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Rhetoric of the ‘slum’

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13604813.2011.609002

1470-3629

Pushpa Arabindoo,

Water Governance and Infrastructure

Abstract Despite Gilbert's recent identification of the 'return of the slum' as a dangerous trend (2007), scholars such as Rao (2006) assure us that there is a broader theoretical interest in applying the term 'slum' in a normative sense, as it offers a new analytic framework for understanding the global cities of the South. Using the recent politics of large-scale slum evictions in Indian cities, this paper explores this tension, asking if a theoretical return to slums can help generate new narratives of poverty, serving as an important site in which historiographies of neoliberalisation in the global South can be unfolded and addressed. It underscores the need for a new direction in collecting ethnographies of the urban poor in India as they negotiate the current political and policy drive for creating 'slum-free' cities, conscious that the resulting spatial articulation could possibly reveal how formal and informal geographies connect with each other in increasingly multiple and complex ways. As this paper argues, what is needed in the context of contemporary urban change involving harsh and often violent slum eradication strategies is perhaps not 'slum as theory' but a sincere engagement with in-depth, empirical case studies that clarify much of the uncertainty surrounding the spatialisation of urban poverty. Keywords: 'slum as theory'evictionsresettlementurban povertyIndia/South Asia Acknowledgements I am thankful, in large doses, to Bob Catterall, Matti Siemiatycki, Alan Gilbert, Ann Varley, Charlotte Lemanski, Andrew Harris and Matthew Gandy for their critical comments on an earlier version of this paper. Notes The Slum Rehabilitation Authority was established in 1995 to oversee the redevelopment of all slums in Mumbai through the participation of private developers. In exchange for rehousing the slum dwellers, developers are allowed to redevelop the sites for market-driven real-estate speculation, often at higher densities than normally permitted. At the time of writing, GKS residents had gathered considerable support for their cause, with the famed activist Medha Patkar from the National Alliance of People's Movements joining them on behalf of the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan. Although their houses have been demolished, they continue to live amidst the rubble, organising rallies and protest marches across the city. After a nine-day fast by Medha Patkar in May 2011, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra intervened, agreeing to take into consideration the terms and conditions of those facing eviction. Local media have been surprisingly measured with some reports even taking the side of the state and the developer. However, extended international coverage and attention has been gained through Internet propaganda (http://khareastandolan.wordpress.com) as well as a write-up in The Guardian, 11 March (Patel, Citation2011). While this may seem like a small percentage, the size and population of slums vary considerably ranging from a few hundred to few thousand shanties. The Mumbai Human Development Report (2010) suggests that slums occupy only 6% of the total land, whereas Nijman Citation(2008) believes it to be closer to 12%. Depending on the figure, the total slum area in Greater Mumbai is anywhere between 8900 and 17,800 acres, accommodating nearly 9 million people. The drive to free these thousands of acres of inner-city land for development is putting millions of slum dwellers at risk of eviction. This includes Dharavi spread over 432 acres with 67 communities comprising a population of 550,000 (Nijman, Citation2010), the airport slums (276 acres of 31 slum pockets and 85,000 families) and Golibar (140 acres with 46 cooperative societies and 26,000 families). Together these three clusters cover 850 acres of land with 1.1 million people. This is quite different from the analytical concepts of the 20th century where ethnographically grounded research (mostly set in Latin America) yielded useful epistemologies of slums such as Portes's rationalisation of the slum (Citation1972) or Perlman Citation(1976) dispelling the myth of marginality. Varley Citation(2010), on the other hand, notes the almost complete absence of Latin America in recent explicitly theoretical approaches to informality drawing mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Architects while acknowledging the deprivation prevalent in the slums have exhibited a tendency to view its physical environment positively within the cultural framework of the vernacular, some more cautiously than others (Rapoport, Citation1988; Kellett and Napier, Citation1995; cf. Oliver, Citation2003). Chalana Citation(2010), for example, examines the squatter settlements and the more permanent tenements of the urban poor in Mumbai as part of the spatial narrative of a vernacular environment. Describing it as a classic example of 'everyday urbanism' that is devoid of the 'spectacle' of architecture, his emphasis on the vernacular nature of these settlements is a way of highlighting the supposedly greater control that residents exert on the production and/or appropriation of space and its architecture. Lemanski and Oldfield Citation(2007), for instance, argue that while interpretations of slums may act as a critical discourse through which Southern cities are understood, in contrast, stories of gating and walling off homes and communities provide an equally powerful but different lens to view the Southern city and its urban experience. The difference between populations and citizens derives from Chatterjee's distinction between the two where he states that the citizens claim equal rights and operate through civil society while populations make demands on the state's welfare policies via the domain of political society (Citation2004).