sonal has left a lot of photographs of her thesis site on the computer. today as i was searching for new wallpaper i found a series of great snaps from shivaji nagar- the slum that lies in between the mandapashwar caves and the dahisar river. in spite of running the danger being romantic i must say that the experience of the settlement is so different when you are walking down the narrow gullies in between the houses- meeting people and navigating through them, than looking at them from windows of the high rises to replace them through the sra. the streets are still not paved in many areas and sanitation is a problem but is the SRA really the only model for developing these areas in the face of a disinvestment jamboree by the state?
55% of the city lives like this and it is a prosperous city. the newspaper today has a huge image of the dharavi redevelopment plan. it looks frightening in its scope and scale- rand. a planned gentrification project if there ever was one.
7 comments:
I really like ya blog. It makes me sentimental about my time in india. And with the archi-link we have... I have made you a link, hope ya dont mind!!!
hey ..
i dont mind at all.. though i dont really know what archi-link is..
when were u in india last? and what were you doing here?
rohan
These people make the city a city, not the buildings. They are smart here in chennai, the govt is doing something towards slum clearance and giving them cheap apartments which are big death traps, you don't need american missiles to demolish them, they just need one kick the whole building crumbles to the ground. Been to some where the entire stair case had collapsed, and the residents were using bamboo ladder to climb. and some adventurous kids were doing rope climbing. These are allotted to slum dwellers and they rent it out and come back to the pavements.
in mumbai, th slums (like everything else) are ebing seen as a real estate oppurtunity and developers are being given added incentives to rehouse them. the kinds of housing been given to them is unbeilievable. will try and get some photographs for the blog. its ridiculous when the state officially sanctions abysmal living conditions.
When you mentioned passing through the slum and looking into their homes and liking it, I felt that was because your gaze could not be challenged. Your authority of looking into their private space could not be questioned, precisely because they are "encroachers", they occupy public space, rather than looking through their windows in a SRA building. I dont think it was about a "SRA" scheme v/s a slum but more an assertion of their private space, which they could claim and shut you out off. (Your first photograph of the house with the curtain next to the shop was very interesting. I got uncomfortable when i saw it, because i thought you were prying into their house.)
The SRS is a result of a network between the state, builders and a wealthier section of slum dwellers. They have govt. jobs, are well informed about the policy, can afford the maintenance of the scheme, manipulate it by controlling the information that is disseminated to the rest of the society. They aspire for an "apartment" and use the SRS as an opportunity to appropriate resources (2 houses, more furnished houses). They want the SRS. And i think the the rest of the slum society, when they opt for the scheme, is relatively unaware of what they will eventually get. Though I dont know how they managed to push the SRS in Dharavi.
granted there is always a problem with the 'gaze' as it exists. but the fact is that SRA buildings so suck big time, even though the slums themselves are not that great to live in.
of course i have not seen the re dev plan for dharavi...but back around 97 they had some plan for redeveloping other slum areas
I remember i had written for kenekar's humanities that the entire idea was "ghettoization" of the area. The shift from a holrizontal slum to a vertical one.
-nish
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