

state of flux. Hence the practise of urban design too, needs to reflect on how these changing scenarios can be realised, on the understanding of organisational structures that lie within these scenarios. Urban space should be designed as instruments of change that can incorporate transitions and be a mediator between the people who occupy and use this space and the Static City. It should be able to affect, mutate and influence existing structures of governance and policies, instead of stemming out from them.

Cities contain within themselves positive self-organisational forces, and we as urbanists must identify them, articulate them in order to create a richer manifestation of how cities work. Upon dissolving the utopian project, we can allow for the non-structural forces to shape our cities in a more engaging manner.

The planned city is the product of a singular idea, of economic and political visions that are often too rigid and dismiss flexibility from its built form. Can this vulnerability in cities can be bridged by future designs that are more dynamic, varied and accommodating of transitions? Can this be a harbinger towards developing a new theory of co-existence, which embraces polyvalence, and thus rejecting singularity?

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